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Mauchly conveyed the good news in a letter to Atanasoff, which also contained hints of a plan that u
Howard Aiken (1900–1973) at Harvard in 1945.
John Mauchly (1907–80) circa 1945.
J. Presper Eckert (1919–95) circa 1945.
Eckert (touching machine), Mauchly (by pillar), Jean Je
Either way, the letter upset Atanasoff, who had still not succeeded in prodding his lawyer into filing any patent claims. He responded to Mauchly rather brusquely within a few days: “Our attorney has emphasized the need of being careful about the dissemination of information about our device until a patent application is filed. This should not require too long, and, of course, I have no qualms about having informed you about our device, but it does require that we refrain from making public any details for the time being.”60 Amazingly, this exchange still did not provoke Atanasoff or the lawyer to make a filing for patents.
Mauchly proceeded to forge ahead during that fall of 1941 with his own design for a computer, which he correctly believed drew ideas from a wide variety of sources and was very different from what Atanasoff had built. In his summer course, he met the right partner to join him in the endeavor: a graduate student with a perfectionist’s passion for precision engineering, who knew so much about electronics that he served as Mauchly’s lab instructor, even though he was twelve years younger (at twenty-two) and didn’t yet have his PhD.
J. PRESPER ECKERT
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr., known formally as J. Presper Eckert and informally as Pres, was the only child of a millionaire real estate developer in Philadelphia.61 One of his great-grandfathers, Thomas Mills, invented the machines that made salt water taffy in Atlantic City and, as important, created a business to manufacture and sell them. As a young boy, Eckert was driven by his family’s chauffeur to the William Pe
In high school Eckert dazzled his classmates with his inventions, and he made money by building radios, amplifiers, and sound systems. Philadelphia, the city of Benjamin Franklin, was then a great electronics center, and Eckert spent time at the research lab of Philo Farnsworth, one of the inventors of television. Although he was accepted by MIT and wanted to go there, his parents did not wish him to leave. Pretending to have suffered financial setbacks because of the Depression, they pressured him to go to Pe
Eckert’s social triumph at Pe
Pres Eckert had his quirks. Filled with nervous energy, he would pace the room, bite his nails, leap around, and occasionally stand atop a desk when he was thinking. He wore a watch chain that wasn’t co
ENIAC
War mobilizes science. Over the centuries, ever since the ancient Greeks built a catapult and Leonardo da Vinci served as the military engineer for Cesare Borgia, martial needs have propelled advances in technology, and this was especially true in the mid-twentieth century. Many of the paramount technological feats of that era—computers, atomic power, radar, and the Internet—were spawned by the military.
America’s entry into World War II in December 1941 provided the impetus to fund the machine that Mauchly and Eckert were devising. The University of Pe
Creating a table for just one category of shell shot by one gun might require calculating three thousand trajectories from a set of differential equations. The work was often done using one of the Differential Analyzers invented at MIT by Va
That August, Mauchly wrote a memo that proposed a way to help the Army meet this challenge. It would change the course of computing. Titled “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating,” his memo requested funding for the machine that he and Eckert were hoping to build: a digital electronic computer, using circuits with vacuum tubes, that could solve differential equations and perform other mathematical tasks. “A great gain in the speed of calculation can be obtained if the devices which are used employ electronic means,” he argued. He went on to estimate that a missile trajectory could be calculated in “100 seconds.”66