Category: Timeline Stories

The Belgian Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944) from Brussels was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist, and which most important for us—he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science. Otlet started his work on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge in the 1890s and towards the end of his working life, he summarized his ideas in two large books of synthesis, the Traité de documentation in 1934 and Monde: Essai d’universalisme in 1935.

Otlet’s monumental book Traité de documentation (Brussels, 1934) was both central and symbolic in the development of information science (which he called Documentation) in the first half of the 20th century. It reminds us also of something that has been too widely forgotten: This field did have a lively existence in the early decades of the 20th century and sophistication concerning theory and information technology that now commonly surprises people.

Otlet was the most central figure in the development of Documentation. He struggled tirelessly for decades with the most important technical, theoretical, and organizational aspects of a problem, which is central to mankind: How to make recorded knowledge available to those who need it. He thought deeply and wrote endlessly as he designed, developed, and initiated ambitious solutions at his Institute in Brussels.

Otlet was also an idealist and peace activist, pushing internationalist political ideas that were embodied in the League of Nations and its International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (forerunner of UNESCO), working alongside his colleague Henri LaFontaine (in 1895, Otlet and LaFontaine, co-founded the International Institute of bibliography, to promote the efficient organization and dissemination of knowledge), who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, to achieve their ideas of a new world polity that they saw arising from the global diffusion of information and the creation of new kinds of an international organization. In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine first envisioned a “city of knowledge” (Otlet originally named the Palais Mondial (World Palace), comprising a World Museum, World Library, World University, etc.), that would serve as a central repository for the world’s information.

In 1906, Otlet and the chemist Robert Goldschmidt proposed “microfiche” as a standard format for a “micro-photographic book”. Later on, they proposed a portable library of “micro-photographic books”.

In his Traité de Documentation, Otlet speculated imaginatively about online communications, text-voice conversion, and what is needed in computer workstations, though of course, he does not use this terminology. He enumerates inventions, such as machine translation, that are needed for information retrieval and information processing. After stressing the importance of telecommunications and the need for technical standards, Otlet provides a concise outline of a personal information system, including anticipation of hypertext:
We should have a complex of associated machines which would achieve the following operations simultaneously or sequentially: 1. Conversion of sound into text; 2. Copying that text as many times as is useful; 3. Setting up documents in such a way that each datum has its own identity and its relationships with all the others in the group and to which it can be re-united as needed; 4. Assignment of a classification code to each datum; [division of the document into parts, one for each datum, and] rearrangement of the parts of the document to correspond with the classification codes; 5. Automatic classification and storage of these documents; 6. Automatic retrieval of these documents for consultation and for delivery either for inspection or to a machine for making additional notes; 7. Mechanized manipulation at the will of all the recorded data in order to derive new combinations of facts, new relationships between ideas, new operations using symbols. The machinery which would achieve these seven requirements would be a veritable mechanical and collective brain.

Otlet wrote expressively of the need for an international information handling system embracing everything, from the creation of an entry in a catalog to new forms of publication, from the management of libraries, archives, and museums as interrelated information agencies to the collaborative elaboration of a universal encyclopedia codifying all of man’s hitherto unmanageable knowledge. Central to all of this were the so-called Universal Decimal Classification, a new kind of information agency for information management, called the Office of Documentation, a new principle of information indexing and storage, the monographic principle, and microfilm (the idea of providing convenient copies of documents on microfilm dates at least from 1859 when René Prudent Patrice Dagron was granted the first microfilm patent in history. Otlet and the Belgian inventor Robert B. Goldschmidt proposed standardized microfiche in 1906). Ultimately he foresaw the creation of a Universal Network for Information and Documentation, to which access would be had by multimedia workstations, that lay waiting to be invented just beyond the technological capacity of his time.

In the same Traité de Documentation, Otlet predicted that media that would convey feel, taste, and smell would also eventually be invented and that an ideal information-conveyance system should be able to handle all of what he called sense-perception documents.

In his l’Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum from 1936 Otlet conceptualized and designed a large network, comprised of data centers, called Mundaneum, and multimedia offices, called Mondothèque (see the lower image).

Otlet envisioned Mundaneums in various cities all over the world and a large hierarchical network of local, regional, and national centers of knowledge production: Species Mundaneum. The Mondothèque was one link in this network. Otlet designed the Mondothèque as a workstation to be used at home to engage people in the production and dissemination of knowledge. It contained reference works, catalogs, multimedia substitutes for traditional books such as microfilm, TV, radio, and finally a new form of an encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, comprising reproducible “atlases” involving charts, posters, and other illustrative materials.

The Mondotheque was thought by Paul Otlet to be a piece of furniture that everyone would have at home, to encourage access but also the production of new knowledge. Made of wood, it combines essential books, atlas boards in the form of visual encyclopedias, small objects (museums in particular), the Universal Bibliographic Directory and its bibliographic records, microfilms, etc. On the side walls of the Mondothèque, we can observe various media of the period represented (telephone, television, radio, phonograph, microphone, etc.) with the functionalities that Paul Otlet imagined already able to combine.

The great French novelist and poet Jules Gabriel Verne (1828–1905) is best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.

In 1889 Verne wrote an intriguing short story “In the Year 2889”, following a day in the life of a news mogul 1000 years in his future, in which he dreams of a global network. It is believed that the story was chiefly if not entirely the work of his son—Michel Verne (1861-1925), but undoubtedly many of the topics in the story echo Jules’ ideas.

The above-mentioned news mogul, named Fritz Napoleon Smith, used two communication devices, a phonotelephote, and a telephote, to spy on his wife:
This morning Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith awoke in very bad humor. His wife having left for France eight days ago, he was feeling disconsolate. Incredible though it seems, in all the ten years since their marriage, this is the first time that Mrs. Edith Smith, the professional beauty, has been so long absent from home; two or three days usually suffice for her frequent trips to Europe. The first thing that Mr. Smith does is to connect his phonotelephote, the wires of which communicate with his Paris mansion. The telephote! Here is another of the great triumphs of science in our time. The transmission of speech is an old story; the transmission of images by means of sensitive mirrors connected by wires is a thing but of yesterday. A valuable invention indeed, and Mr. Smith this morning was not niggard of blessings for the inventor, when by its aid he was able distinctly to see his wife notwithstanding the distance that separated him from her. Mrs. Smith, weary after the ball or the visit to the theater the preceding night, is still abed, though it is near noontide at Paris. She is asleep…

Mr. Smith introduced an advanced system, which made him rich:
Everyone is familiar with Fritz Napoleon Smith’s system—a system made possible by the enormous development of telephony during the last hundred years. Instead of being printed, the Earth Chronicle is every morning spoken to subscribers, who, in interesting conversations with reporters, statesmen, and scientists, learn the news of the day. Furthermore, each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument, he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they can at a very trifling cost learn all that is in the paper of the day at any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere.

Mr. Smith’s reporters also are using several devices for communication:
Mr. Smith continues his round and enters the reporters’ hall. Here 1500 reporters, in their respective places, facing an equal number of telephones, are communicating to the subscribers the news of the world as gathered during the night. The organization of this matchless service has often been described. Besides his telephone, each reporter, as the reader is aware, has in front of him a set of commutators, which enable him to communicate with any desired telephotic line. Thus the subscribers not only hear the news but see the occurrences. When an incident is described that is already past, photographs of its main features are transmitted with the narrative. And there is no confusion withal. The reporters’ items, just like the different stories and all the other component parts of the journal, are classified automatically according to an ingenious system, and reach the hearer in due succession. Furthermore, the hearers are free to listen only to what specially concerns them. They may at pleasure give attention to one editor and refuse it to another.

As Mr. Smith is a very rich man, he has to follow his account, thus:
Left alone, Mr. Smith busied himself with examining his accounts—a task of vast magnitude, having to do with transactions which involve a daily expenditure of upward of $800,000. Fortunately, indeed, the stupendous progress of mechanic art in modern times makes it comparatively easy. Thanks to the Piano Electro-Reckoner, the most complex calculations can be made in a few seconds. In two hours Mr. Smith completed his task. Just in time. Scarcely had he turned over the last page when Dr. Wilkins arrived. After him came the body of Dr. Faithburn, escorted by a numerous company of men of science. They commenced work at once. The casket being laid down in the middle of the room, the telephote was got in readiness. The outer world, already notified, was anxiously expectant, for the whole world could be eye-witnesses of the performance, a reporter meanwhile, like the chorus in the ancient drama, explaining it all viva voce through the telephone.

Do you find it funny and primitive? Let’s remind you, it was 1889, and the most advanced computers were mechanical marvels like Bollee’s multiplier!

For more than 25 years ENIAC was considered the first digital electronic computer in the world. As late as the beginning of the 1970s this assertion was proved false. First, by the famous trial Sperry Rand Corporation vs. CDC and Honeywell, which started in 1971, and later by the information, which began to emerge about the Colossus computer. At present, it is clear, that first was (prototype built in 1939) the ABC computer of Atanasoff and Berry and the second was the Colossus Mark I computer (build in 1943) of Newmann and Flowers.

Rather eloquent was the finding of the judge of the abovementioned lengthy court trial (it lasted 135 working days, filled more than 20000 pages of the transcript with the testimony of 77 witnesses), the Judge in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota Earl R. Larson, distributed on 19 October 1973 —Mauchly’s basic ENIAC ideas were derived from Atanasoff, and the invention claimed in ENIAC was derived from Atanasoff. In extensive findings, Judge Larson declared: Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff. Furthermore, Judge Larson had ruled that Mauchly had pirated Atanasoff’s ideas, and for more than thirty years had palmed those ideas off on the world as the product of his own genius.

Despite this controversy and Mauchly’s shameful display during the trial (he spoke slightingly for Atanasoff and his computer and changed his testimony under oath three times because the documents and other witnesses’ evidence were against him), the ENIAC computer played an extremely important role in the history of electronic computers.

John Mauchly for the first time met a serious computational problem in 1938 while preparing an article for meteorological data analysis for the Journal of Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity. This article, however, was rejected, as one of the reasons for the rejection was relying on too short a period of data analysis. This rejection prompted Mauchly to begin early experiments with digital electronic computing circuitry. His two years as an undergraduate in an electrical engineering department no doubt fueled this new twist in his research. His resources were small, as was the scale of these trials. Among the circuits that he built were basic elements such as a flip-flop, which could essentially store the “1s” and “0s” that make up the information stored by all digital computers. Mauchly built some of the circuits using neon bulbs rather than the more expensive vacuum tubes, which meant that they did not have the full performance of vacuum tube circuitry. Thus Mauchly was beginning to figure out the basic concepts behind electronic computing circuitry himself.

During WWII the US Army (as well as all other armies) faced a very nasty problem with the computation of firing tables for artillery. Since the factories were producing new long-range guns and a gunner often couldn’t see his target over the hills, he relied on a booklet of firing tables to aim the artillery gun. How far the shell traveled depended on a host of variables: the wind speed and direction, humidity and temperature of the air, elevation above sea level, the ground, etc. Even the temperature of the gunpowder mattered. A typical gun required a firing table with five hundred different sets of conditions. Each new gun, and each new shell, had to have new firing tables, and the calculations were done based on test firings and mathematical formulas. The USA Army used a staff of 176 people (so-called computers) in Aberdeen near Philadelphia and in Moore School, doing the calculating, using desk calculators with push buttons and a large handle to pull to complete each arithmetic operation. Besides that, they used two differential analyzers (the differential analyzer was a mechanical analog computer, designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration), nevertheless, they need more than a month to produce a complete firing table with all the trajectories needed, which was unacceptable. Aberdeen was falling far behind in its firing table responsibility, and guns were being delivered to Europe and Africa that were essentially useless because they could not be aimed. In 1941, the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, responsible for producing firing tables, had made the Moore School into an auxiliary of its computing section. The Moore School performed its work using both analog and numerical methods, the former based on the use of the differential analyzer, and the latter was carried out by a separate group of human computers assembled by the Moore School.

Thus Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, a young 29 years old Ph.D. and professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, had been put in charge of the operation in Penn and ordered to get the tables completed faster, no matter what. Soon Goldstine began calculating the impossibility of the task. The demand for tables was so great, they would never be finished before the guns reached combat. Goldstine sent his wife, Adele, a mathematician herself, on cross-country recruiting trips to seek out more female math majors at colleges, but there was only a handful to be found. He prodded technicians to run the Differential Analyzer as much as possible, but it was prone to breakdowns. Then one day, a graduate student at Penn asked Goldstine if he had heard of an idea that a newly hired professor, John Mauchly, had been spouting. It seemed so silly that the Penn faculty had ignored it. Mauchly had wanted to make an electronic calculator, that could take the place of all the computers.

In August 1942, Mauchly produced a seven-page memorandum—The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculation. In this document he touted the advantage that his machine would be far more accurate than existing mechanical devices, his main selling point was speed—A great gain in the speed of the calculation can be obtained if the devices that are used employ electronic means for the performance of the calculation, because the speed of such devices can be made very much higher than that of any mechanical device. Mauchly’s memorandum, however, was ignored by Penn’s deans, but circulated among his colleagues and students and most importantly to a young graduate student, J. Presper Eckert, who was undoubtedly the best electronic engineer in the Moore School.

When Goldstine tracked Mauchly down and inquired about his idea, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. He immediately realized the army was the way to get his machine built. Suddenly, John Mauchly became an expert on firing tables. He would venture down to the basement, where the Differential Analyzer was located, and tantalize the firing-table workers with questions like, Wouldn’t it be great if you had a machine that would do that in twenty seconds?

Goldstine quickly grasped Mauchly’s idea to make the Differential Analyzer electronic, replacing all the gears and wheels with electronic counters, driven by pulses of electricity and he persuaded his immediate superiors to take the idea to top army brass and ask for funding. On 9 April 1943, Goldstine presented Mauchly and Eckert to Colonel Leslie Simon, director of the Ballistics Research Laboratory, and Oswald Veblen, a renowned mathematician and technical adviser to the army and they agreed to fund the project. The army gave the University of Pennsylvania a development contract and an initial appropriation of $61700 for the first six months of work on what Eckert and Mauchly called the Electronic Numerical Integrator. The name was later changed to Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).

The work on the computer began in June 1943, with Eckert as chief engineer and Mauchly as his consultant. In the beginning, the key role was played by Mauchly, but later on, after settling the initial ideas, the leadership was transferred to Eckert, who was a genius engineer, and Goldstein, who was appointed as a representative of the Army and maintained mathematical and organizational tasks. ENIAC was finished too late for the purpose for which it was built—by the fall of 1945, just as the war had ended, and presented to the public in February 1946. It had taken 200000 man-hours of work and cost some $487000. What the army got was a thirty-ton monster, that filled a room 10 by 15 m. It had 30 different units, including its twenty accumulators, arranged in the shape of U, sixteen on each side, and eight in the middle, all connected by a ganglion of heavy black cable as thick as a fire hose. It could perform 5000 addition cycles a second and do the work of 50000 people working by hand. In thirty seconds, ENIAC could calculate a single trajectory, something that would take twenty hours with a desk calculator or fifteen minutes on the Differential Analyzer. ENIAC required 174 kilowatts of power to run. It contained 17468 vacuum tubes, 1500 relays, 500000 soldered joints, 70000 resistors, and 10000 capacitors-circuitry. The clock rate was 100 kHz. Input and output via an IBM card reader and card punch and tabulator.

The units of the ENIAC can be loosely grouped into five categories: arithmetic (general purpose and dedicated units), global control units, memory, I/O units, and busses (trunks). The lower scheme shows a functional organization diagram of the ENIAC. The units concerned mainly with arithmetic operations are 20 accumulators (for addition and subtraction), a multiplier, and a combination of a divider and a square rooter. Numbers are introduced into the machine by means of a unit, called the constant transmitter, which operates in conjunction with the IBM card reader. The reader scans standard punched cards (which hold up to 80 digits and 16 signs) and cause data from them to be stored in relays, located in the constant transmitter. The constant transmitter makes these numbers available, as they are required. Similarly, results may be punched on cards by the ENIAC printer unit operating in conjunction with the IBM card punch. Tables can be automatically printed from the cards by means of an IBM tabulator.

The accumulators (arithmetic units) of ENIAC consisted of electronic ring counters, formed by a linear array of flip-flops. Since ENIAC was a decimal machine, capable of handling numbers of decimal digits for each plus sign, each accumulator contained 10 ring counters each of 10 stages, and a 2-stage ring counter for the sign of the number. When a number was received by an accumulator, it was added to the prior contents of that unit. The subtraction was performed as a type of addition through the representation of negative numbers by complements.

An addition or subtraction took 200 microseconds, a multiplication required some 3 milliseconds. To achieve this speed, it built into it an electronic device, which stored the multiplication table. The most complex operation was division, which required some 30 milliseconds, similar to the square root.

Various units of the ENIAC communicate with each other over the data, program, and synchronization busses (also called trunks). Digit trunks are carried in trays that are stacked on top of each other, allowing for multiple connections. Digit trays can also be used over again in the course of a program. Only one accumulator can transmit data on a digit trunk at any one time, but multiple accumulators can listen in. In addition to the regular transmission of digits over digit cables/trunks, adapters can be used to change the digit place between the transmitting and receiving accumulator. As an example, a shifter adapter is used to multiply a number by a power of 10, while a delete adapter is used to eliminate the pulses of one or more places of the transmitting number.

The ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, which could include loops, branches, and subroutines. The task of taking a problem and mapping it onto the machine was quite complex, and usually took weeks. Six women were chosen from among the several hundred human computers to work on ENIAC, making them the world’s first computer programmers. Programming the ENIAC was very different from what we consider programming on a modern, stored-program computer. The data-flow architecture of the ENIAC requires setting switches by manipulating its switches and cables and making connections between units (see the lower photo). Programming consists of the following steps.
1. First, the problem to be solved needs to be described by a set of mathematical equations, such as total or partial differential equations.
2. Then, the equations are broken down into basic mathematical operations that the ENIAC is capable of executing.
3. Also, one needs to plan for the storage of numerical data. For each arithmetical operation, one needs to set up a program control and make connections between the program control I/Os.
4. Finally, the individual programs are tied together into a program sequence, so that a collection of programs is automatically stimulated upon completion of another set of programs.

Mauchly and Eckert applied for a patent on the ENIAC in 1947 (but the USA patent No. 3120606 was granted as late as 4 February 1964). By then, they had resigned from the Moore Engineering School and had begun their own corporation, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation. They assigned their patent to their corporation, where they developed the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC. Eckert took care of the engineering functions, and Mauchly ran the business. Neither Mauchly nor Eckert, however, was a good businessman. They eventually ran into financial troubles, and in 1950 sold their company along with their computer patents to Remington Rand. Sperry Rand later bought out Remington. Mauchly worked for Remington and Sperry until 1959 when he left to form his own consulting corporation, Mauchly Associates.

Biography of John Mauchly and John Eckert

John William Mauchly was born on 30 August 1907, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the family of Sebastian J. and Rachel Scheidemantel Mauchly (1878-1960). The father, Sebastian Jacob Mauchly (1878-1928), whose grandparents (Pankratius Fidelis Mauchle and Sophia Schochli) had emigrated to Ohio from Zürich, Switzerland, in 1839, was a high-school science teacher, who went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cincinnati. When John was 8, his father received an appointment as a chief physicist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D.C., in the newly established Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. This position, and his apparatus, enabled John’s father to discover the diurnal variation in the Earth’s magnetic field, a discovery for which he secured a considerable reputation.

Yet, if a commitment to science was one of the early elements of John’s socialization, he was also moved by the heady materialism of the 1920s. Although scientists in the United States were not yet a class unto their own, membership in an elite institution such as the Carnegie Institution enabled the Mauchlys to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, they carved out for themselves in a modest four-bedroom, one-bath frame house in the comfortable suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. John’s mother, Rachel Mauchly, was a strong woman, who enjoyed the gay lifestyle of the 1920s. She had attended the regular meetings of the local Women’s Club, hosted some of its luncheons, and held informal hen parties with her new friends and social acquaintances. The mother worked hard to cultivate her son’s interests. She arranged for the obligatory piano lessons, chided him for his penmanship, and saved up for the annual family vacation out at the Jersey shore.

His father’s occupation afforded Mauchly a decent education, beginning with his schooling at the McKinley Technical High School in downtown Washington. Yet in grade school, Mauchly demonstrated his talent in construction and earned money installing electric bells in place of mechanical bells. When neighbors had trouble with their wiring, they called John Mauchly. He earned near-perfect scores in high school, was a whiz at math and physics, and was editor of the school paper his senior year (1925). Still, in balancing his school work with tennis matches and walks through the woods, or one of Edgar Allen Poe’s ghost stories read in the dark among friends, Mauchly led a reasonably comfortable existence of an upper-middle-class youth. His academic achievements brought him the Engineering Scholarship of the State of Maryland, which enabled him to enroll at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1925, as an undergraduate in the Electrical Engineering program.

There were problems in his family, however. During one of his scientific voyages (sometime before 1925), Sebastian Mauchly contracted a chronic illness. Unwilling to let go of his scientific work, he continued to work excessive hours, which only made his condition worse. Between 1925 and 1928, Mauchly received postcards from the New Jersey shore, where his family went to help his father’s convalescence.

During his freshman year at Johns Hopkins University, Mauchly complained to his father about the General Engineering course, which attempted to provide a more theoretical foundation for engineering. By the end of his second year, Mauchly began to feel that engineering was too mundane. In 1927 he made use of a special provision that allowed outstanding students to enroll directly in a Ph.D. program before completing their undergraduate degrees and transferred to the graduate physics program of the university.

Mauchly’s father passed away on Christmas Eve of 1928. A series of scholarships permitted Mauchly to continue with his studies after his father’s death. Mauchly submitted his dissertation on “The Third Positive Group of Carbon Monoxide Bands” to the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1932.

Mauchly eventually accepted a teaching position in physics at Ursinus College, a small, liberal arts college located on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where he taught introductory physics courses. However, the circumstances at Ursinus did not suit the research interests to which he had been so thoroughly conditioned. Physics itself was changing, and by the 1930s the leading laboratories in the country were equipped with accelerators, spectrometers, and other instruments beyond the resources of many state universities, let alone an individual professor working at a liberal arts college. Mauchly made some attempts to develop analog electronic instruments suitable for specific lines of research. He also discovered a wealth of meteorological data, which by the 1930s were being collected from field stations located all around the globe. Such data were available in tabular form and were transportable to an isolated researcher. Their analysis, however, required extensive calculations. Mauchly actually sought more generally to improve calculating instruments, thinking as much about the needs of his students as his own research. This preoccupation with making calculations quicker and easier led Mauchly towards calculating machines. He purchased a second-hand Marchant calculator to carry out the calculation of molecular energy levels that could be extracted from meteorological data.

In the summer of 1936, Mauchly decided to take up a position as a temporary assistant physicist and computer at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. He accepted a position as a glorified human computer, working for his father’s former supervisor. At the end of the third summer, Mauchly submitted his work for publication in the Journal of Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity. This article, however, was rejected, as one of the reasons for the rejection was relying on too short a period of data analysis. Thus Mauchly starts thinking about finding a means of performing a greater volume of computation. He first turned to the resources offered by the National Youth Administration, a Depression-era agency that allowed him to hire students to work as human computers. Simultaneously, Mauchly turned to mechanical solutions. One aspect of this was Mauchly’s decision to examine tabulating machines, a machine that was used to routinely compute statistics in the social sciences.

This new interest and his encounter with John Atanasoff eventually in 1941 led Mauchly to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, part of the University of Pennsylvania. The Moore School stood at the heart of a strong regional electrical industry that had grown with the popularity of radio, telephony, and other electronic technologies. With the prospects of war looming, the military began to seek young engineers trained to operate the electronic weapons and communications systems that were becoming an increasing part of U.S. armaments. The Moore School stepped forward to accept a contract from the U.S. Army to teach a special ten-week course on Electrical Engineering for Defense Industries directed to students with a degree in mathematics or physics. Thus Mauchly agreed to study electrical engineering at the Moore School, despite of the fact, that he had an opportunity to take up a defense training job at another college for big money and badly needed this money. It was there he met Eckert and they began their famous collaboration. The Moore School had already developed one of the most advanced electro-mechanical computational devices in the world, the differential analyzer. The differential analyzer was a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. At the beginning of the war, the United States Army had awarded the school a contract to compute the tables of trajectories for artillery shells. Both Mauchly and Eckert became deeply involved in this project. This project increased Mauchly’s interest in electronic computation and step by step led him to the creation of ENIAC.

In 1947 Mauchly and Eckert resigned from the Moore Engineering School and began their own corporation, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later on, they developed the computers BINAC and UNIVAC. Eckert took care of the engineering functions, and Mauchly ran the business. Neither Mauchly nor Eckert, however, was a good businessman. Mauchly was a very easygoing and jovial man, but he was also rather unconventional. When he and Eckert visited IBM and its famous president, Thomas Watson, Sr., Mauchly flopped down on the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. Eckert and Mauchly eventually ran into financial troubles, and in 1950 they sold their company along with their computer patents to Remington Rand. Sperry Rand later bought out Remington. Mauchly worked for Remington and Sperry until 1959 when he left to form his own consulting corporation, Mauchly Associates. In 1968, he founded a second computer consulting corporation, which he called Dynatrend.

Mauchly was a dashing person with brown hair and hazel eyes. Standing about six feet and weighing 180 pounds, the long-limbed Mauchly was well read, soft-spoken, and whimsical man. He had married Mary Augusta Walzl, a mathematician, in 1930. They had a son, James, born in 1935, and a daughter, Sidney, born in 1939. Unfortunately in September 1946, while they were swimming in the Atlantic, Mary was swept out to sea and drowned. On 7 February 1948, Mauchly married Kathleen R. McNulty, who had been one of the programmers on the ENIAC. He had five more children with her, four daughters and a son. Mauchly suffered all his life from a hereditary genetic disease called hemorrhagic telangiectasia, which caused anemia, bloody noses, and internal bleeding, among other symptoms. In his later life, he had to carry around oxygen to breathe properly.

Despite his family, business, and court problems, Mauchly had a successful career. Whatever the various turns in his life, he designed and oversaw the development of the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer. He created a start-up venture which he eventually sold at a profit to the company that went on to manufacture his computer. His work as a consultant was also successful. Moreover, Mauchly received academic recognition for his contributions: the Potts Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1949, the John Scott Award in 1961, and the Harry Goode Medal of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies in 1966.

Mauchly retired to the quiet suburb of Ambler, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. He died on 8 January 1980, of complications from an infection.

John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. (called Pres) was born in Philadelphia on 9 April 1919, to John Presper Eckert and Ethel Hallowell Eckert. His father was the rich real estate developer and self-made millionaire John Eckert. Eckert Jr. was an only child and was raised in a large house in Philadelphia’s Germantown section.

But Pres was more than just a child who had been driven to the prestigious William Penn Charter School by a chauffeur. He was a genius in his own right. As early as five-year-olds he was sketching radios and speakers. At age twelve, he won a Philadelphia science fair with a water-filled tub and a sailboat that he could control with a steering wheel hooked to magnets laid at the bottom of a homemade pond. This invention was patterned after an amusement he had seen in a park in Paris, and it was so sophisticated, that it had a rheostat, which could control electric current to the magnets, enabling him to drop one boat and pick up another for maneuvering in the four-by-six-foot pond. At age fourteen, he replaced a vexatious battery-powered intercom system in one of his father’s high-rise apartment buildings with an electrical system. He built radios and phonograph amplifiers and earned pocket money installing sound systems for schools, nightclubs, and special events. He even was hired by West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Merion to build a music system that masked the unnerving sound of gas burners in the nearby crematorium.

In high school, he spent afternoons hanging out in the Chestnut Hill research laboratory of Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who had demonstrated a working model of a television system in 1927. On the math portion of the College Board examination, Pres was placed second in the country. He wanted to go to the center of USA scientific research—Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was easily accepted. But his mother couldn’t bear the thought of her only child leaving home, and his father wanted him to attend business school, so they enrolled Pres at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Feigning tight finances because of the depression, they even required Pres to live at home and commute to the downtown campus.

Bored in business classes, Pres soon tried to transfer to the physics department, but no spaces were available. Finally, he decided to transfer to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, where he enrolled in 1937.

At Moore School, Eckert distinguished himself as a bright young man but not an outstanding student. He was a perfectionist, like his father, orderly and hard driving. But he was not very diligent when it came to classes that bored him, and his grades suffered. Eckert made a name for himself in other ways, as well. At one dance, he created the Osculometer—a machine he claimed measured the intensity, the passion, of a kiss. Couples would grab handles wired to the Osculometer, and an array of ten light bulbs progressively lit up when the pair kissed, completing the electric circuit. What the engineers knew—and their dates didn’t, was that if you got your lips wet enough, hands sweaty enough, and held the kiss long enough, you could get all ten bulbs to light up. Then a loudspeaker atop the device would proclaim: “WAH! WAH! WAHHHH!”.

In 1940, still only twenty-one years old, Pres applied for his first patent, which was granted two years later (USA patent number 2283545). It was called Light Modulating Methods and Apparatus and amounted to a motion-picture sound system. The machine was never sold, however.

Pres persisted at Moore School, earning his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1941 and his master’s degree in 1943. He was widely regarded as a superb engineer while at Moore. However, he could be stubborn, and his work habits were considered odd. He was highly nervous and would rarely sit in a chair or stand still while thinking. Often he would crouch on top of a desk or pace back and forth.

John Mauchly and Pres first met in 1942, when the Army asked the University of Pennsylvania to have a class of scientists to help the war effort. Eckert was the teacher in this class and Mauchly was a student. Though they had different upbringings and were twelve years apart in age, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert became fast friends, wired together by a shared enthusiasm for creating devices. They had amazingly similar childhood interests. Both were fascinated by electricity and wiring, and both had rigged up the same kind of boyhood toys and gimmicks. Eckert was a man more interested in doing than teaching, and prescribed lab exercises bored him. Mauchly knew exactly what he wanted to work on, and saw little value in simple experiments of a caliber he might have assigned to his Ursinus students. Much of the lab time Eckert and Mauchly were assigned to spend together was actually spent talking about different ideas-including computing machines. The final result of these talks will be the creation of the first large electronic computer in the world—ENIAC.

After the WWII and creation of ENIAC, IBM had offered Eckert a job and his own lab for developing computers, but Mauchly talked him into jointly starting a new company—Electronic Control Company. Their first work, in 1946 and 1947, was with the National Bureau of Standards and the Census Bureau. They developed the specifications for a computer eventually known as the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) in 1948. Like most start-up companies developing complex hardware, Eckert and Mauchly ran into their share of financial problems, consistently underestimating the development costs for their computers. To raise money, they signed a contract in the fall of 1947 with the Northrop Aircraft Company to create a small computer for navigating airplanes—the BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer). The BINAC (completed in August 1949) and the UNIVAC were the first computers to employ magnetic tape drives for data storage. Smaller in size and comprised of fewer parts than the ENIAC, both machines had internal memories for storing programs and could be accessed by typewriter keyboards.

Eckert and Mauchly had been kept from bankruptcy by the support of Henry Straus, an executive for the American Totalisator Company, which manufactured the odds-making machines used at race tracks. When Straus was killed in a plane crash in October 1949, Eckert and Mauchly knew they had to sell UNIVAC. The Remington Rand Corporation acquired their company in February 1950. Eckert remained in research to develop the hardware for UNIVAC, while Mauchly devoted his time to developing software applications. In contrast to Mauchly, Pres succeeded in Sperry Rand, in 1959 he even became vice president and assistant to General Manager. The first UNIVAC, delivered to the Census Bureau in March 1951, proved its value in the 1952 presidential election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson when it accurately predicted results less than an hour after the polls closed. Eckert and Mauchly’s patent on the ENIAC was challenged during an infringement suit between Sperry-Rand (formerly Remington), who now owned the rights to the computer and Honeywell.

On 28 October 1944, Eckert married Hester Caldwell. The couple had two sons, John Presper III and Christopher before Hester died in 1952. Ten years later, on 13 October 1962, Eckert married Judith A. Rewalt and he had two more children, Laura and Gregory.

Eckert received his honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964. After his first patent in 1942, he also received 87 patents and numerous awards for his innovations, including the Howard N. Potts and John Scott Medals (both of which he shared with Mauchly). President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the National Medal of Science in 1969. Eckert was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967. He remained with the Remington Rand Corporation through a number of mergers, retiring in 1989. He later served as a consultant to UNISYS and to the Eckert Scientific International Corporation, based in Tokyo, Japan.

John Presper Eckert died on 3 June 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

WWII hindered the progress of computer inventors like Atanasoff and Zuse, but had the opposite effect on the first British steps toward the creation of an electronic computer. During the war, the Department of Communications of the British Foreign Office created machines, which used electronic circuits to assist the British in decoding intercepted German radio messages, coded with special machines. The English electronic computers were created by a group of people, with the leading role of the famous English mathematician Maxwell Newman and the engineer Thomas Flowers. Many others played important roles, including Alan Turing and C. E. Wynn-Williams.

The interception and decoding of German messages was a significant factor in the Allied victory, a fact kept secret until recently. The work was carried out in great secrecy at Government Code and Cipher School in Bletchley Park, GC&CS, a Victorian estate, situated some 80 km north of London. According to the historian Harry Hinsley, the work of crypto analysts in GC&CS was of great importance for the Allied victory and shortened the wartime by some two years.

The German army started using Enigma cipher machines (see the nearby photo) for the coding of military messages in 1925. Contrary to the beliefs of the Germans, the Enigma machine was not secure. In 1928, the Poles acquired knowledge about the German military Enigma by intercepting one, in customs, being sent to the German Embassy in Warsaw, and examining it. A whole series of Enigma machines were produced at the factory in Warsaw. A group of brilliant mathematics students at the Poznan university (Rejewski, Rozycki, and Zygalski) was recruited to work in the cryptological section of the Polish General Staff. In 1932, they decrypted the German Enigma signals. To facilitate decryption Rejewski designed an electromechanical programmable machine which he called Bomba (Polish for a bomb), because of the bomb-like ticking noise it made. In July 1939, the Poles gave the French and the British replicas of Polish-made Enigmas together with the drawings and information on the Enigma, Bomba, and the decryption information. Two mathematicians working at GC&CS, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, developed an improved version of the Bomb machine and over 200 of the Bombes were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company.

The British were very enthusiastic about the possibility to decode all the German military correspondence by means of the Bombs, but suddenly at the beginning of 1940, the interceptors started to catch German messages, coded with a different machine, which were impossible to be decoded. What happened?

At the end of the 1930s, the German Army High Command asked the company C. Lorenz AG to produce for them a high-security teleprinter cipher machine to enable them to communicate by radio in complete secrecy. The Lorenz AG designed the SZ40 and SZ42 cipher machines (see the nearby photo), based on the additive method for enciphering teleprinter messages invented in 1918 by Gilbert S. Vernam, of Brooklyn, New York (see the patent of Vernam). Since 1940 the Enigma machine was generally used by field units, the Lorenz machine was used for high-level communications (including Hitler’s orders) which could support the heavy machine, teletypewriter, and attendant fixed circuits. The Vernam system enciphered the message text by adding to it, character by character, a set of obscuring characters thus producing the enciphered text which was transmitted to the intended recipient. The simplicity of Vernam’s system was that if the obscuring characters were added in a rather special way (known as modulo 2 addition), then exactly the same obscuring characters added in the same way to the received enciphered message, canceled out the obscuring characters, and retrieved the original message. Vernam proposed that the obscuring characters should be completely random and pre-punched onto paper tape to be consumed character by character in synchronism with the input message characters. Such a cipher system using purely random obscuring characters is unbreakable.

The difficulty was, in a hot war situation, to make sure that the same random character tapes were available at each end of a communications link and that they were both set to the same start position. The Lorenz Company decided that it would be operationally easier to construct a machine to generate the obscuring character sequence. Because it was a machine, it could not generate a completely random sequence of characters. It generates what is known as a pseudo-random sequence. Unfortunately for the German Army, it was more pseudo than random and that was how it was broken. The amazing thing about SZ machines (in contrast with the Polish codebreakers’ success with the Enigma machine) is that the code breakers in GC&CS never saw an actual SZ machine until right at the end of the war, but they had been breaking the Lorenz cipher for two and a half years.

John Tiltman was one of the top code breakers in Bletchley Park and he took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name fish and the messages which, as was later found out, were enciphered using the Lorenz machine were known as tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner. Because the Vernam system depended on the addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned, if the operators had made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages, then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. And the British got a bit of fat—in August 1941 two German operators made a horrendous mistake, sending the same message 2 times (something absolutely forbidden by instructions), and a smart British interceptor catch both messages. Tiltman got the messages and for the first time succeeded to recover completely both texts. That was the breakthrough.

Then over the next two months, the Research section in GC&CS worked out the complete logical structure of the cipher machine. At the beginning of 1942, the Post Office Research Labs at Dollis Hill were asked to produce an implementation of the logic worked out by code breakers. Frank Morrell produced a rack of uniselectors and relays, which emulated the logic. It was called Tunny. So now when the manual code breakers in the Testery had laboriously worked out the settings used for a particular message, these settings could be plugged up on Tunny and the cipher text read in. If the code breakers had got it right, out came German. But it was taking four to six weeks to work out the settings. This meant that although they had proved that technically they could break Tunny, by the time the messages have been decoded the information in them was too stale to be operationally useful. The codebreakers deadly needed a faster machine.

The famous English mathematician Max Newman now came onto the scene. He thought that it would be possible to automate some parts of finding the settings used for each message, using electronic devices. He created a specification of a machine, which was built by the engineers at Dollis Hill. The logic was built by means of relays, but the counters are electronic, by the design of Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams (T. Flowers was also involved). The machine was called Heath Robinson after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines.

Heath Robinson was delivered to GC&CS in June 1943. The machine compares two data flows, which are entered by means of two tape readers. The first tape contains the intercepted message, second—a probable decrypted message. Comparing continuously the two tapes and shifting the letters soon or later will decode the message, and the result will be printed on a typewriter. Heath Robinson presented some problems, however. The optical tape readers gave errors if a long stretch of adjacent holes or no holes occurred on the tapes. The major problem was keeping the two tapes in synchronization at over 1000 characters per second. Even a slight misalignment would render the whole process worthless. Heath Robinson however worked well enough to show that Max Newman’s concept was correct.

Newman then went to Dollis Hill, where he was put in touch with Thomas Flowers. Flowers was the brilliant Post Office electronics engineer who designed and built Colossus to meet Max Newman’s requirements for a machine to speed up the breaking of the Lorenz cipher. He had already given some advice on the building of Heath Robinson. Flower’s major contribution was to propose that the wheel patterns be generated electronically in ring circuits thus doing away with one paper tape and completely eliminating the synchronization problem. This required a vast number of electronic valves, but he was confident it could be made to work. He had, before the war, designed Post Office repeaters using valves. He knew that valves were reliable provided that they were never switched on and off. Nobody else believed him! Later Flowers will say: “My suggestion, made in February 1943, was met with considerable skepticism. The first reaction was that a machine with the number of tubes that was obviously going to be needed would be too unreliable to be useful. Fortunately, this criticism was defeated by the experience of the Post Office using thousands of tubes in its communication network. These tubes were not subject to movement or handling, and the power was never switched off. Under these conditions, tube failures were very rare.”

Colossus (called later Colossus Mark I) design started in March 1943. By December 1943 all the various circuits were working and the Colossus was dismantled shipped up to GC&CS and assembled. Colossus used state-of-the-art vacuum tubes (thermionic valves), thyratrons, and photomultipliers to optically read a paper tape and then applied a programmable logical function to every character, counting how often this function returned “true”. The computer (see the upper photo) was operational in January 1944 and successful on its first test against a real enciphered message tape. Colossus was able to read up to 5000 characters per second (cps), with the tape moving through it at about 50 km an hour, and reduced the time to break Lorenz messages from weeks to hours and just in time for messages to be deciphered which gave vital information to Eisenhower and Montgomery prior to D Day. These deciphered Lorenz messages showed that Hitler had swallowed the deception campaigns, the phantom army in the South of England, the phantom convoys moving east along the channel, that Hitler was convinced that the attacks were coming across the Pas de Calais and that he was keeping Panzer divisions in Belgium. After D-Day the French resistance and the British and American Air Forces bombed and strafed all the telephone and teleprinter land lines in Northern France, forcing the Germans to use radio communications and suddenly the volume of intercepted messages went up enormously.

In June 1944 was developed an improved version of Colossus Mark I, called Mark II, and eight more machines were quickly built to handle the increase in messages. The Mark I was upgraded to a Mark II, and there were thus ten Mark II Colossi in the GC&CS by the end of the war. By the end of hostilities 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted. Mark II contained 2500 valves and 800 relays and was capable to read up to 25000 cps (five times faster than Mark I), due to the combination of parallel processing and buffer memory (registers), and contains a circuit for automatically changing the program when a probable code pattern was discovered.

Each of the ten Colossi occupied a large room in Bletchley Park. The racks were 2.3 m high of varying widths. There were eight racks arranged in two bays about 5.5 m long plus the paper tape reader and tape handler. The input of data was cipher text, punched onto 5-hole paper tape, and read at 5000 cps. The output was buffered onto relays and printed on a typewriter. The processor had a memory of 5 characters of 5-bits, held in a shift register, pluggable logic gates, and 20 decade counters arranged as 5 by 4 decades. The clock speed was 5 kHz, derived from sprocket holes in the input tape. Programming of the Colossus’ cross-correlation algorithm was achieved by a combination of telephone jack plugs, cords, and switches.

After Victory Day, suddenly it was all over. Eight of the ten Colossi were dismantled in Bletchley Park. Two went to London and were dismantled in about 1960 and in the same year all the drawings of Colossus were burnt, and of course, its very existence was kept secret. In the 1970s information began to emerge about Colossus. Professor Brian Randell of Newcastle University started researching the machine. Dr. Flowers and some of the other design engineers wrote papers in the 1980s describing Colossus in fairly general terms.

Colossus was the first of the electronic digital machines with programmability, albeit limited in modern terms. It was not, however, a fully general Turing-complete computer, even though Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park, nor a stored program computer. It was not then realized that Turing completeness was significant; most of the other pioneering modern computing machines were also not Turing complete (e.g. the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, the Harvard Mark I electro-mechanical relay machine, the Bell Labs relay machines (by George Stibitz et al), or the first designs of Konrad Zuse). The notion of a computer as a general-purpose machine, that is, as more than a calculator devoted to solving difficult but specific problems, would not become prominent for several years.

Because of his parallel nature, Colossus is very fast, even by today’s standards. The intercepted message punched onto ordinary typewriter paper tape is read at 5000 characters per second. The sprocket holes down the middle of the tape are read to form the clock for the whole machine. This avoids any synchronization problems, whatever the speed of the tape, that’s the speed of Colossus. Tommy Flowers once wound up the paper tape drive motor to see what happened. At 9600 characters per second, the tape burst and flew all over the room at about 100 km/h! It was decided that 5000 cps was a safe speed. At 5000 cps the interval between sprocket holes is 200 microseconds. During this time Colossus will do up to 100 Boolean calculations simultaneously on each of the five tape channels and across a five-character matrix. The gate delay time is 1.2 microseconds which are quite remarkable for very ordinary valves. It demonstrates the design skills of Tommy Flowers.

In 1994, a team led by Tony Sale began a reconstruction of a Colossus at Bletchley Park. When the machine (see the nearby image) was ready, in November 2007, to celebrate the project completion and to mark the start of a fundraising initiative for The National Museum of Computing, a contest was organized—the rebuilt Colossus against radio amateurs worldwide in being first to receive and decode 3 messages enciphered using the Lorenz SZ42 and transmitted from radio station DL0HNF in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum computer museum. The challenge was easily won by radio amateur Joachim Schüth who had carefully prepared for the event and developed his own signal processing and decrypt code using the computer language Ada. The Colossus team was hampered by their wish to use World War II radio equipment, delaying them by a day because of poor reception conditions. Nevertheless, the victor’s 1.4 GHz laptop, running his own code, took less than a minute to find the settings for all 12 wheels. The German code breaker said: “My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second—240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944.”

Biography of Max Newman and Tommy Flowers

The famous English mathematician Maxwell Newman was born Maxwell Hermann Alexander Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, on 7 February 1897. His father was the German Jewish immigrant Hermann Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz, Poland), who had emigrated with his family to London in 1881 at the age of 15. Hermann worked as a secretary in a company, and in 1896 married the 26-year-old Sarah Ann Pike, who was the daughter of a leather dresser, and came from a farming family, but had become a primary school teacher. Max was their only child.

The family moved to the London suburb of East Dulwich in 1903, and Max attended Goodrich Road school, then City of London School from 1908. As a schoolboy at the City of London School, Max demonstrated a great aptitude for classics and also mathematics where he was fortunate enough to come under the influence of a particularly stimulating teacher called F.W. Hill. Hill had formerly been a fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge and it was to this college that Max in turn gained a scholarship, commencing his studies in 1915. Newman made a very promising start winning several prizes at the end of his first year and obtaining a First Class in Part 1 of the Mathematical Tripos. The next three years were spent away from Cambridge doing work related to the war. Initially, Newman took up teaching at Archbishop Holgate’s School in York.

After the outbreak of the First World War, this domestic tranquility as may have existed was shattered by the internment of Max’s father as an enemy alien. Hermann, who had lived in England for 33 of his 48 years was understandably disgusted at his treatment and returned to Germany immediately upon his release. Little detail is known of Max’s relationship with his father but in 1916, Max broke with the past and changed his surname by deed poll and was henceforward called Newman.

For national service, besides teaching at Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School in York, Max worked in the Royal Army Pay Corps and taught at Chigwell School. He was called up for military service in February 1918, but claimed conscientious objection due to his beliefs and his father’s country of origin, and thereby avoided any direct role in the fighting.

His next challenge was to study for a college fellowship and in pursuit of this aim, Max spent 1922-3 in Vienna. The dissertation which Newman produced in 1923 in support of his fellowship contains some evidence of a nascent curiosity about the impact mechanized calculation might have on the mathematical sciences. Universal computing machines were still some way off, but Newman considers the use of “symbolic machines” for making predictions in physics. He was elected a fellow of St. John’s College in Cambridge in November 1923 and, in 1927, he was appointed as a lecturer in mathematics.

In 1934, Max much to the surprise of most of his friends announced his intention to marry. His bride-to-be was Lyn Lloyd Irvine, a writer, a friend of some years standing, and the daughter of a minister of the Church of Scotland. The wedding took place at the end of 1934 and, early the following year, the couple took up residence a few miles south of Cambridge at Cross Farm, Comberton. In the years that followed they had two sons, Edward (born 1935) and William (born 1939).

Over the next two decades, Newman applied himself to mathematics, setting out to tackle combinatorial topology, an area which, at that time no one else in Britain had attempted. Characteristically, his approach was to build on the work of the major pioneers in the field, proceeding incrementally in simple steps. The result was a collection of important papers and a number of theories that continue to be of interest to topologists. He also published papers on mathematical logic and solved a special case of Hilbert’s fifth problem. Namely, Newman was the reason, Alan Turing first encountered Hilbert’s, so-called Entscheidungsproblem (German for decision problem) around the Spring of 1935 when Turing was a student in Newman’s Part III Foundations of Mathematics course. In the middle of April 1936, Turing presented Newman with a draft of his breathtakingly original answer to the Entscheidungsproblem. At the heart of Turing’s paper was an idealized description of a person carrying out numerical computation which, following Alonzo Church, we have come to call a Turing machine. All modern computers are instantiations of Turing machines in consequence of which Turing’s paper is often claimed to be the single most important in the history of computing. From the moment Newman saw Turing’s solution he took him under his wing. Newman canvassed successfully for On Computable Numbers to be published by the London Mathematical Society and, simultaneously, enlisted Alonzo Church’s assistance in arranging for Turing to spend some time studying at Princeton.

Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. The part-Jewish ancestry of the Newman family was of particular concern in the face of Nazi Germany, and Lyn, Edward, and William were evacuated to America in July 1940. Newman remained at Cambridge, and at first continued research and lecturing. By the spring of 1942, he was considering involvement in war work. He made inquiries and was approached to work for the Government Code & Cipher School at Bletchley Park. He was cautious, concerned to ensure that the work would be sufficiently interesting and useful, and there was also the possibility that his father’s German nationality would rule out any involvement in top-secret work. The potential issues were resolved by the summer, and he agreed to arrive at Bletchley Park on 31 August 1942, where he became the main constructor of the English code-breaking machines Heath Robinson and Colossus.

After WWII Newman was appointed head of the Mathematics Department and the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester in 1945 and transformed it into a center of international renown. He obtained the support of the university and the Royal Society and assembled a first-rate team of mathematicians and engineers. Adopting exactly the same approach as he had used so effectively at Bletchley Park, Newman set his people loose on the detailed work while he concentrated on orchestrating the endeavor. By the middle of 1948, the SSEM (Small Scale Electronic Machine) was up and running, and although it was little more than a proof of concept it was still the world’s first working digital electronic stored-program computer.

Newman wrote Elements of the topology of plane sets of points, a definitive work on general topology. He also made major contributions to combinatorial topology. He was a laureate of many honors and awards, let’s mention only: Fellow of the Royal Society, Elected 1939; Royal Society Sylvester Medal, Awarded 1958; London Mathematical Society, President 1949-1951; LMS De Morgan Medal, Awarded 1962; Speaker International Congress of Mathematicians, 1962; D.Sc. University of Hull, Awarded 1968. The Newman Building at Manchester was named in his honor. The building housed the pure mathematicians from the Victoria University of Manchester between moving out of the Mathematics Tower in 2004 and July 2007 when the School of Mathematics moved into its new Alan Turing Building, where a lecture room is named in his honor.

Newman’s direct involvement with computing activity was, however, coming to an end. Newman was opposed to the inevitable use of the Manchester computer in the development of nuclear weapons and as the government took an ever closer interest in the Manchester computer, Max stepped back gradually, preferring to leave further development to the engineers. Newman was a deeply cultured man with an inquiring mind whose interests ranged over a broad canvas. His influence on the first generation of British computer scientists was incalculable, and his appreciation of the importance of computing long before it was generally apparent was probably matched only by that of Alan Turing. The vision and leadership which he showed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and his single-minded determination to mechanize the British code-breaking efforts not only had an appreciable impact on the outcome of the conflict but created a computing legacy that he was determined to carry into the post-war situation. Such was the deftness by which he accomplished the transfer of knowledge that some of those who gained most from his understanding was more or less completely unaware of the singular contribution made to their own success by this remarkable man.

Newman retired in 1964 to live in Comberton, near Cambridge. After Lyn’s death in 1973, he married Margaret Penrose. This remarkable man died on 22 February 1984, in Cambridge.

Thomas Flowers was born at 160 Abbot Road, Poplar, in London’s East End on 22 December 1905, the son of a bricklayer. He seems to have been a practical child, when told of the arrival of a baby sister he declared a preference for a Meccano set (Meccano is a model construction kit comprising re-usable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles, and gears, with nuts and bolts to connect the pieces. It enables the building of working models and mechanical devices). After school, he embarked on a four-year apprenticeship in Mechanical Engineering at the Woolwich Royal Arsenal and went to night classes to study successfully for a degree in Engineering from London University.

After graduation from London University in 1926, he joined the telecommunications branch of the General Post Office (GPO), which was then responsible for all telecommunications within the UK. In 1930 he moved to Dollis Hill in northwest London from 1930, the GPO’s research station, working on experimental electronic solutions for long-distance telephone systems. It was here that he began experiments with early electronic systems that would form the basis not only for Colossus, but also for advanced long-distance telephone systems, that developed into modern direct dialing. By 1939, he was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible, despite some problems with reliability. This background in switching electronics would prove crucial for his computer design in World War II.

In 1935, he married to Eileen Margeret Green and the couple later had two children, Kenneth and John.

After the war, Tommy Flowers returned to the Telephone Research Establishment at the GPO. He was awarded 1000 pounds for his war work, barely sufficient to pay off the debts that he had run up while developing Colossus. He was also honored with an MBE, thought now by some to be a scant reward for war-winning work. Although he proposed making a digital electronic exchange, he was not successful because he couldn’t convince the management of their worth nor tell them he had already worked on such systems. He remained there until 1964, then worked for International Telegraph and Telephone until his retirement in 1969. His work was not acknowledged until 1970 as he, and others, were bound by the Official Secrets Act to remain silent. All his family knew was that he was on some secret and important work.

Recognition came after the release of the Colossus information but much too late to give Tommy any real benefit. He received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1977, and another from De Montfort University in Leicester. Flowers received an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1977, and another from Dc Montfort University in Leicester. More was planned. It became known that he was being considered for a knighthood, possibly in the New Years Honours List. Sadly, Tommy Flowers died from heart failure at home Mill Hill, London on 28 October 1998, at the age of 92.

Working on his doctoral thesis in theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the young scientist John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) first time met a severe computational problem, being forced to perform complex calculations, using traditional computing tools like the slide rule and mechanical calculator Monroe type.

After returning to Iowa State College in 1930 as an assistant professor in mathematics and physics, he started doing experiments with vacuum tubes and radio, and examining the field of electronics. After examining many mathematical devices available at the time, Atanasoff concluded that they fell into two classes—analog and digital. Since the term “digital” was not used until much later, Atanasoff contrasted the analog devices to what he called “computing machines proper.” Sometimes in 1935, he has begun to think seriously about methods of mechanizing digital calculation. In 1936 Atanasoff constructed (along with his colleague physicist Glen Murphy), a small analog calculator, called Laplaciometer. It was used for analyzing the geometry of surfaces. Atanasoff regarded this machine as having the same flaws as other analog devices, where accuracy was dependent upon the performance of other machine parts.

Atanasoff spent a large portion of his time during the 1935-37 period modifying an IBM tabulating machine to solve sets of linear equations by the elimination procedure. He wrote a paper, Solution of Systems of Linear Equations by the Use of Punched Card Equipment, and a drawing for it, schematic Sketch of Auxiliary Apparatus, and in April 1937, he wrote a letter to IBM concerning this idea (later on, during the trial, an internal letter of IBM was revealed, saying in effect “…keep Atanasoff out of the tabulator.” In the 1930s IBM was not in the computer business, but in the office machines business.). Atanasoff had success in modifying an IBM tabulator for the analysis of spectra, that’s why he tried to use it for sets of equations. Ultimately he abandoned the scheme as impractical, primarily because of the machine’s limited storage capacity.

The obsession with finding a solution to the computer problem had built into a frenzy in the winter months of 1937. One cold night, frustrated after many discouraging events, Atanasoff got into his car and started driving to the east. Later on, he will tell in an interview: “It was at an evening of scotch and 100 mph car rides, when the concept came, for an electronically operated machine, that would use base-two (binary) numbers instead of the traditional base-10 numbers, condensers for memory, and a regenerative process to preclude loss of memory from electrical failure.” After driving two hundred miles, he pulled onto a roadhouse in the state of Illinois. Here, he had a drink of bourbon and soda and (he was very fond of fast cars and scotch, and at this time Iowa was still a dry state, so let’s drive to Wisconsin) continued thinking about the creation of the machine. No longer nervous and tense, Atanasoff realized that these thoughts were coming together clearly. He began generating ideas on how to build this computer, using the back of a cocktail napkin. He envisioned a machine that:
• Use base-two numbers (the binary system)—all other known systems at the time used base-ten
• Use electricity and electronics as its principal media
• Use condensers for memory and use a regenerative process to avoid lapses that could occur from leakage of power
• Compute by direct logical action rather than by the enumeration methods used in analog calculators

By early 1938, Atanasoff had conceived the general electronic and logical design of an automatic digital computer for solving large sets of simultaneous linear equations and started to ask for financing. In March 1939 he applied and 2 months later received a grant of $650 ($200 for materials; $450 for Clifford Berry) from Iowa State College for the construction of the machine. Asking for an assistant, Atanasoff received a recommendation from his colleague and friend Harold Anderson (professor of electrical engineering) for a particularly bright electrical engineering student, Clifford E. Berry and after a short meeting, he decided to hire him sometime in the spring of 1939. The construction of the prototype moved ahead with great speed and as soon as it was completed it worked well.

In late 1939 Atanasoff filled out an application for funding to Iowa State College, and in December 1939 made a demonstration of the prototype to Iowa State College officials, which convinced them that Atanasoff’s project was worthy of a grant of $5000 from the Iowa State College Research Council to construct a full-scale machine capable of solving systems of equations. Work on that machine started at the beginning of 1940. By late spring 1940, the machine was well on its way to completion, and they submitted a manuscript describing the details of the computer, both for obtaining a patent (which would never be filed by Iowa State College) and to apply for additional funding for refinement and perfection of the construction and operation features. The machine was manufactured in the basement of the Physics Building of Iowa State University (see the nearby photo) and was ready by the end of 1941. As the building of the machine continued, Clifford Berry wrote a manual for the ABC.

At the end of 1948, on one of his return visits to Ames, Atanasoff was surprised and disappointed to learn that his computer had been removed from the Physics Building and dismantled. Neither he nor Clifford Berry had been notified that the computer was going to be destroyed. Only a few parts of the computer were saved (one of the two memory drums, shown in a lower photo).

By late spring of 1940, the project was well underway, and consideration was given to the fact that steps needed to be taken to patent the machine, as well as to request additional funding for its completion. A 35-page manuscript Computing Machines for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations, complete with drawings of the machine, was written by Atanasoff, with Berry’s assistance. One copy of this manuscript was sent in late 1940 to Chicago patent lawyer, Richard R. Trexler, who had been hired by Iowa State College to give them advice on how to protect the inventions that were incorporated into the computer. When in 1941 the work on the computer came to a halt and Atanasoff left Ames, to receive a defense-related position at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he left the task of completing the patenting of the ABC to university officials. This will prove to be one of the biggest mistakes in his life, as we will see later on.

Atanasoff never did earn any money from his invention. He said “I wasn’t possessed with the idea I had invented the first computing machine. If I had known the things I had in my machine, I would have kept going on it.” After his retirement in 1961, he used to work on private projects, when in the spring of 1967 he was contacted, to his surprise, by the attorneys of three huge computer companies—Control Data Company (CDC), Honeywell, and General Electric, regarding controversy with the Sperry Rand Corporation over what was called generally “the ENIAC PATENTS”. The inventors of the computer ENIAC—John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert applied for the patent of their machine in 1947, the patent was granted in 1964. Meanwhile, Sperry Rand had purchased the company of Mauchly and Eckert and together with the company—the patent rights, so not only Honeywell but all the companies, manufacturing electronic computers, were supposed to pay patent fees. The lawyers of Honeywell and Control Data somehow managed to learn about the computer of Atanasoff. Until this moment the computer of Atanasoff has been mentioned only in 3 short newspaper messages from the 1940s (see the nearby photo) and in the book Electronic Digital Systems by R. K. Richards, published in 1966. Richards was an Ames friend of Berry, who had seen the Atanasoff machine in 1941, so his book was probably the source of information for the attorneys.

Atanasoff was hired as a consultant by CDC and Honeywell, provided all available information, and agreed to be a witness at the court trial, which started in 1971. In this trial, CDC and Honeywell, with the determinant help of Atanasoff managed to prove, that Mauchly and Eckert have used ideas from the ABC, the patent pretensions of Sperry Rand have been rejected, and the patent of Mauchly and Eckert was classified as invalid. During this long trial (it lasted 135 working days, and filled more than 20000 pages of a transcript with the testimony of 77 witnesses), Atanasoff made a very good impression with his manners and testimony, in contrast with Mauchly’s shameful display, who changed his testimony under oath three times, and spoke slightingly for Atanasoff and his computer. It was proved, that during their first meeting in December 1940, Atanasoff described his work to Mauchly, and as Mauchly wanted to see the ABC for himself, Atanasoff agreed and invited him to visit him in Iowa (see the nearby photo for a letter from John Atanasoff to Mauchly, dated 7 March 1941). Bit by bit Mauchly was persuaded by the attorneys to confirm the following points:
1. He spent from 13 June 1941 to the morning of 18 June 1941 as a guest in Atanasoff’s home in Ames.
2. During this period as Atanasoff’s guest he spent uncounted hours in discussions of the Atanasoff Berry Computer and computer theory with John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
3. On three or four days he accompanied Atanasoff to his office in the Physics Building and observed the Atanasoff Berry Computer in the company of Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
3. He had seen demonstrations of the operations or some phases of the functions of the ABC and might have engaged in the manipulation of some parts of the machine with Clifford Berry.
4. He was permitted to read Atanasoff’s 35-page manuscript on the construction and operation of the ABC from cover to cover and probably did read it. Atanasoff and Berry had willingly answered questions and entered into discussions with him about the machine and the booklet, but Atanasoff had refused to let him take a copy to Pennsylvania.
5. Immediately after his visit to Iowa State in June, Mauchly had written letters to Atanasoff and to his meteorologist friend, Helms Clayton, expressing enthusiasm about the Atanasoff Berry Computer and had taken a crash course in electronics at the University of Pennsylvania.
6. On 15 August 1941 he wrote a comprehensive memorandum on the difference between analog calculators and pulse devices that incorporated some ideas that were almost identical to those in Atanasoff’s 35-page manuscript on the ABC.
7. On 30 September 1941 he had written to Atanasoff suggesting a cooperative effort to develop an Atanasoff computer and had asked if Atanasoff had any objection to him using some of the Atanasoff concepts in a computer machine, that he was considering building.

When Judge Larson distributed the formal opinion on 19 October 1973, it was everything that the attorneys of CDC and Honeywell and Atanasoff himself had hoped it would be. It was a clear and unequivocal finding that Mauchly’s basic ENIAC ideas were “derived from Atanasoff, and the invention claimed in ENIAC was derived from Atanasoff.” In extensive findings, Judge Larson declared: “Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

Judge Larson had ruled that John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry had constructed the first electronic digital computer at Iowa State College in the 1939-1942 period. He had also ruled that John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who had for more than twenty-five years been feted, trumpeted, and honored as the co-inventors of the first electronic digital computer, were not entitled to the patent upon which that honor was based. Furthermore, Judge Larson had ruled that Mauchly had pirated Atanasoff’s ideas, and for more than thirty years had palmed those ideas off on the world as the product of his own genius.

Let’s examine the purpose and construction of the ABC (the name ABC-Atanasoff-Berry Computer is not the original name of the machine, Atanasoff adopted this name in recognition of Berry’s contribution to it during the litigations at the end of the 1960s).

ABC was about the size of a desk and weighed about 315 kg (see the nearby scheme). It contained 280 vacuum tubes and 31 thyratrons.

ABC was a specialized computing machine for the solution of large systems of linear algebraic equations (up to twenty-nine equations in twenty-nine unknowns, with each of the thirty coefficients (including constant term) of each equation having about fifteen decimal places), using the standard Gaussian elimination algorithm. Atanasoff’s idea was the following: he would solve a large set of equations by eliminating a designated variable from successive (overlapping) pairs, thereby generating a new set in one fewer variables, then repeating the process for the new set, and so on, until finally a single equation in a single variable emerged. He could then find single equations in all the other variables, as well, and so calculate the value of every variable.

The structure and principles of operation of ABC are very simple. The machine consists of three basic parts: a storage device, an arithmetic unit, and an input/output unit.

For the storage device Atanasoff considered many possibilities, conducting numerous tests and experiments, in the end, he chose to use for the memory a rotating electrostatic store—drum, based on capacitors. So-called keyboard and counter drums (the nearby photo is of the only surviving part of the ABC—one of the two drums), are mounted on a common axle and were each eleven inches long and eight inches in diameter (the drums contained 1600 capacitors each). Each drum holds 30 numbers of 50 bits each of them. (Two of the columns are spares). Drums are operated in parallel. It is the first use of the idea we now call DRAM—the use of capacitors to store 0s and 1s, refreshing their state periodically.

The source digits from the punch card reader are stored on Drum #1. The contents of Drum #1 could be transferred to Drum #2. When all operands are stored on Drum #1 and Drum #2 the ABC was ready for computations. Each computation (addition or subtraction) was completed on digits from Drum #1 and Drum #2 and the result was stored on Drum #1. When the computations were finished the contents of Drum #1 were punched on cards. He would have a memory separate from the arithmetic unit, in the form of two drums turning on a common axle, each drum large enough to store the coefficients of one equation in capacitor elements. The coefficients of any given pair to be processed would be fed simultaneously into the electronic arithmetic unit and operated on to eliminate a designated coefficient from one of them. The new equation thus formed would be recorded on a card as one of the next smaller sets, to be reentered in the next round of eliminations.

Atanasoff’s arithmetic unit is based on vacuum tubes and consists of thirty computing mechanisms together with several control mechanisms. Each of the computing mechanisms, which Atanasoff had expected to be electronic counters with some kind of carrying arrangement. That is, the thirty computing mechanisms consisted of thirty electronic add-subtract mechanisms (each contains 7 dual triodes) (see the nearby photo), thirty other primarily electronic mechanisms, and the thirty electrostatic bands of a carry-borrow drum.

The input device used an existing punch card reader of IBM Corp (there are two readers: decimal and binary). For the output device, however, Atanasoff devised a high-voltage thyratron-based puncher, which seems to be a failure. During the experiments with the machine in the summer of 1942, the only serious flaw appeared namely in the output puncher. The writing mechanism consisted of two sets of thirty tungsten electrodes, positioned one directly above the other in straight lines. The card was passed between the two sets and a sparking circuit applied 5000 volts across the associated pair of electrodes, to produce an arc and leave a small round charred spot on the card at that position. This mechanism was not reliable and for solving the system of equations over 3 appeared mistakes. It was only a matter of time to improve the scheme of the punching mechanism or choose a better material for punching cards, or even invent a new, not-so-primitive way of entering the intermediate data in the machine, but Atanasoff and Berry didn’t have time, as they hade to leave to the army.

In 1996 a replica of ABC was built at Iowa State University (see the nearby photo) and was demonstrated in several towns in the USA.

Biography of John Atanasoff

John Vincent Atanasoff was born in the farm of his grandfather, located a few miles west of Hamilton, New York, on 4 October 1903. John was the first child in the family of Ivan (John) Atanasoff (1876-1956), an electrical engineer, and Iva Lucena Purdy (1881-1983), a mathematics schoolteacher. The couple had nine children (one of whom died in infancy): John (1904-1995), Ethelyn (1906–2005), Margaret (1912–2009), Theodore Brooks (1916–2002), Avis, Raymond (1923–2004), Melva Ann (1926–2021), and Irving.

Atanasoff’s mother Iva Lucena Purdy (see the lower photo from 1906 of John and Iva) is from an old American family of Ireland origin, a daughter of Monmouth Floyd Purdy (1842-1921) and Mary Celestia Tackleberry (1842-1907). Atanasoff’s father Ivan Atanasoff was an immigrant from Bulgaria (the son of Atanas Ivanoff and Yana Zhelyazkova from Boyadjik, Yambol Region in Bulgaria) and a rather interesting and important figure in the life of John Atanasoff. Let’s see what wrote John about his parents:
My father was born on January 6, 1876, at the time of the preparation of our people for an uprising against the Turks. Before the outbreak of the uprising, the Turkish governors forced the people of the village of Boyadjik to leave their houses and then they burnt them. As my grandfather ran with his son in his hands, followed by my grandmother, a group of Turkish soldiers shot him in the chest. The bullet, which killed him, left a scar on the forehead of my father for the rest of his life.
My grandmother married twice more after that. My father was 13 years old when he arrived in the United States and at 15 he became an orphan. After this incredible start in his life, he finished Colgate University and married my mother, an American whose grandfather fought in the Civil War between the North and the South.

The story of the miraculous survival of Ivan Atanasoff is a documented fact in Bulgarian history (so-called The Massacre of Boyadjik). On 17 May 1876, the Turkish army attacked and plundered the Bulgarian village of Boyadjik, killing almost 200 non-armed people, mainly women, and children. This (as well as many others) brutality of Turks changed Europe’s main countries’ public opinion, which allowed Russia to declare war on Turkey and to liberate Bulgaria in 1877-1878.

Ivan Atanasoff arrived in the US with his uncle in 1889 (Ivan’s name was changed to John Atanasoff by immigration officials at Ellis Island). Ivan’s uncle however left the US the next year, and 14 y.o. Ivan was found to be alone, without money, and without knowing well the language. The next years were very difficult for the boy, but he worked hard and even managed to graduate the Colgate College in New York.

Iva and John married in 1900, following John’s graduation from Colgate College with a degree in philosophy. He got a job as an industrial engineer in New Jersey and they started their family. John took electrical engineering correspondence courses at night and on weekends to further his education. In 1903, the family with just born John Vincent moved to Florida, where John accepted an electrical engineering position in Osteen, Florida, and subsequently, in a newly established town called Brewster, now an empty ghost town, but back then, the home of the phosphate mines of chemical conglomerate American Cyanamid. It was here that John completed grade school and started understanding the concepts of electricity. The Atanasoff’s home in Brewster was the first house they lived in with electricity, and John, as a 9-year-old boy found and corrected faulty electric wiring in a back-porch light.

John’s grade school years were very normal. He was a good student and had a youthful interest in sports, especially baseball. This interest in baseball faded when his father purchased a new Dietzgen slide rule (see the lower photo) to help him at his job. The 10-year-old boy became totally fascinated with it. He carefully read the instructions and was amazed that he could get the correct answers. His father soon discovered that he didn’t have an immediate need for the slide rule, and it was soon forgotten by everyone except young John.

John soon became interested in the mathematical principles behind the operation of the slide rule and the study of logarithms; this led to studies in trigonometric functions. With the help of his mother, he read A College Algebra, by J.M. Taylor. This book included a beginning study on differential calculus and also had a chapter on infinite series and how to calculate logarithms. Within a few months, the precocious 9-year-old had progressed beyond the point of needing help. During this time, he learned about number bases other than ten from his mother; this led him to study a wide range of bases, including base-two.

When John was to enter high school, the family moved to a farm in Old Chicora, Florida. He completed the Mulberry High School course in two years, excelling in science and mathematics, and graduating with his high school diploma at age 15. He had, by then, decided he wanted to be a theoretic physicist. After working a year as a seeker of phosphate deposits to save some money, in 1921 John entered the University of Florida in Gainesville. Since the university did not offer a degree in theoretical physics, he started taking electrical engineering courses. While taking these courses, he became interested in electronics and continued on to higher mathematics. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1925 with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. He had a straight “A” academic average. Even though he had many offers of teaching fellowships, including one from Harvard, he accepted the one from Iowa State College, because it was the first one he received and because of the institution’s fine reputation in engineering and sciences.

In the summer of 1925, John left for Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State College, where he started work on his master’s degree and taught two undergraduate mathematics classes. In June 1926, John received his master’s degree in mathematics and married Lura Ella Meeks (1900-1981), a beautiful, brown-haired, blue-eyed 25-year-old home economics major from Oklahoma. Next year was born his oldest daughter Elsie, and the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where John had been accepted as a doctoral candidate. Two other children, the twins Joanne and John, were born a year later.

In March of 1929, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin as a doctoral student in theoretical physics. The work on his doctoral thesis, “The Dielectric Constant of Helium,” gave Atanasoff his first experience in serious computing. He spent hours on a Monroe calculator, one of the most advanced calculating machines of the time. During the hard weeks of calculations to complete his thesis Atanasoff acquired an interest in developing a better and faster computing machine. After receiving his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in July 1930, he returned to Iowa State College with a determination to try to create a faster, better computing machine.

In the fall of 1930, Atanasoff became a member of the Iowa State College faculty as an assistant professor in mathematics and physics. He started doing experiments with vacuum tubes and radio and examining the field of electronics. After examining many mathematical devices available at the time, Atanasoff concluded that they fell into two classes—analog and digital. Since the term digital was not used until much later, Atanasoff contrasted analog devices to what he called computing machines proper. In 1936 he engaged in his last effort to construct a small analog calculator. With Glen Murphy, then an atomic physicist at Iowa State College, he built the Laplaciometer. It was used for analyzing the geometry of surfaces. Atanasoff regarded this machine as having the same flaws as other analog devices, where accuracy was dependent upon the performance of other parts of the machine (see the nearby photo from 1938).

In September of 1942, Atanasoff left Ames, Iowa, and Iowa State on leave for a defense-related position at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He had become Chief of the Acoustics Division at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, a position that was paying him a salary well above the $10,000 cap on government salaries at the time. He was in charge of developing a computer for the United States Navy. At the same time, he became involved in the first atomic test in the Pacific, a project that he liked very much.

In 1949 John and Lura were divorced and Lura moved with the children to Denver, Colorado. In the same year, John married Alice Gertrude Crosby (1921-2013), an Iowan who had also gone to Washington to work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during the war years.

In 1949 John became chief scientist for the Army Field Forces in Fort Monroe, Virginia. After one year, he returned to Washington as director of the Navy Fuse Program at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. He stayed in that position until late 1951. In 1952 he established the Ordnance Engineering Corporation, a research, and engineering company in Rockville, Maryland, with his old friend and student, David Beecher. The company was sold to Aerojet General Corporation in 1957, and Atanasoff became Manager of its Atlantic Division from 1957-1959 and Vice President from 1959-1961. In 1961 he retired.

After retirement Atanasoff worked in the area of computer education for young people and developed a phonetic alphabet for use with computers. John Atanasoff was a holder of many Honors and Awards, such as the U.S. Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award (the U.S. Navy’s highest honor awarded to civilians), five honorary doctorate degrees, membership in the Iowa Inventors Hall of Fame, and the U.S. National Medal of Technology presented by President George Bush in 1990. Atanasoff is a holder of about 30 patents.

Let’s quote the Iowa State University Associate Professor of Physics John Hauptman opinion about Atanasoff:
“I came here from Berkeley,” Hauptman said. “You know Berkeley must have 20 Nobel prizes and they are proud of them; poets, physicists, chemists… When I found out Atanasoff’s story and read his paper… It occurred to me that if Atanasoff had been at Berkeley in 1939 (with the Atanasoff-Berry Computer) he would have gotten a Nobel prize right away. Berkeley would not have waited a minute before going after a Nobel Prize and becoming known as the birthplace of the electronic digital computer. Here at Iowa State, it was just dropped.”

The Atanasoffs had a farm in Monrovia, Maryland, and enjoyed together growing vegetables, and flowers and raising cattle. Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff died on 15 June 1995 of a stroke at his home in Monrovia and was buried at the local Pine Grove Cemetery.

In the second half of the 1890s, Ivar Hultman (1869-1942), a Swedish mathematician and inventor, together with his partners—Knut Martin Pauli (an engineer, born 1866 in Jönköping) and Julius Waldemar Haglund (a mechanic, born 1877 in Stockholm), devised a pin-wheel calculating machine and applied for patents in several countries. The first patent they got in 1898 (French patent No. 282940 from 12 Nov. 1898 for Machine à calculer), followed by a Swedish patent (SE14935 from 11 May 1900), and a US patent (No. 706180 from Aug 1902). In the same year, 1898, they founded a company, Verkstads AB (Aktiebolaget) Pythagoras (Pythagoras Mechanical Workshop Ltd.) of Norrtälje, Stockholm County, to produce mechanical calculators, hence its name from the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. Pauli was the director of the company (and several members of the Pauli family were shareholders in the company), Haglund was the foreman, and Hultman was obviously “the brain” (in fact Hultman left soon, probably in early 1900).

The plans of Pythagoras AB to manufacture calculating machines failed and the factory instead started producing locks, brass candlesticks, and electrical fittings. Nevertheless, later Hultman continued to patent (together with the co-inventor Adolf Magnus Johanson) variants of his calculator in Sweden, the USA, Denmark, and Great Britain. In 1909 the calculator of Hultman, at last, was put into production, although in small series, by the company of famous Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Lars Magnus Ericsson, who made it for a couple of years under the name Mercur.

Let’s examine the Mercur calculator, described in one of the later patents (US patent No. 878292 of Ivar Hultman and Adolf Magnus Johanson). The dimensions of the device are: length 245 mm, width 477 mm, height 150 mm; the weight is 12.6 kg.
The invention relates to calculating machines more particularly to that class thereof, in which the main wheels are provided each with nine shiftable cogs or teeth adapted to be brought into and out of active position by turning a movable disk or the like connected with the wheel for changing the number of the active cogs.
The object of the improvement is to stop, without failure and at the exact moment, the wheels acted upon by the shiftable cogs and to insure this result without increasing the resistance or affecting in any way the ease of handling the machine.
The device consists of fixed and movable cams, arranged on or connected to the main wheels and adapted to coact with polygonal disks or the like provided on or connected to the gears. The invention involves also means for shifting the position of the movable cams according to the number of acting cogs.

Biography of Ivar Hultman

Ivar Hultman was born on 5 June 1869 in Stockholm, Drottninggatan 64, Klara parish. He was the second son of Frans Vilhelm Hultman (25 May 1829-19 Feb 1879), a teacher in physics and mathematics at Stockholm’s gymnasium (high school), and Augusta Ulrica Amalia Fredrika Teuchler (7 Sep 1839-24 May 1875), who married in March 1864. Vidar had two brothers: Carl Axel Wilhelm, and Eric (1867-1911), and two sisters: Ester (1871-1948), and Siri.

Despite losing his father and mother early (Augusta died only 35 years old in 1875, while Frans died 49 y.o. in 1879), following in the steps of his father (who got a master’s degree in mathematics at Uppsala University in 1854), in the early 1890s, Ivar graduated with a master’s degree (filosofie licentiate) in mathematics.

Despite his natural aptitude for mechanics, it seems Hultman earned his living all his life in the insurance business, as he worked as an actuary in Allmänna Änke- och Pupillkassan i Sverige, one of the world’s oldest life insurance companies, and then he became an actuary and later a deputy manager in Försäkringsaktiebolaget Skandia (his father Frans also worked as an actuary for Skandia in 1871), an old insurance company in Sweden.

Besides the abovementioned patents for calculators, Hultman was a holder of quite a few patents for other devices, such as an Ink supply system for writing nibs, Shears for cutting sheet metal and the like, Drill chuck, Blankets for scraping, Mandrel, Clot cartridge or shaft coupling, and others.

Hultman loved to draw and was a skilled pianist. He had a great interest in theosophy and alchemy and translated esoterical writings from English and French to Swedish. He was a friend of the Swedish painter Oskar Bergman (1879-1963), and they were both great admirers and diligent readers of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and communicated with the Swedenborg society.

Ivar Hultman married to Helga Gottfrida Vilhelmina Richter (1873-1952) from Hångers Storegård, Ljungby, Småland. She too was a skilled pianist and also a wood carver in the Old Norse style. They had a son—Arne Vidar Ivarsson Hultman (1901-1973), who became an engineer, and two daughters Maya (born 1899, died as a child) and Ingrid (1905-1974).

In 1910 Hultman family moved to live in Villa Grantorp, Majorsvägen 8, in Neglinge, Saltsjöbaden.

Ivar Hultman died in Saltsjöbaden in 1942 at 73 years of age.

Little is known about the humble Danish bank clerk Johannes Vermehren (1858-1928), which is rather strange, because he was an active inventor for more than three decades (from the end of the 1880s until the early 1920s) and has several dozens of patents mainly for calculating devices not only in Denmark, but also in the USA, Austria, Canada, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Switzerland, and Finland. Trying to commercialize his calculators, Vermehren even established his own company (Aktieselskabet Vermehrens Regnemaskiner, of Copenhagen, Denmark), but obviously without success, because there is no working example, survived to the present.

During his long career as an inventor of calculators, Vermehren tried mainly to facilitate banking-related calculations and patented several basic types of calculating devices, let’s examine some of them: (1) devices with gears-based calculating mechanisms; (2) devices with cone-shaped calculating members; (3) devices with a circular disk, provided with projecting pins; and (4) devices with a pin-wheels mechanism. Let’s examine the first (chronologically) calculating device of Vermehren, using the US patent No. 398360, filed Jan 1888, granted Feb 1889.

This is a calculating machine, suitable for calculations of commission, interest, annuity, and similar proportionate calculations, in which calculations may be made in a moment of time by adjusting the machine to a certain adjustment indicated in a key or index accompanying the machine and is dependent upon the proportions and the character of the calculation, and thereupon setting the hands or pointers upon one set of disks to the number, which is to be treated in the desired manner, when the machine will indicate upon another set of dials the resulting sum.

When the machine is to be operated, for example, the calculation of the interest of a certain sum in a given space of time-the key or index, which must accompany each machine is consulted to determine the adjustment of the carriage, the said key giving a certain adjustment indicated by the scale upon the slot and upon the nut for the amount of interest and length of time. The handle is now turned so as to bring the hands of one set of dials to point to the given number, when the hands of the other set will indicate the desired number, the hands indicating the desired number or the sum having been revolved a proportionate number of revolutions to the adjustment of the horizontal driving-disk.

The entire principle of the machine is to determine by the key or index, which is calculated beforehand to indicate the various proportions between figures in various calculations, the proportion desired between the hands indicating the given number and the hands indicating the desired number or the sum, when the hands will be moved around with a proportionate speed by the friction disks being revolved at the proportionate speed by the horizontal disk, having their points of contact at the proportionate distances from the center of the said disk.

In the late 1890s, Vermehren designed another type of calculating device, which he patented around 1900 in several countries. It was also (like the first) suitable for proportionate calculations, but had cone-shaped and disk-shaped calculating members (see the nearby drawing from the US patent No. 825363).

This calculator consists of two or more pairs of friction or calculating members, one member of each pair being cone-shaped, while the other one is shaped as a disk or a ring whose edge runs on the outer or inner surface of the cone in frictional contact with it so that the disk or ring is rotated when the cone is rotated. The disk or ring may be mounted in such a manner that its contact points with the cone have a constant but adjustable distance from the apex of the cone or so that it during its rotation also has a lengthwise motion in the direction of its axis, whereby its consecutive contact-points with the cone form a curve the projection of which on the base of the cone forms a logarithmic spiral. By the combination of said pairs of calculating members with a number of counting apparatuses, the machine is able to perform multiplications and divisions of whole numbers and fractions and multiplications, divisions, involutions, evolutions, and calculations by means of logarithms.

This mechanism presents great advantages, especially for calculating the exchange value of bonds and the like. If, for example, one German mark is eighty-eight oere, Danish, and one French franc equals 72.5 oere, the disks a and a’ must be adjusted so as to make r equal eighty-eight and r’ equal 72.5, so that the counting apparatus t will indicate the number of francs and the other one, t’, the corresponding number of marks; but the said arrangement may also be employed for general multiplications, as may be seen from the example quoted. If, for example, any given number is to be multiplied by sixty-seven, it is the same as multiplying with the fraction 670/10. It is obvious that the machine may be used for performing divisions also.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Vermehren devised a calculating device for calculating fractions, based on a mechanism with a circular disk with projecting pins, which he patented around 1910. This machine (see the nearby patent drawing from US patent No. 953160) can be used for calculating fractions, adapted, not only to give a large number of figures in the products, but also to enable fractions to be calculated both the numerators and denominators of, which have several figures. In order that the machine may be able thus to give a product with an increased number of places, the actuating device (which, for example, may consist of five parts on each side) must be able to engage simultaneously a corresponding series of number wheels belonging to the counting mechanism, and further must be movable along the same, unless it is preferred to move the counting mechanisms while the actuating device remains stationary. This latter arrangement is, however, not generally to be recommended, because the counting mechanisms are far larger than the actuating device. In the example illustrated the actuating device is in the form of a circular disk a provided with projecting pins b which are arranged in nine concentric circles whose radii are in the ratio 1:2:3: . . . 9.

In the late 1910s, Vermehren designed a different type of calculating device, which he patented around 1920. In the contrast with his previous machines, it is based on the pin-wheel mechanism and is more suitable for general addition and multiplication (see the nearby drawing from the Swedish patent No. 51960).

This is an extended addition machine and working multiplication calculator, consisting of two, as a rule, of each-other extension lying drums, composed of against each digit of the multiplier and multiplicand corresponding slices or the like, each of which is provided with a number of organs, by means of which the number of active bodies can be varied in accordance with the numerical value of the figures, and of which drums one is rotated from the other three turns each time the latter was overturned, at the same time the former the drum, in this case, is controlled by the latter in this way, in the case of each of the above-mentioned bodies, one drum on all records on the other the drum of a series of bodies is brought into action on the Gears of a counting device, which is so arranged, that its numbers are shifted one step between the multiplications by the individual numbers. It works by multiplying and the multiplicand is set before the counting operation, and the entire calculation is carried out without other external more than the turnaround itself.

Biography of Johannes Vermehren

Johannes Vermehren was born on 3 July 1858 in København (Copenhagen), Christianshavn. He was the firstborn of the famous Danish genre and portrait painter Johan Friderich “Frits” Nicolai Vermehren (1823-1910), and his wife—Thomasine Ludvigne Grüner (1833-1877). After Johannes, the family had nine more children.

Besides his inventions (he had not only numerous patents for calculating devices, but he was also a holder of a patent for Security systems for Bank premises and the like (patent DK19549), and another one for Apparatus for Preventing Collisions on Railways (pat. GB189730753)), we know almost nothing about the life of Johannes Vermehren. He used to work many years as a clerk in the Sparekassen for Kjøbenhavn og Omegn (Savings Bank for Copenhagen and its surroundings), founded in 1820 and one of the oldest banks in Denmark. At the beginning of the 20^th century, Vermehren tried to commercialize his inventions and established his own company (Aktieselskabet Vermehrens Regnemaskiner, est. 1904), which despite enlisting as board member famous Danish businessmen such as Villads Emanuel Gamborg (1865-1929) and Holger Petersen (1843-1917), didn’t achieve success.

Johannes Vermehren married on 7 May 1886 in Næstved to the local girl Ida Christine Ingeborg Henriette Larsen (1859-1935), the daughter of procurator Rasmus Larsen and Anne Marie Christine Cæcilie Sessiong Christensen. They had five children: Ingeborg Thomasine (1887-1896), Margrethe Cecilie (1888-), Knud Frederik Rasmus (1890-1985), Erik Christian Nicolai (1893-1945), and Else Ludvigne (1896-). Knud Frederik Rasmus Vermehren became an engineer and a gymnast who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and won the gold medal in the gymnastics men’s team event.

Johannes Vermehren died on 23 July 1938 in Copenhagen.

At the end of the 1880s, Philip Gottschalk (1842-1924), a German jew, born in England, who lived in Stockholm since the early 1870s, where he used to work as a mechanic, optician, and businessman, invented a calculating device. In 1889 the adding machine of Gottschalk has been patented in Sweden (patent №1876 from 16 January 1889 for Anordning vid Räknemaskiner och dermed jemförliga apparater), Germany (patent №48429 from 6 March 1889 for Additionsmaschine), and France (patent №196612 from 11 March 1889 for Machine à calculer).

It seems the calculating device of Gottschalk was put into serial production in 1890 for a couple of years, although on small scale, and only two examples survived to our time. They are practically identical, but the first of them (see the upper image) has five digits capacity (up to 99999 in the result mechanism), while the second machine (see the lower image) has nine digits capacity (up to 999999999 in the result).

The dimensions of the small device are: length 170.0 mm, width 200.0 mm, height 70.0 mm; the weight is 2.0 kg. The dimensions of the bigger device are: length 170.0 mm, width 280.0 mm, height 60.0 mm; the weight is 4.1 kg. The materials used are: copper alloy (copper, brass, bronze), bone, and wood.

The numbers to be entered into the machine are set by using the vertical movable levers on the upper side, and the number is entered into the calculating mechanism by rotating the crank at the right. To reset the device (to set zeroes at the result windows) the crank must be rotated in opposite direction.

Biography of Philip Gottschalk

Philip Gottschalk was born on 10 June 1842, at 46 Spital Square, Old Artillery Ground, London, England. He was the son of Isidor Gottschalk (1805-1884), and Rosetta Harris (1808-1877). Isidor Gottschalk (son of Ephraim Isaac Gottschalk (1777-1850) and Rebecca Salomon) was a German (Ashkenazi) Jew, born in Groß Glogau, Lower Silesia, Prussia, who in the 1830s moved to England, where he established a family and lived for some 10 years.

Isidor used to work as a merchant of men’s wardrobe items, but he was also an amateur optician, so Philip inherited this trade and business attitude from his father. In the middle 1840s the family moved to Berlin, Germany, but later returned to England.

We know nothing about Philip Gottschalk until the early 1870s, when he moved to Stockholm, Sweden, opened a shop for wizardry devices, and published a catalog, containing a lot of goodies for those interested in magic and optical effects (the price list describes 180 witchcraft items, but also devices and instruments like laterna magica, camera obscura, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, and others). For some time Gottschalk was also a court optician, instrument maker, and photographer.

Philip Gottschalk married Betty (Bertha) Schmahl (1853-1946) from Hamburg, Germany, on 26 February 1873 and they had eight children: Rosetta (1874-1953), Selma (b. 14 Nov 1875), Alice (1877-1955), Lionel Wolf (Albert) (b. 15 Dec 1878), Blanche (1880-1944), Elsa (1881-1972), Carrie (1883-1970), and Siegfried Axel (1886-1970). The son of Blanche Gottschalk-Reuterswärd is the famous Swedish graphic artist Oskar Georg Adolf Reuterswärd (1915-2002).

Philip Gottschalk died on 26 April 1924 in Stockholm, at age 81.

In the middle 1860s the young Swedish engineer Carl Helge Julius Palmcrantz (1842-1880), who just finished his studies at the Teknologiska Institutet (Technological Institute of Stockholm) and returned unemployed (there was a recession with a large shortage of work in Sweden) to his parental home in Jämtland, was trying to establish his own business. Thus he decided to design and put into serial production a calculating machine.

Palmcrantz created initially several simpler experimental models (see the nearby images), similar to earlier devices of Blaise Pascal and Samuel Morland. These wooden and metal models were made in the summer of 1865, and had the dimensions: first (upper image) machine: length 260.0 mm, width 150.0 mm, height 35.0 mm, weight is 0.4 kg; second (lower image) machine: length 240.0 mm, width 115.0 mm, height 50.0 mm, weight is 0.6 kg.

In the autumn of 1865, Helge Palmcrantz improved his early designs and devised a better calculator, suitable for addition and multiplication (see the lower image), which he later patented (Swedish patent Nr. 106 from 30 July 1867 for å summerings- och kontrollerings-machiner), and put into serial production, although on a small scale, from 1866 until 1870, as only several devices survived to our time.

The calculating machine of Helge Palmcrantz is somewhat similar to the earlier Manipolatore Aritmetico of Niccola Guinigi. The device has a rotary disc with push buttons, was made of copper alloy (copper, brass, bronze) and wood, and was mounted in a brass frame with a base, in a mahogany box. Dimensions (with the box): length 140.0 mm, width 190.0 mm, height 50.0 mm; the total weight was 1.8 kg (the box is 400 g). The machine seems like a solid and well-designed device, but it is hard to believe it can be used for practical calculations, having only two digits at the result mechanism.

Biography of Helge Palmcrantz

Carl Helge Julius Palmcrantz was born at Hammerdal in Jämtland, Sweden, on 7 July 1842. He was the second child (of eight) of Per Gustaf Palmcrantz (1806–1905), a captain in the Jämtland Ranger Regiment, and Lovisa Ulrika Nordenmark (1818-1893).

Carl Helge grew up in Vigge, a village in Bergs Parish, and studied at the high school in Östersund. Interestingly, in school, he showed himself lazy and was even considered retarded—obvious signs of his creative genius. His mechanical aptitude was expressed early, influenced by his grandpa, Per Nordenmark (1775-1853), the provost of Offerdal, who was a mechanic: at the age of twelve, Helge made a sleigh and later added a wall clock and violins. In 1858, Helge was enlisted as a cadet in his father’s regiment, where he worked doing land surveying for two years, then worked in a mechanical workshop in Stockholm in 1860. In 1861 he obtained a patron for financial support and in September went to study at the Technological Institute of Stockholm (now the Royal Institute of Technology). There he took the initiative for the student newspaper Blandaren, which still exists today.

When Helge graduated in civil engineering in June 1864, he worked as an engineer in Jämtland for a year, trying to establish his own business, and rebuilding the Frösö Bridge in Östersund. Then he began experimenting with new weapon designs. This led to him being employed as a draftsman at a state arms committee in Stockholm from October 1866 to April 1867.

Inspiration came to Palmcrantz during his numerous trips abroad, among other things he visited the World’s Fair in Philadelphia in 1876. At the same time, he took the opportunity to study various American industries, which can be seen, in his report printed after his return home. During his time in the USA, Palmcrantz got to meet John Ericsson, the inventor of the propeller, among other things.

Helge Julius Palmcrantz was a versatile inventor. Besides the mechanical calculator, he constructed a bicycle and a mower/harvester. The machine gun he developed made him a fortune. The company that Helge Palmcrantz founded (together with his brother-in-law Theodor Winborg (1832-1918), a chemist and entrepreneur), AB Palmcrantz&Co, became one of the largest Swedish industries of the time. At the factory, among other unusual for the time things, Palmcrantz granted his workers regulated working hours with an eight-hour day, overtime compensation, and some sick pay applied; a vocational school was also established there.

Palmcrantz married on 11 August 1874 in Stockholm, to Susanna Josephina Winborg (28 Feb 1838—29 April 1925), a daughter of a quartermaster from Undenäs, Skaraborg, Johan Winborg, and Anna Brita Göthberg, and sister of his friend and partner Theodor Winborg. Susanna was a strong person, who had her own business—a bakery. They had four children: the tween boys Carl Johan (May 1875-Aug 1875), and Nils Gustaf (1875-1961), and daughters Helga Margareta (Jan 1877-Feb 1878), and Susanna Birgitta (1878-1915).

Helge Palmcrantz has been described as “lean, but sinewy”, sharp-minded, imaginative, independent, original, and unconventional but somewhat rough and angular in his manner. He also had an artistic streak, loved violins, and liked to write poetry.

Palmcrantz succumbed to an early death at only 38 years. After dinner at Operakällaren in the middle of November 1880, Palmcrantz suddenly fell ill with a bleeding stomach ulcer and died after a few days, on 22 November 1880, and was buried at Norra Begravningsplatsen cemetery in Stockholm.

Around 1877 the Swedish public school teacher Per (Peter) Johann Bäckman from Stockholm invented an adding device, similar to the earlier calculator of Charles Henry Webb, and applied for patents in Sweden and Germany. The Swedish patent №205 of å framstäld räknemaskin för addition for nine years was granted on 11 April 1878. German patent №2615 for Rechenapparat für Addition was granted on 28 March 1878 (see the German patent of Bäckman).

The adding device of Bäckman was put in production, although on small scale, between 1885 and 1890. The price was SEK 10 (or 15 SEK), but due to low demand, production was soon discontinued and the workers each received a copy as a gift.

The dimensions of the black metal adding device of Peter Bäckman are as follows: height 30.0 mm; length 172.0 mm; width 100.0 mm. The weight is 2.5 kg.

The machine was advertised in several Swedish newspapers, for example, see the nearby advertisement from the 29 December 1878 issue of Dagens Nyheter newspaper:
Machine Agency
KARLSTAD
A fitting Christmas present.
P. JOH. BACKMANS
patented
Calculating machine for addition, and speed calculations, simple and easy to operate, particularly suitable as a controller when measuring and weighing all kinds of goods, loading, and unloading, and a good helper for bookkeepers. Now in stock and sent by cash on delivery or by post.
J. W. NORDQVIST
Price 15 krones.

Biography of Peter Backman

Peter (AKA Per) Johann Bäckman, born 11 June 1850, and died 12 April 1904, was a schoolteacher, rector, author, and one of the early leaders within the Swedish Good Templar movement.

Bäckman was the founder and first rector (from 1878 until 1889) of Kristinehamns Praktiska Skola, which started its operations in 1878. Per Johan Bäckman introduced co-education for both sexes in 1880 and the teaching was conducted in two rented rooms in Kristinehamn. After retiring from the Praktiska Skola, Bäckman became a director of an insurance company.

Bäckman wrote a practical textbook in the Swedish language along with spelling and foreign words with explanations.