*That is, 9:04 A.M. Tokyo time.
*Colonel Cosgrave of Canada, who walked unsteadily and by some accounts may have been drunk, nervous, or consumed with a headache, signed the Japanese document in the wrong place and MacArthur’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General R. K. Sutherland, had to cross out the names of all the countries that followed Canada and rewrite them in ink to correspond with the signatures written by the representatives of France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.
*In 1998 the Missouri, which had an original displacement of 45,000 tons and a draft of 28 feet 11 inches, and whose overhaul in 1988 gave it a displacement of 57,500 tons and a draft of 37 feet 9 inches, was towed to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Plans are for the Missouri to be open to public visitation and for it to be permanently berthed on the seaward end of Battleship Row, within sight of the battleship USS Arizona, which was bombed and sunk by the Japanese in the attack on December 7, 1941.
ENIAC
DATE: 1946.
WHAT IT IS: The first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: Only portions of ENIAC survive, including panels (units that performed various mathematical operations such as addition and multiplication) and function tables (devices which stored numeric constants that were used by ENIAC’s program). The panels are 10 feet tall and 3 feet wide, and are painted black. Prominent features include round knobs and cables with plugs on the ends (the cables are of the patch-cord kind, and the plugs are large).
Deftly pushing contemporary technology to its limits and working without any kind of manual to guide them with regard to design, components, circuitry, assembly, or any other detail, the inventors of the electronic computer built what is arguably the first modern “thinking machine” by creating an electronic version of the mechanical adding machines of the day. They produced a device that by later standards was immensely heavy and huge; it weighed thirty tons and was shaped like a giant U with the two parallel sides each running sixty feet long, the bottom measuring thirty feet, and the whole contraption rising ten feet off the ground. It was large and cumbersome, indeed, and with its flashing lights and immense tangled forest of vacuum tubes, knobs, lights, and wires it resembled a contraption worthy of an old science fiction novel. But the machine was a landmark invention. After centuries of dreaming about an automatic calculating device, humans created ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and with it ushered in the information age.
The first computing device, simply enough, was the human hand. A primitive digital computing device, fingers could be counted to solve basic arithmetical problems. The Romans and the Chinese each developed an abacus, a wire frame containing rows of movable beads that made possible more complex mathematical operations.
In the mid-1830s, Charles Babbage, an English mathematician who had built mechanical calculation machines, began designing an analytical engine in which tabulating cards were used for the performance of operations. Babbage, who through the years lost government support for his inventions, never finished building this forerunner of the modern automatic computer.
In 1944, Harvard professor Howard Aiken demonstrated a general-purpose electromechanical machine. Called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, it had moving parts—principally, electromagnetic relays—that were powered by electricity, but it was still essentially a mechanical device. ASCC contained some three-quarters of a million parts in total and was a huge punch card machine. An electronic computer had yet to be built.
Thanks to the U.S. Army, one was actually on its way. During World War II the army employed “computers” (people, typically women) to prepare firing tables for its guns. Using calculators, the workers—many of whom were Women’s Auxiliary Corps mathematicians—took between ten and forty hours to compute just one trajectory. But the tables contained up to four thousand trajectories each, and there simply weren’t enough people available to grind out the calculations. Some kind of device that could do the math much more quickly was needed.
ENIAC, the first modern general-purpose electronic digital computer. Could the inventors of the large-scale thinking machine ever have envisioned the laptop?
John Mauchly, a physics professor at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, who was interested in using mathematics to predict weather, had proposed in a memo an electronic computer for making faster calculations. His idea caught the attention of Herman H. Goldstine of the Ballistic Research Lab in Aberdeen, Maryland. Goldstine, who was seeking an efficient way to calculate artillery trajectories, requested that Mauchly develop a proposal. Mauchly was practical about funding and understood that, at least at the time, ballistics took priority over weather. He undertook to write the proposal with a gifted electronic engineering graduate student named J. Presper Eckert. They submitted a proposal on April 2, 1943, for a machine called ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, and two months later they were awarded a contract.
A team of engineers headed by Eckert, with Mauchly the principal consultant, secretly built ENIAC in the Moore building at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; because it was wartime, and the output of ENIAC was needed to operate large guns, the project was kept under wraps. The machine, in which over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 6,000 switches, 10,000 capacitors, and 70,000 resistors were encased in black steel, occupied 1,800 square feet.
Unlike Howard Aiken’s Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, ENIAC was an electronic device in that it was based not on mobile metal parts but moving electrons; it did not have moving mechanical parts but electrons moving in a vacuum. ENIAC’s main components were the panels, which numbered forty in total. Numerous cables plugged into each panel. The other ends of the cables plugged into digit trays, which connected the panels. The panels had numerous rotary switches, or knobs, that indicated a particular number or function.
ENIAC worked in base ten, as opposed to modern computers, which work in base two. The foundation of the entire ENIAC was the accumulator, which was essentially an electronic version of an adding machine. The accumulator added ten-digit decimal numbers, and kept them in base ten. A panel would have the capability to display one decimal number ten digits long by using an array of lights, going from top to bottom, so it would have ten columns of ten lights each. These lights would signify numbers. The accumulators would be connected together to perform mathematical calculations. Essentially, Eckert, Mauchly, and their team of engineers strung together decimal adding machines, or mechanical accumulating calculators, of their day and made them electronic.
Unveiled in a ceremony on February 14, 1946, ENIAC, which punched results onto cards, performed high-speed calculations not feasible on other computing devices.
But its operation was delicate. Vacuum tubes were not always reliable, and with more than seventeen thousand of them emitting a hundred thousand pulses per second, there were almost two billion chances every second that ENIAC could fail. Furthermore, the complexity and interdependence of ENIAC’s circuits meant that a failure of just one of the thousands of solder joints could render the whole electronic brain unusable.
But the marvel was that ENIAC worked, and it was unquestionably a major improvement over the computing devices of the day—indeed, the inventors of ENIAC successfully harnessed the power of the vacuum tube to create a machine that worked more than a thousand times faster than these devices. Although the war was by this time over, ENIAC could compute a firing trajectory in just half a minute.
Despite its immense size and cost (over $486,000), ENIAC convinced an array of professionals of the potential of electronic computing, launching the modern computing era. The rest, as they say, is history: the FORTRAN language, magnetic disks for storage, transistors replacing vacuum tubes, keyboards and monitors replacing punched cards, minicomputers, microprocessors, silicon chips, personal computers, graphical user interfaces, Windows 95, laptops, the World Wide Web.
The programming capability of ENIAC can be approximated today with a small c
alculator that costs under $40. ENIAC’s clock speed was 100,000 pulses per second or 0.1 megahertz. This compares with modern computers that run at about 600 megahertz or more.
Today, the PC is the offspring of the computer revolution. A common household and office item, a PC can be purchased for under $1,000. But anyone who has ever clicked a mouse owes a debt to that monstrous hunk of metal and wires, ENIAC, which quietly sparked the revolution and forever changed the way we live.
LOCATION: National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. This is the main repository of ENIAC’s panels. Of the sixteen panels the museum owns, some are on loan to other institutions, including the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Computer Museum in Boston, and the Heinz-Nixdorf Museumsforum in Patterbom, Germany. Other panels and parts of ENIAC are located at other institutions.
MARILYN MONROE’S BILLOWING
DRESS FROM THE SEVEN YEAR
ITCH
DATE: 1955.
WHAT IT IS: A dress the actress wore in a famous movie scene in which she stands over a subway grating and a rush of air lifts up her dress to expose her upper thighs and panties.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The bodice is a sleeveless halter top, and the skirt is full-flowing and pleated. The dress is white.
Thomas O’Malley sniffed circumspectly around the storage-bin area, searching for clues. A gumshoe right out of Philip Marlowe, the Tenth Squad NYPD detective surveyed the crime scene, making mental notes as he went along.
Just minutes before, O’Malley had been sitting in the squad room at the Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth Street. It was late afternoon on the 13th of September, 1993. He was banging out a “Five”—a detective report—in the typewriter when the call came in. A 10-21, a past burglary. A storage bin at Chelsea Mini-Storage on West Twenty-eighth Street had been broken into. Property had been stolen. A mere garden-variety crime, except that the stolen goods included priceless, original personal property of perhaps the most famous movie actress of all time: Marilyn Monroe.
By mere serendipity, Detective Thomas O’Malley, a burly six-foot-two Irishman with over twenty years on the job, was up on the squad rotation order, so he would be the “catching,” or head, detective on the case. O’Malley and his partner, rookie Detective Richie O’Brien, left the station-house and piled into their unmarked Chevy Caprice.
The report of the burglary had been made by Anna Strasberg, widow of the renowned acting teacher Lee Strasberg. Marilyn Monroe, who died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of thirty-six in 1962, had bequeathed her former acting coach 75 percent of her estate, which had been valued at over $1.5 million.
Strasberg kept a large amount of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia in a seventh-floor bin at Chelsea Mini-Storage: the actress’s white dress and pumps from The Seven Year Itch, the sequined dress in which she had sung “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962, garments, letters, vanity kits, a clock given her by Clark Gable, personal mementos, commemorative merchandise, and sundry other objects. When one of Strasberg’s employees went to bin number 744 to catalog the contents in preparation for a planned exhibit to benefit a child-welfare organization, the employee discovered that the lock on the bin had been clipped and replaced by a different lock, and boxes inside had been stolen. The employee dialed 911, and the call filtered down to Tom O’Malley.
Experienced cops have gut instincts, hunches they play out like Vegas poker games. A veteran of thousands of homicide, assault, robbery, and burglary cases, O’Malley had razor-sharp instincts when it came to crime scenes. A few observations lit up O’Malley’s intuition. He felt that the chances were excellent that at least some of the stolen Monroe goods were still somewhere in the building, probably in a bin rented by the thief himself. And if O’Malley could find even one of the items in someone else’s bin, he’d have his perp.
Marilyn Monroe's pleated white skirt cascading in the famous movie scene.
Such thieves don’t always feel a need to remove their booty immediately, O’Malley knew. Sometimes people store their belongings for long periods, six months to a year, before returning to inspect their possessions or take them out. And skillful purloiners know that if security sees a lock broken, an investigation will immediately be launched, so they’re careful to replace the broken lock with one identical or very similar to the original. This gives the perp time to smuggle items out of the facility in small packages at leisurely intervals without arousing suspicion.
But obviously O’Malley couldn’t just search through all the bins in the huge storage facility. He had to figure out, somehow, who had rented a bin for the purpose of storing stolen goods, before the perp sold all the pilfered merchandise.
There were video cameras in the storage facility, but none on the upper floors, where the burglary had occurred. The precinct print man dusted for fingerprints, and these would have to be run and sorted.
O’Malley had his work cut out for him.
Working in a busy house, or precinct, O’Malley investigated the case of the stolen Marilyn Monroe artifacts while juggling dozens of other cases. While to the public eye, detectives employed ingenious techniques to find their prey, O’Malley knew he would solve this case the same way he solved all his others: with hard work.
Over the next six and a half months, O’Malley pursued his leads on the Marilyn Monroe theft and tried to develop new ones. While the local press had a field day with the case—the Daily News ran a story about it under the banner, “Sticky Fingers in Pinch of Marilyn’s ‘Itch’ Dress”; Newsday’s headline blared, “Burglars Got Dress, But Will It Fit?”; and the New York Post trumpeted on its front page, “Marilyn’s Dresses Ripped Off”—O’Malley canvassed for witnesses, fingerprinted the storage facility’s employees and compared them with the crime-scene prints, asked around on the street, ran names through the police department’s central computer, checked the storage facility’s customer list, debriefed prisoners. One jailbird said he had heard that someone who had a “house” (bin) in the storage facility had done the crime, but he couldn’t give a name. O’Malley thought the guy was on to something, but he also knew that crooks would give up their mothers to extricate themselves from the crib.
Names surfaced over the months, which O’Malley and O’Brien considered as cops do, eliminating some and keeping others in mind, until O’Malley, who likened criminal investigations to beauty contests, told his partner that they were down to three finalists. After further checking he found out that one of the suspects, a man named Davila, had a prior arrest in Manhattan for a storage-bin burglary. “I like him,” O’Malley said to O’Brien of his pick for a “winner.”
At 3:10 P.M. on March 28, 1994, O’Malley and O’Brien returned to the scene of the crime to ask if anyone by the name of Davila had ever conducted business at the storage facility. A review of the establishment’s records revealed that a Jesus Davila had rented storage bin number 13-734, which was located on the same floor as Anna Strasberg’s and was only a few aisles away.
“Let’s go have a look,” O’Malley said.
At about 4:00 P.M., O’Malley, O’Brien, and two storage-facility managers repaired to the suspect’s bin. Some of the metal bins at the storage facility had had their tops removed so their areas could be extended; wire screens ran from the top of the metal lockers to the ceilings. Jesus Davila’s bin had such a wire mesh, and O’Malley asked security to fetch a long ladder so he could take a gander. O’Malley climbed the ladder and looked down. After a few moments he guffawed. “Hey, Richie,” he said to his partner, “do me a favor. Sometimes I don’t know if I see something because I want to see something. You go up and take a look.”
When O’Malley cracked a case, a sense of euphoria sometimes overwhelmed him. He liked to share the feeling with his partner.
O’Brien climbed the ladder and saw below a box that had a mailing label with Anna Strasberg’s name printed on it. He waved O’Malley a
high-five. One of the facility managers also climbed the ladder and confirmed the detectives’ discovery.
Back in the squad room, O’Malley called Anna Strasberg, who was in California at the time, asking her to send a representative to make a positive identification of the alleged stolen property. Soon a man in his late twenties by the name of Michael Martin Theuringer reported to the Tenth Precinct detective unit. O’Malley and O’Brien drove Theuringer to the Chelsea facility and shepherded him to Davila’s bin, where he climbed the ladder, looked through the screen, and declared, “That is her box, taken from Ms. Strasberg’s bin.”
O’Malley contacted the New York County District Attorney’s Office, and after conferring with an ADA (assistant district attorney), found himself standing before a judge. The Hon. William Mogulescu granted his request for a search warrant.
Armed with the vital document, O’Malley returned to the Chelsea building to execute the search. He clipped the lock on Jesus Davila’s bin and removed Anna Strasberg’s property, which her representative, up close and without a barrier now, once again confirmed as belonging to Ms. Strasberg.
O’Malley hoped the recovered boxes would yield the Seven Year Itch dress. He badly wanted to recover the dress, not just for Anna Strasberg’s sake, not just to do his job as a detective, but for Marilyn Monroe. The dress was a piece of movie history, a symbol of its sexiest star. He had heard there were other copies of Monroe’s dress from The Seven Year Itch—leading actors and actresses often had multiple sets of the same outfits for important scenes in case the primary costume was damaged or lost—but he was convinced that if anyone had retained the actual dress filmed in the immortal subway-grating scene, it was Marilyn Monroe herself, and this was the dress she had bequeathed to Lee Strasberg.
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