The Innovators

by Walter Isaacson

  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 Penn private school, founded in 1689. But his success came not from the privileges of birth but from his own talents. He won a citywide science fair at age twelve by building a guidance system for model boats using magnets and rheostats, and at fourteen he devised an innovative way to use household current to eliminate troublesome batteries for the intercom system in one of his father’s buildings.62

  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 Penn and live at home. He did rebel, however, against their desire that he study business; instead he enrolled in the university’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering because he found the subject more interesting.

  Eckert’s social triumph at Penn was creating what he called an “Osculometer” (from the Latin word for mouth), which purported to measure the passion and romantic electricity of a kiss. A couple would hold the handles of the device and then kiss, their lip contact completing an electric circuit. A row of bulbs would light up, the goal being to kiss passionately enough to light up all ten and set off a blast from a foghorn. Smart contestants knew that wet kisses and sweaty palms increased the circuit’s conductivity.63 Eckert also invented a device that used a light-modulating method to record sound on film, for which he successfully applied for a patent at age twenty-one, while still an undergraduate.64

  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 connected to a watch, and he would twirl it in his hands as if it were rosary beads. He had a quick temper that would flare and then dissolve into charm. His demand for perfection came from his father, who would walk around construction sites carrying a large pack of crayons with which to scrawl instructions, using different colors to indicate which worker was responsible. “He was sort of a perfectionist and made sure you did it right,” his son said. “But he had a lot of charm, really. He got things done most of the time by people wanting to do the stuff.” An engineer’s engineer, Eckert felt that people like himself were necessary complements to physicists such as Mauchly. “A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”65

  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 Pennsylvania and the Army’s Ordnance Department at Aberdeen Proving Ground had been tasked with producing the booklets of firing-angle settings needed for the artillery being shipped to Europe. In order to be aimed properly, the guns required tables that factored in hundreds of conditions, including temperature, humidity, wind speeds, altitude, and gunpowder varieties.

  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 Vannevar Bush. The machine’s calculations were combined with the labor of more than 170 people, most of them women, known as “computers,” who tackled equations by punching the keys and cranking the handles of desktop adding machines. Women math majors were recruited from around the nation. But even with all of this effort, it took more than a month to complete just one firing table. By the summer of 1942, it was clear that production was falling further behind every week, rendering some of America’s artillery ineffective.

  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

  Mauchly’s memo was ignored by Penn’s deans, but it was brought to the attention of the Army officer attached to the university, Lieutenant (soon to be Captain) Herman Goldstine, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been a math professor at the University of Michigan. His mission was to speed up the production of firing tables, and he had dispatched his wife, Adele, also a mathematician, on a cross-country tour to recruit more women to join the battalions of human computers at Penn. Mauchly’s memo convinced him that there was a better way.

  * * *

  The decision of the U.S. War Department to fund the electronic computer came on April 9, 1943. Mauchly and Eckert stayed up all the night before working on their proposal, but they still hadn’t finished it by the time they got into the car for the two-hour ride from Penn to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where officials from the Ordnance Department were gathered. As Lieutenant Goldstine drove, they sat in the backseat writing the remaining sections, and when they arrived in Aberdeen, they continued working in a small room while Goldstine went to the review meeting. It was chaired by Oswald Veblen, the president of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who was advising the military on mathematical projects. Also present was Colonel Leslie Simon, director of the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. Goldstine recalled what happened: “Veblen, after listening for a short while to my presentation and teetering on the back legs of his chair, brought the chair down with a crash, arose, and said, ‘Simon, give Goldstine the money.’ He thereupon left the room and the meeting ended on this happy note.”67

  Mauchly and Eckert incorporated their memo into a paper they titled “Report on an Electronic Diff. Analyzer.” Us
ing the abbreviation diff. was cagey; it stood for both differences, which reflected the digital nature of the proposed machine, and differential, which described the equations it would tackle. Soon it was given a more memorable name: ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Even though ENIAC was designed primarily for handling differential equations, which were key to calculating missile trajectories, Mauchly wrote that it could have a “programming device” that would allow it to do other tasks, thus making it more of a general-purpose computer.68

  In June 1943 construction of ENIAC began. Mauchly, who retained his teaching duties, served as a consultant and visionary. Goldstine, as the Army’s representative, oversaw the operations and budget. And Eckert, with his passion for detail and perfection, was the chief engineer. Eckert became so dedicated to the project that he would sometimes sleep next to the machine. Once, as a joke, two engineers picked up his cot and gently moved him to an identical room one floor up; when he awoke he briefly feared the machine had been stolen.69

  Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution (a lesson Atanasoff learned), Eckert was not shy about micromanaging. He would hover over the other engineers and tell them where to solder a joint or twist a wire. “I took every engineer’s work and checked every calculation of every resistor in the machine to make sure that it was done correctly,” he asserted. He disdained anyone who dismissed an issue as trivial. “Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters,” he once said. “Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters.”70

  Eckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved. “He was always kidding and joking with people,” Eckert recalled. “He was personable.” Eckert, whose technical skills came with a nervous energy and scattershot attention span, badly needed an intellectual sounding board, and Mauchly loved being that. Although he was not an engineer, Mauchly did have the ability to connect scientific theories with engineering practicalities in a way that was inspiring. “We got together and did this thing and I don’t think either of us would have done it by ourselves,” Eckert later conceded.71

  * * *

  ENIAC was digital, but instead of a binary system, using just 0s and 1s, it used a decimal system of ten-digit counters. In that regard, it was not like a modern computer. Other than that, it was more advanced than the machines built by Atanasoff, Zuse, Aiken, and Stibitz. Using what was called conditional branching (a capability described by Ada Lovelace a century earlier), it could hop around in a program based on its interim results, and it could repeat blocks of code, known as subroutines, that performed common tasks. “We had the ability to have subroutines and subroutines of subroutines,” Eckert explained. When Mauchly proposed this functionality, Eckert recalled, “it was an idea that I instantly recognized as the key to this whole thing.”72

  After a year of building, around the time of D-Day in June 1944, Mauchly and Eckert were able to test the first two components, amounting to about one-sixth of the planned machine. They started with a simple multiplication problem. When it produced the correct answer, they let out a shout. But it took more than another year, until November 1945, for ENIAC to be fully operational. At that point it was able to perform five thousand additions and subtractions in one second, which was more than a hundred times faster than any previous machine. A hundred feet long and eight feet high, filling the space of what could be a modest three-bedroom apartment, it weighed close to thirty tons and had 17,468 vacuum tubes. By contrast, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, then languishing in a basement in Iowa, was the size of a desk, had only three hundred tubes, and could do merely thirty additions or subtractions per second.

  BLETCHLEY PARK

  Although few outsiders knew it at the time—and would not know for more than three decades—another electronic computer using vacuum tubes had been secretly built at the end of 1943 on the grounds of a redbrick Victorian manor in the town of Bletchley, fifty-four miles northwest of London, where the British had sequestered a team of geniuses and engineers to break the German wartime codes. The computer, known as Colossus, was the first all-electronic, partially programmable computer. Because it was geared for a special task, it was not a general-purpose or “Turing-complete” computer, but it did have Alan Turing’s personal fingerprints on it.

  Turing had begun to focus on codes and cryptology in the fall of 1936, when he arrived at Princeton just after writing “On Computable Numbers.” He explained his interest in a letter to his mother that October:

  I have just discovered a possible application of the kind of thing I am working on at present. It answers the question “What is the most general kind of code or cipher possible,” and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of them is pretty well impossible to decode without the key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H.M. Government for quite a substantial sum, but am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think?73

  Over the ensuing year, as he worried about the possibility of war with Germany, Turing got more interested in cryptology and less interested in trying to make money from it. Working in the machine shop of Princeton’s physics building in late 1937, he constructed the first stages of a coding machine that turned letters into binary numbers and, using electromechanical relay switches, multiplied the resulting numerically encoded message by a huge secret number, making it almost impossible to decrypt.

  One of Turing’s mentors in Princeton was John von Neumann, the brilliant physicist and mathematician who had fled his native Hungary and was at the Institute for Advanced Study, which for the time being was located in the building that housed the university’s Mathematics Department. In the spring of 1938, as Turing was finishing his doctoral thesis, von Neumann offered him a job as his assistant. With the war clouds gathering in Europe, the offer was tempting, but it also felt vaguely unpatriotic. Turing decided to return to his fellowship at Cambridge and shortly thereafter joined the British effort to crack the German military codes.

  His Majesty’s Government Code and Cypher School was, at the time, located in London and staffed mainly by literary scholars, such as Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, a classics professor from Cambridge, and Oliver Strachey, a dilettante socialite who played piano and occasionally wrote about India. There were no mathematicians among the eighty staffers until the fall of 1938, when Turing went there. But the following summer, as Britain prepared for war, the department began actively hiring mathematicians, at one point using a contest that involved solving the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle as a recruitment tool, and it relocated to the drab redbrick town of Bletchley, whose main distinction was being at the juncture where the railway line between Oxford and Cambridge intersected with the one from London to Birmingham. A team from the British intelligence service, posing as “Captain Ridley’s shooting party,” visited the Bletchley Park manor house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity that its owner wanted to demolish, and discreetly bought it. The code breakers were located in the cottages, stables, and some prefabricated huts that were erected on the grounds.74

  Turing was assigned to a team working in Hut 8 that was trying to break the German Enigma code, which was generated by a portable machine with mechanical rotors and electrical circuits. It encrypted military messages by using a cipher that, after every keystroke, changed the formula for substituting letters. That made it so tough to decipher that the British despaired of ever doing so. A break came when Polish intelligence officers created a machine based on a captured German coder that was able to crack some of the Enigma codes. By the time the Poles showed the British their machine, however, it had been rendered ineffective because the Germans had added two more rotors and two more plugboard connections to their Enigma machines.

  Turing and his team went t
o work creating a more sophisticated machine, dubbed “the bombe,” that could decipher the improved Enigma messages—in particular, naval orders that would reveal the deployment of U-boats that were decimating British supply convoys. The bombe exploited a variety of subtle weaknesses in the coding, including the fact that no letter could be enciphered as itself and that there were certain phrases the Germans used repeatedly. By August 1940 Turing’s team had two operating bombes, which were able to break 178 coded messages; by the end of the war they had built close to two hundred.

  The Turing-designed bombe was not a notable advance in computer technology. It was an electromechanical device with relay switches and rotors rather than vacuum tubes and electronic circuits. But a subsequent machine produced at Bletchley Park, and Colossus, was a major milestone.

  * * *

  The need for Colossus arose when the Germans started coding important messages, such as orders from Hitler and his high command, with an electronic digital machine that used a binary system and twelve code wheels of unequal size. The electromechanical bombes designed by Turing were powerless to break it. It required an attack using lightning-quick electronic circuits.

  The team in charge, based in Hut 11, was known as the Newmanry after its leader, Max Newman, the Cambridge math don who had introduced Turing to Hilbert’s problems almost a decade earlier. Newman’s engineering partner was the electronics wizard Tommy Flowers, a pioneer of vacuum tubes, who worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, a London suburb.

  Turing was not part of Newman’s team, but he did come up with a statistical approach, dubbed “Turingery,” that detected any departures from a uniform distribution of characters in a stream of ciphered text. A machine was built that could scan two loops of punched paper tapes, using photoelectric heads, in order to compare all possible permutations of the two sequences. The machine was dubbed the “Heath Robinson,” after a British cartoonist who specialized, as did Rube Goldberg in America, in drawing absurdly complex mechanical contraptions.