With his family in Iowa, Atanasoff’s work in Washington was not favorable to his marriage, and then, in 1944, his daughter Elsie’s asthma took such a turn for the worse that it seemed essential that she be taken from Ames and moved to a more healthful climate. Atanasoff suggested Florida, which had worked for his father and siblings forty years earlier. Lura sold the house, packed up the children, and moved to Miami, but the move was not a success—Elsie did not improve, and marital relations did not improve. After living in Miami for about a year, Lura packed up the children again and drove west, looking for a livable climate for her seventeen-year-old daughter. By this time, the war was coming to a close and Atanasoff had to choose whether to return to Iowa State. He considered that his defense work was both essential to the war effort and well paid—he was making about $10,000 a year in salary (the equivalent of about $125,000 in 2010 dollars). His pay grade was above the congressional pay grade because his work was so productive. And his work fascinated him—always a prime consideration for Atanasoff. And then the navy asked him to develop a computer for them, a project that he of course could not resist. Lura and the children ended up settling in Boulder, Colorado, beautiful and neither hot nor humid. Elsie seemed to benefit, and Lura, inspired by the local scenery and by the colors of the native American art that she saw there, rediscovered her long-standing interest in painting. She set up her easel and was soon selling her work in local galleries. But Boulder, Colorado, was much farther from Washington, D.C., even than Ames, Iowa; the Atanasoffs drifted apart.
It was at this time that Atanasoff made the acquaintance of perhaps the most mysterious but also the most famous contributor to the invention of the computer, mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann was a personable and charming man (even his biographer calls him “Johnny”). He would show up in the Naval Ordnance Laboratory to chat, and Atanasoff seemed to hit it off with him. Indeed, they had more than a few things in common. They were almost exactly the same age—von Neumann having been born at the end of December in the same year that Atanasoff was born at the beginning of October. Von Neumann’s father, Max, only a few years older than Atanasoff’s father, had moved from the small town of Pecs in Hungary to the cosmopolitan city of Budapest around the same time that Ivan Atanasoff had departed Bulgaria for the cosmopolitan city of New York. Just as the elder Atanasoff had married into the long-established Purdy family in upstate New York, Max von Neumann had married into a wealthy and established Jewish family in Pest. Both Atanasoff and von Neumann (whose name as a boy in Hungary was Neumann János Lajos) had been voracious students and enterprising learners, able, above all, to formulate pertinent questions and to see hidden connections among apparently disparate concepts.
But in other ways, their lives could not have been more different. Von Neumann’s boyhood had been ferociously urban and cosmopolitan. In the Jewish community in Budapest, von Neumann had grown up in a period and in a place remarkable for prosperity, education, talent, and exposure to a world of ideas and sophistication. Norman Macrae, von Neumann’s biographer, relates that in the late nineteenth century, enterprising Jews from all over Russia and eastern Europe flocked to Budapest, where changes in the culture meant that they could get ahead in the professions, if not in government, faster than they could in other, more conservative parts of Europe. In Budapest, Jews were welcomed—and educated, thanks to reforms instituted by a man named Maurice von Karman at the behest of Emperor Franz Joseph. But men like von Neumann’s father also went to Budapest instead of New York because it was more expensive for middle-class people to go to America than it was for poor people, who were content to travel in steerage. Macrae writes, “More steerage-class Jewish families settled on New York, and more upper-class strivers settled on Budapest.” Von Neumann’s generation of mathematicians and scientists from Budapest included Michael Polanyi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, but Budapest also produced great musicians (Antal Dorati, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy), moviemakers (Adolf Zukor, Alexander Korda, Michael Curtiz), photographers (André Kertész, Robert Capa), and writers (Arthur Koestler).
In 1914, when eleven-year-old John Atanasoff was attending a one-room schoolhouse in Florida, helping his father rewire the family house, learning to maintain, repair, and then drive the new Model T, as well as frustrating his teachers by surpassing them, Neumann Janusz (called “Jancsi”) was delighting his teachers, who were some of the best mathematical minds in Europe. Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner recalls, in Kati Marton’s The Great Escape, that “he was one grade below me, but in mathematics, two classes ahead. He already had an astonishing grasp of advanced mathematics … The way he described set theory and number theory was enchanting. The beauty of the subject, his intensity and facility of description made me feel we were close friends.” One well-regarded teacher tutored von Neumann without compensation, according to Wigner, for the sheer pleasure of “the brush with a special kind of mind.” There were other tutors, too. According to Macrae, “Before he finished high school [he] had been accepted by most of the university mathematicians as a colleague.” Jancsi was not a pest. He naturally and willingly fit in with his fellow students (Wigner recalled, “He joined in class pranks just enough to avoid unpopularity”) and pleased his teachers. He was so adept at mathematics that he could do difficult problems in several ways and gear his solution to the educational level of his associate if he had to. Perhaps we may say that whereas Atanasoff was a natural fixer and improver, von Neumann was a natural game player, always aware that the moves in any game could be made in more than one way and that each possible move would lead to a different outcome, which would in turn lead to other, different outcomes. And game playing, too, as demonstrated by Turing’s fascination with chess, was an aspect of computer innovation.
In 1920, when Neumann Janusz was seventeen, educational circumstances changed for Jews in Hungary. In a place where the vast majority of educated professionals (50 to 80 percent) were Jews, the post–World War I government instituted anti-Semitic quotas for university places—no more than 5 percent. By June 1921, when Atanasoff had saved enough money teaching and working so that he could attend the University of Florida, von Neumann was taking his exams (and worrying so much that as a result his papers were not perfect). In Gainesville, Atanasoff wanted to be a physicist, but the university offered electrical engineering, so he studied that. In Budapest, von Neumann wanted to be a mathematician, but conditions in Hungary made that impractical, so his father pushed him toward chemical engineering. Ironically, when, in September, Atanasoff left Brewster for Gainesville, von Neumann left Budapest for Berlin. But in this, too, he fell into the center of the world, or at least of the mathematical world. Marton writes, “From all over the globe, theoretical physicists gathered in Berlin, and in the medieval university town of Göttingen, three hours away. In those last years before the darkness fell on Germany, a revolution was taking place in the way we understand space and time.” This revolution was quantum mechanics, the very subject that Atanasoff was taking from John Hasbrouck Van Vleck at the University of Wisconsin at about the same time, and proving that he could comprehend in spite of a late start and missed classes.
By the time von Neumann encountered Atanasoff, he had exceptional connections, not only because he was a genius, and not only because he had been born and educated at the center of things, but also because he was worldly, charming, and personable—a connector as well as a maven, in Malcolm Gladwell’s terms. After completing his degrees at Berlin and Zurich (where a paper he wrote was sent to David Hilbert, the man who posed the problem that Turing addressed in “On Computable Numbers,” and so impressed him that he assiduously cultivated the young man), von Neumann went to the University of Göttingen in 1926, just about the same time that Atanasoff was first at Iowa State (and Flowers first went to work at Dollis Hill). In 1930, von Neumann was invited to Princeton, and two years later he was given a professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study, along with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. It was there that he met Alan Turing, to whom he offered the job as research assistant in 1938. Clearly, von Neumann’s personality and biography meshed to produce a man who was perhaps preternaturally political in a way that was unusual in a mathematician or an inventor—he was not only completely at ease in all sorts of social situations, he was extraordinarily aware of the ramifications of larger sorts of politics. He was, after all, the man who was assigned to do the calculations at Los Alamos that were to estimate exactly how much damage an atomic bomb might be made to inflict upon the Japanese. His specific task was to calculate at what elevation the detonation should take place in order to achieve the greatest possible destruction. Other Manhattan Project physicists, notably Leo Szilard, von Neumann’s slightly older compatriot, preferred an intimidating demonstration of the weapon, but von Neumann was willing to make a list of good targets—according to Norman Macrae, he was instrumental in steering the air force away from the Imperial Palace, but, according to Kati Marton, he thought the Japanese holy city of Kyoto was a good target (of course, the final targets were Hiroshima, a shipping center and supply depot, and Nagasaki, a ship-building center).
Physicist Stanley Frankel, who performed many of the Manhattan Project calculations that predicted whether or not an atom bomb could be made to explode, and what would happen then, later said that von Neumann was aware of “On Computable Numbers” by 1942 or 1943 and made sure that Frankel studied it (Frankel went on to be a computer consultant after the war). With his experience on the Manhattan Project, von Neumann was one of the most influential scientists in the world.
But of course, although everyone knew that von Neumann was a genius, and an important man, in the summer of 1944 the Manhattan Project was highly classified, and in 1944, although one type of bomb had been developed (Little Boy), the method for detonating a more powerful bomb had not been worked out. Just about this time, von Neumann was approached by a young man on a train platform. The young man was Herman Goldstine. Goldstine went up to the famous mathematician (whose lectures he had once attended) and introduced himself, but von Neumann got friendly only when Goldstine began to chat about his (highly classified) work on a computer. A month later, in August, von Neumann visited ENIAC in Philadelphia for the first time. Von Neumann may have been a famous genius, but according to Norman Macrae, Pres Eckert, then twenty-five, viewed von Neumann’s visit as a test—for von Neumann. Eckert said to Goldstine that he would find out if von Neumann was really the genius he was supposed to be “by his first question. If this was about the logical structure of the machine, he would believe in von Neumann. Otherwise, not.” Forty-one-year-old von Neumann passed the test.
By the time of von Neumann’s visit, work on ENIAC had been moving at a fever pitch for fifteen months, but the speed of construction demanded by the army because of the difficulty of creating the firing tables meant that real innovation in every aspect of the machine (Mauchly’s and especially Eckert’s goal) had not been possible. They had to use parts that were already in existence (and because the machine was a low priority to the military, a percentage of these parts were defective, though not actual discards, like Zuse’s parts) and at least some ideas that derived from machines that were already familiar to the army, including Irven Travis’s machine at the Moore School that Mauchly was already familiar with by the time he met Atanasoff. Von Neumann grasped that the really new machine would be the next version, and Eckert grasped that, too—he had already begun making drawings for it.
After meeting Goldstine, Eckert, and Mauchly, and chatting with Atanasoff at the NOL (and, no doubt, with anyone else who seemed to know about computer theory), von Neumann went back and forth to Los Alamos, where he worked on the Manhattan Project—it wasn’t until December of that year that the detonation device for one of the bombs (Fat Man) was successfully tested. Work continued on the bomb, but in June 1945, von Neumann was not so busy at Los Alamos that he did not have time for other things—under his direction, Herman Goldstine wrote a description of an idea for the second version of ENIAC. The paper was 101 pages long and was entitled “First Draft of a Report of the EDVAC, by John von Neumann.” EDVAC stood for “Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer.” Mauchly and Eckert were told that the paper was “an internal summary of their work,” and Goldstine also told another concerned party that it was meant for internal use only; therefore it did not constitute classified material and could be reproduced. The fact that von Neumann was given sole authorship at first seemed to Mauchly and Eckert insignificant. The purpose of the paper, and its achievement, was that it expressed the logical and overarching theory of what the creators of ENIAC were trying to do, something that Eckert had hardly had time to attempt, and Mauchly had not been inclined to do, even though he had the time. Eckert had written a three-page memo in February 1944, describing a system for storing electrical impulses. A notable feature of Goldstine’s paper was that even though Eckert had described what he was building to von Neumann in August 1944 and subsequently, there was no mention of Eckert and only one mention of Mauchly (though Howard Aiken was mentioned several times). Partisans of von Neumann make the case that, as with everything else von Neumann did, he took the raw material of another man’s ideas and immediately transcended it, or, as Macrae says, “Johnny grabbed other people’s ideas, then by his clarity leapt five blocks ahead of them, and helped put them into practical effect.”
The most important contribution of the “First Draft” to computer design was that it laid out what came to be known as “von Neumann architecture”—that is, that the computer could contain a set of instructions in its memory like the set of instructions that Turing’s human “computer” would have been given and would have to follow day after day forever. The instructions would be stored in the memory, which the electronic computer could readily access (not like a paper tape or a deck of punch cards). This set of instructions in the memory would be called a stored program. Von Neumann described these ideas in terms of physical structures that had access to one another—the control unit was a self-contained space that could communicate back and forth with the memory. Separate from the control unit was the logic unit (conceived as a place where mathematical calculations were performed), which also communicated back and forth with the memory. The control unit and the logic unit communicated back and forth with each other. The problem to be solved, the input, was fed into the logic unit, and the solution, the output, emerged from the logic unit. But really these “places” were not physical structures—they were sets of instructions, an idea that von Neumann may have (or seems to have) gotten from “On Computable Numbers.” According to Macrae, “The primary memory would be fairly small, with rapid random access. Behind it would be a secondary memory. It should be able to transfer information into the primary memory automatically, as needed. The computer should be able to move back and forth through the secondary memory. Individuals should be able to enter information directly into the secondary memory.”
Although ENIAC was an army project and the war was still on when Goldstine wrote the paper, over the next few months Goldstine sent von Neumann’s report to twenty-four of von Neumann’s colleagues and friends in the United States and England. Their response was enthusiastic and included requests for more copies. Goldstine eventually sent out hundreds. It was this that finally alarmed Mauchly and Eckert, who wrote their own paper in September, describing their ideas for EDVAC and more carefully ascribing particular ideas to particular participants in the ENIAC project, but they hadn’t the gift—their report was neither as detailed nor as eloquent as Goldstine and von Neumann’s in conceptualizing the larger implications of the project. Nor did they have the connections or the reputation. Most important, they did not have the cooperation of the boss, Herman Goldstine. Goldstine, who was in charge of security classification for the project, marked Mauchly and Eckert’s report confidential, thereby ensuring that, unlike von Neumann’s report, it would not be widely read or, perhaps, read at all. There is no evidence that, even though von Neumann was in contact with Atanasoff because of the navy project, he gave Atanasoff a copy of the report or told him about it. Nor did Mauchly and Eckert send Atanasoff a copy of their report, even though his security clearance was higher than theirs.
Although Atanasoff was invited to the February 1946 unveiling of ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, and attended, the demonstration of the machine did not clear up any mysteries for him about how the machine worked or the principles behind it. And Mauchly and Eckert were not present. The purpose of ENIAC was to accomplish what Mauchly had originally proposed—the calculation of artillery trajectories. It was so enormous and so expensive that Atanasoff was intimidated. Even so, not long after he saw the ENIAC, Atanasoff called Richard Trexler, the patent attorney in Chicago. Trexler told him that Iowa State had never paid to file the patent application, and so he had not filed it. Atanasoff knew that his moment to patent his ideas was lost—ENIAC convinced him that computers had progressed. Either his ideas were obsolete or they were irrelevant. Computer technology, it was readily apparent, was now established and developing apace.
In Germany, in 1943 and 1944, Konrad Zuse was still hard at it, still undaunted in attempting the impossible. Even the small prototype using vacuum tubes that Herbert Schreyer wanted to build seemed to be impossible—the type of tubes they needed were not being manufactured in Germany. But while a friend at the Telefunken company made ten tubes in his spare time and smuggled them out of the lab, they discovered that they had another sort of access to materials:
Dr. Schreyer was able to get [the German Aeronautics Institute] assigned the task of examining the intended uses of mysterious devices found in shot-down American and British aircraft … After such an examination, a huge number of completely modern components, resistors, small cylindrical capacitors, variable capacitors, the most modern miniature tubes and small batteries, etc. were left over. Never again did we lack parts which we needed ad hoc for developing the computing machine; we had so much left over, we were able to set up a flourishing radio repair shop.
The conditions surrounding the invention of the Z4 were astonishing—every morning, the inventors had to clean up damage and debris from bombings of the night before. One morning, Schreyer decided he needed, as a conductor, a piece of copper-rich bronze. His two assistants decided to find some—and they did so by wandering the bombed-out streets of Berlin looking for a piece of dead streetcar cable. They managed to cut off and steal a fifty-centimeter piece without getting shot for looting. Since the computer was still not considered a government priority, Schreyer had to get a contract for the development of a dud-bomb-detecting instrument in order to have access to other materials. Once he attained first-class status through that, though, his personnel could order almost anything, and one thing they ordered was “a bottle of radioactive material” for painting on the inner surfaces of the diodes they were making. They also painted the faces of their old watches. The watches were soon stolen by invading Russian troops.
One by one, Zuse’s inventions, wherever they were around Berlin—the Z1, Z2, and Z3—were destroyed in the bombing, but work on Z4 continued; it was being built in a basement. And the use of unorthodox personnel continued—Zuse’s first programmer was blind. Watching him work led Zuse to realize that Braille was a type of computer alphabet. Subsequently, he happily employed blind or sight-impaired programmers.
While he was working on the Z4 and trying out designs for the prototype electronic computer mentioned above, Zuse understood that there was a price to pay. He writes, “Our prototype did not have the slightest practical value.” He could not quite solve the old Turing problem—how to mediate between the desirable simplicity of operation and the huge (or even infinite) number of operations required to solve a problem. But throughout the war, Zuse and his workers and programmers pursued their objectives. Reminiscing after fifty years, he writes:
Today when I look back to these days, it seems unbelievable, even to me, that we kept working while the bombs continued to fall on Berlin. We spent a great deal of the night in an air-raid shelter. All around us, bombs fell and houses burned. More than once after a heavy attack, we thought it was finally over, that nothing would work anymore. We had no water, no electricity, and no telephones, and there was hardly any serviceable means of transportation. But each time, after a few hours, almost everything was working again. And somewhere, all of the employees found ways to pull through.
After Germany surrendered, Zuse heard that Albert Speer had suggested to Hitler that the development of the computer might aid in the war effort. “Hitler is said to have replied that he didn’t need any computing machine, he had the courage of his soldiers.”
But toward the end of 1944, after D-Day, when conditions of every sort were getting desperate in Germany, Konrad Zuse’s savior showed up in the person of a mysterious man named “Dr. Funk.” Dr. Funk was a physicist who had been drafted into the army and was looking for a way to avoid service. Zuse had no illusions—he told Dr. Funk he had nothing for him and sent him to Henschel to ask around for a position. Three days later, Dr. Funk returned with an exemption from military service. His powers only increased from there, Zuse suggests, by means of well-executed forgery. He did seem to know his way around—toward the end of the war, he managed to get Zuse, his assistants, and the machine safely away from Berlin and the encroaching Soviet army. But the evacuation was not without suspense:
The stairway was too narrow for the large relay cabinets; the only way to get them [out] was with the freight elevator. And once again at the wrong moment, the obligatory air raid alarm sounded. The power went out, and we found out just how helpless modern man is without electricity. The elevator had no hand crank, and the only way we could operate the winch was by hand, with indescribable difficulty. Millimeter by millimeter, we raised the device from the cellar to the ground floor. Then the Z4 was on its way for fourteen days on a heavily bombed route between Berlin and Göttingen. It had hardly been unloaded when the freight depot was hit.
Berlin was about 210 miles from Göttingen—John von Neumann and his friends at the University of Berlin had been accustomed to traveling back and forth between the two universities in the 1920s, taking about three hours each way. And Dr. Funk had divined the way to save the machine, as well—for its travels, he christened it, not the Z4, but the V-4 (for Versuchmodell, or “Experimental Model” 4). He allowed those in charge of transportation and evacuation to believe it was a “Vergeltungswaffen” 4, or an advanced version of the V-2 rocket.
In Göttingen, Zuse and his assistants assembled and demonstrated the machine—it still worked—but they were then ordered to take it to “one of the underground ordnance factories,” tunnels where thousands of concentration camp prison workers manufactured weapons and ammunition in appalling conditions. Surprised, shocked, and frightened by what he saw there,1 Zuse managed yet another evacuation, this time to Bavaria. Dr. Funk procured for the journey a Wehrmacht truck and one thousand gallons of diesel fuel.
“For fourteen days we fled along the front, past burning neighborhoods and over bombed-out streets. We usually drove at night; during the day we found makeshift shelter with the farmers.” When they got to their destination, they discovered Wernher von Braun and his team (the designers of the real V-2 rocket). They ended up at the same temporary quarters as von Braun—possibly the most prominent scientist in Germany—thanks to Dr. Funk: “Dr. Funk had free run of the place, and even after we left Berlin, he obtained papers firsthand, whenever it was necessary. How he was able to find us a place in Oberjoch [on the Austrian border] remains a mystery to me to this day.” Zuse did talk to von Braun once—they were close in age and had attended the Technical University of Berlin at about the same time. Zuse was not especially impressed, because he did not get the sense that von Braun foresaw much use for computers in future rocket travel. Von Braun said nothing of his plans to “go over to the Americans. We soon felt it better to keep away from them and to look for our own quarters.” Some years later, though, upon reading von Braun’s memoirs, he saw that von Braun had understood their perilous situation better than he had at the end of the war—an SS man told von Braun that storm troopers had been billeted among the scientists with orders to shoot them “to keep you from falling into the hands of the enemy.” Major General Walter Dornberger, who was in charge of von Braun and the V-2 rocket, managed, with the help of several shots of cognac, to elicit the plan from the commander of the SS, and then to persuade him to abandon it (“And when the Allied troops have learned that you carried out a bloodbath, you will be hanged immediately!”).
Although the war was ending and the French were gaining control, surrendering was a complicated business—first the Zuse cohort used their truck to move the Z4 to the village of Hinterstein, Austria, some 125 miles farther east, where they hid the machine in a cellar. Dr. Funk then tried to make contact with the Americans nearby but was arrested, though he was soon released. In Hinterstein, they encountered a local eccentric, an Indian soothsayer who had a way of knowing, or seeming to know, about everything that was going on, including atom bombs and vast caches of food. He was interrogated by occupying French authorities several times; information he gave them came to nothing, so that when he told them that “a large computing machine—which he [the soothsayer] had invented—was hidden in the village,” the French authorities didn’t bother to investigate. Subsequently, a local Englishwoman, a duchess who had lived in the village for a long time, did report to British authorities that there was a V-4 rocket in the village. When the British investigated and found only the Z4 computer, “they left, disappointed.” Not long afterward, Dr. Funk, Zuse’s mysterious savior, disappeared, too.
Zuse, his wife (he had married one of his employees in January), and his machine stayed in Hinterstein, living as best they could on limited means—they foraged for firewood and food, often eating nettles, spinach, wild mushrooms, and snails. He also managed to sell small paintings of local alpine chamois in a souvenir shop owned by his landlord. For his own pleasure, returning to his love of art, he made intricate woodcuts of the scenery. The scene was more pastoral than Zuse was used to, which led him to think in new ways—he turned his attention to software rather than hardware, spending the next two years on a theory of computer programming that he called “Plankakul,” or “plan calculus,” an “algorithmic computer language” that led him to think about the nature of computer logic. He writes, “This environment did anything but nurture the concept of mechanizing thought processes … the Allgau’s flower-strewn surroundings and—not to be forgotten—the childish laughter of my first son were not exactly conducive to analysing the world into yes/no values.” Like Alan Turing, and at around the same time, Zuse began to think about the nature of the mind, the nature of human free will, and even the nature of the universe. He wrote a paper, uncompleted, that he called “Freedom and Causality in the Light of the Computing Machine.”
In 1946, Zuse moved the Z4 to a stable, where he, his wife, and their two children also rented a room. But the machine wasn’t doing anything—“although we could have taken over fat content analysis for the local alpine dairy.” And once again, there were no supplies for working on the computer—“We joked that the Americans had forgotten only one thing—their soldiers carelessly threw away tin cans. But we really did collect and use such garbage.” In 1947, Zuse and his friends, still living in the Austrian Alps, now in the village of Hopferau, with the Z4 in the stable, began to make contact with the outside world when the trains resumed service (though the trains were so crowded and dangerous that “we were happy just to arrive home safe from our travels”).
Zuse and another friend named Stücken decided to found an engineering firm. Every single item they might need to continue work on the computer was hard to attain, but, he writes, “our courage resulted not least from the fact that we felt we had nothing to lose.” His old friend Helmut Schreyer had a different idea—he had met a South American businessman who wanted him to pursue his computer ideas in Brazil, and Schreyer tried to talk Zuse into joining him. Years later, Zuse was glad he had declined—when Zuse managed to visit him in Brazil, Schreyer was working three jobs, and the suitcase of computer parts that he had managed to salvage after the war had been stolen on the train between Hopferau and the town of Erlangen.
But Zuse’s courage did not extend to believing that his machine had much of a future, and later he deeply regretted that he didn’t bother to file patents on what he had invented. Part of the problem was formulating his insights into patentable ideas—he and a friend who was later to become a patent attorney believed that his thoughts about mathematical and logical relationships would not get through a system that was more geared to devices. He had filed patents in 1937 and 1941. His 1937 patent was granted, but it took so long that it was worthless by the time he got it. His 1941 patent was denied in 1967, with the reason that “the innovation and progressiveness of the object concerned in the main application are not doubted. Yet a patent cannot be granted due to insufficient inventive merit.”
In 1949, Zuse got lucky. One day “an elegant car from Switzerland” drove up, and a man from the Swiss national technical institute in Zurich got out and asked around about a computer he had heard was to be found in the village. The man, a Professor Stiefel, had recently returned from the United States, where he had been shown all sorts of computers “in beautiful cabinets with chromework.” Zuse took him to the stable and turned on the machine. Professor Stiefel presented a problem, a differential equation, and the Z4 solved it. Stiefel then leased the Z4, which stayed in the stable, and Zuse received a small monthly payment for its use.
At the end of the war and right afterward, it was clear that technological advances during the war left research questions related to the war that needed to be answered, but research personnel were quickly returning to civilian life; indeed, Iowa State asked Atanasoff to come back as head of the physics department. For him, though, projects for the navy took precedence over teaching, and Lura and the children were no longer in Ames. While the foremost of Atanasoff’s projects was the plan to build the navy computer, he had not been relieved of his duties in the Acoustics Division. Atanasoff had no choice but to attempt, by working even harder, to run both the Acoustics Division and the Computer Division at the same time. In the Acoustics Division, he had two main projects, the first which was to travel to Bikini Atoll, the scene of atomic tests in the summer of 1946. The immediate purpose was to test the effects of atomic blasts on the junked hulls of ninety-five surplus ships. The assignment for the Acoustics Division was to measure sound waves set off by the tests, with an eye to future detection of atomic tests by other nations. At Bikini Atoll, Atanasoff was put in his usual position of making do, scrounging, repairing, and do-it-yourself, but the tests were both successful and interesting—the column of water discharged by the second, underwater atomic blast rose a mile into the atmosphere and “launched” the aircraft carrier Saratoga (which displaced more than 38,000 tons) almost half a mile. Atanasoff’s acoustic results set a standard for subsequent detection of atomic explosions. It was when he returned from Bikini that Atanasoff was informed that the navy had dropped the computer project. One result of the navy dropping the project was that the “need to know” request Atanasoff had submitted to the navy in order to find out the workings of ENIAC became moot. He would not find out this information until years later.
However, the Acoustics Division at the NOL had another big project. Helgoland Island, about sixty miles north of Bremerhaven, west of Jutland, had served as a German ammunition dump, and the British had decided to blow it up. The navy wanted to take acoustical readings on the shock wave that would be produced, a kind of man-made earthquake. Atanasoff was put in charge of the project. The detonation was to take place in mid-April 1947. Atanasoff had eight weeks to prepare. He subsequently learned through the grapevine that several other scientists had been approached to oversee the project and had refused, thinking that the lead time was too short. He was even advised by a colleague not to accept the assignment, but he did so and accomplished what was asked in his standard way—by noting what was wrong with the preliminary plan, resurrecting old ideas for a seismograph he himself had once designed, then modifying existing equipment to measure seismic waves and sonic waves, no matter how large they might prove to be.
In the meantime, the postwar declassification of ENIAC had other ramifications—when ENIAC’s security was lifted in 1946, the scientific and technological world reacted with oohs and ahs. Tommy Flowers realized that he had invented and made use of a more advanced machine, but he was in no position to protest: Colossus would never be on his résumé. He writes:
With no administrative or executive powers, I had to convince others, and they would not be convinced. I was one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind. The one thing I lacked [for pursuing a computer project] was prestige, which knowledge of Colossus would have amply provided. Personal rivalries also played their part. These were exacerbated, and some were even provoked, by what was considered pretentiousness on my part. Little or none of that would have been possible had Colossus been known.
One person who, of course, knew all about Colossus was Alan Turing. The end of the war meant that Turing had several options available to him. In June 1945, he received an Order of the British Empire for his war work, and then he accepted a position at the National Physical Laboratory with the goal of developing a general-purpose computing machine. The NPL was about thirteen miles southwest of central London, in Teddington. The primary work of the NPL was akin to what was then being done in the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in the United States—it established systems of measurement and standards of quality that would then form the basis for the systematic manufacture and production of goods. The British government had realized in the course of the war that the problem of calculation that had frustrated Atanasoff, Turing, and almost every other physicist before the war was going to be a limiting factor in postwar consumer society, and so a new mathematics division of the NPL was begun and a Cambridge man named J. R. Womersley was put in charge of solving the problems of calculation. The head of the whole laboratory was Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin and son of astronomer George Darwin.
In spring 1945, right around the time that the order was going out for the ten Colossus machines to be destroyed, Womersley went to the United States and was shown ENIAC (before, in fact, it was unveiled to the general public). When Womersley got back to the UK, he was eager to build a UK version. Since, unlike Mauchly and Eckert, he happened to be quite familiar with “On Computable Numbers” and had even toyed with designing a mechanical version of a Turing machine before the war (his partner, like Mauchly and Eckert’s original partner, was in the horse-racing pari-mutuel totalizer business), he offered Turing £800 per year—£200 more than he had received at Bletchley Park—to come to the NPL. Turing began work on October 1, 1945, and he was ready with plenty of ideas. Many of his new colleagues at the NPL had also been recruited from the war effort, though from the Admiralty Computing Service, not from Bletchley Park. They were doing calculations on analog desktop calculators.
Turing did not reciprocate Womersley’s respect or get along with him; he was openly contemptuous of Womersley’s shaky grasp of mathematical principles and had no appreciation of the political skills that had allowed Womersley to extract the financing for his section from the increasingly parsimonious British government. In spite of the difficulties, though, Turing understood that this was his opportunity to realize the theory behind “On Computable Numbers” in electricity and hardware, and, indeed, the theory that had been realized in Colossus. He set about doing so, writing a report that laid out his theory and design of a computer called “Proposed Electronic Calculator.”
The basic feature of his design was a large memory and the ability to program it (that is, to supply the computer with a set of instructions that the computer could always consult—the program would always contain an instruction for the next step, just as the “computer” in “On Computable Numbers” would always know whether to add or not to add the next number on the infinite tape), so human input would be minimized. And the large memory was to be very fast (no doubt Colossus had shown him how fast a computer could operate).
Turing had a copy of von Neumann’s “First Draft” (who did not?), and he considered his own ideas to contrast decidedly with von Neumann’s, especially in that he expected to construct his memory not like a paper tape, as in Colossus, which would be long and sequential, presenting the problem to the computer of “finding” an instruction somewhere on the tape, but more like wallpaper on a wall, allowing the computer to quickly scan for instructions. The former is called “serial access memory,” the latter, “random access memory.” The shift from one to the other is, according to computer scientist John Gustafson, “almost as big a deal as going from decimal to binary calculation.” Turing’s proposal, in terms of both theory and engineering, was quite specific. According to Jack Copeland, he “supplied detailed circuit design, full specifications of hardware units, specimen programs in machine code, and even an estimate of the cost of building the machine.” It seems likely, comparing this production with his prewar efforts at computer design, that he had learned as much from Tommy Flowers (and the other engineers he had known in the war) as Flowers had learned from him.
When Womersley and Turing made their proposal in March 1946, the meeting went well enough that Darwin granted them £10,000 ($400,000 in 2010 funds) to try out a small prototype, but not so well that they got enough money to build the machine that Turing really wanted to build. Certainly, the same problem obtained with the ACE (as it was called, standing for “Automatic Computing Engine”) as obtained with Tommy Flowers’s efforts in the same direction—so few knew what had been done at Dollis Hill or at Bletchley Park during the war that no one was prepared to give Turing the respect or the benefit of the doubt that his experience warranted. Darwin, who knew more than most, did request the Post Office to allow Flowers to help with the computer, but with the ACE, Turing was in much the same position that Atanasoff had been in in 1940 with the Iowa State College Research Corporation—his ideas were so advanced that he had to prove they were worth something to people who did not really understand them. Womersley was his advocate and had some political skills, but Turing himself had none—he needed to be able to refer those who controlled the money to his wartime résumé to convince them, but he was forbidden to do so.
He also had a rival for funding—Maurice V. Wilkes, at Cambridge. Wilkes was almost exactly Turing’s age and he had also gone to Cambridge (St. John’s College, in mathematics). He had also joined the war effort, but in radar development rather than code breaking. In 1945, when Turing was heading to the NPL, Wilkes was returning to Cambridge, to the Mathematical Laboratory. Wilkes also read the “First Draft” when it was published, and he was inspired by it to get to Philadelphia and attend the last two weeks of the Moore School Lectures. He traveled around the United States and investigated as many computer projects as he could before returning to England. Unlike Turing, his goal was not to innovate—it was to supply the university with a working computer as quickly as possible. He visited the NPL at the end of November and wrote to Womersley in December. Womersley apparently either did not understand Turing’s ideas or did not understand Turing, because he passed the letter to him, who wrote back rather sharply: “The code he suggests is … very contrary to the line of development here, and much more in the American tradition of solving one’s difficulties by means of much equipment rather than thought … I favor a model with a control [that is, a CPU] of negligible size which can be expanded if desired.” Turing thought that if the hardware was fast enough and the program detailed and complex enough, roomfuls of processor units could be avoided. However, such a machine would have had difficulties of its own, according to John Gustafson, who maintains,
It is clear that what he had in mind building was something very like the theoretical model in his Computability paper, the model we now call a Turing machine. It worked on one bit at a time, but used a huge amount of memory to do anything of consequence. Since he had proved that anything that was computable could be theoretically computed on such a simple device, why not build one? The CPU would only have required a handful of vacuum tubes. But such a machine is horrendously difficult to program, and even at electronic speeds, it would have been painfully slow for many simple things like floating-point arithmetic.2
One of Turing’s difficulties (or Womersley’s, as his director) was that he didn’t mind talking to the press (either the general press or journals of particular groups, such as the Institution of Radio Engineers), but when he did talk, he raised hopes that did not seem realistically capable of fulfillment, and he was often met with skepticism. And he himself met with skepticism, owing to his odd manner and excessively casual (or, you might say, sloppy) mode of dress, which hadn’t changed much since his older brother had despaired of getting him into his sailor suit with his shoes on the proper feet in 1916. When Turing himself gave a few lectures on the proposed NPL computer, Wilkes attended only one. He felt that Turing’s ideas were irrelevant, because they “were widely at variance with what the mainstream of computer development was going to be.” Womersley sent Turing to the United States to attend a computing symposium in January 1947, and then to visit Princeton and have a look at the project von Neumann had begun there as an academic alternative to the EDVAC. The trip did not change Turing’s mind about his own computer, but momentum was carrying the project away from his ideas. Delays were mounting along with the disagreements. In the meantime, Wilkes, who didn’t have to apply for funding, put his computer together very quickly. In February 1946, Turing had requested that Tommy Flowers, at Dollis Hill, build the prototype of the computer he was designing. Flowers promised the machine by August, but postwar repairs and improvements to the telephone system superseded the project, and by February 1947 the ACE was going nowhere because Turing could not persuade Womersley to commit himself to Turing’s ideas—for example, an engineering department was set up, but made no progress. Possibly, Womersley was the sort of administrator who thinks contradictory ideas constitute a backup plan, but in the end they constituted no plan at all because what had come to be called “von Neumann architecture”—the principles of computer design set out in the “First Draft”—were simply taking over by coming to seem tried and tested.3 Turing quit. In the autumn of 1947, he returned to Cambridge.
1. One reason that Zuse’s autobiography is interesting is that it gives Americans a perspective on life in Nazi Germany that we rarely get. Zuse seems perennially surprised by the power of the Nazis and the events he lives through. My interpretation is that this is a feature of his dedication to and focus on his machine—that thinking about it and building it simply occupied his mind almost completely and drove almost every other consideration, including mortality, out of his consciousness.
2. A Turing machine has been constructed. It can be seen on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3keLeMwfHY
3. One computer that conformed to Turing’s ideas was built by two engineers from Tommy Flowers’s Colossus engineering team. It was called MOSAIC and was used during the cold war to calculate aircraft and anti-aircraft trajectories.