Presper Eckert & John Mauchly
Electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, with John William Mauchly. Additional collaboration between the two engineers led to the evolution of the first commercial digital electronic computer, UNIVAC. Their united efforts introduced the commercial computer revolution that continues to alter the world in significant ways.
John Presper Eckert, Jr., was born in 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eckert attended the Moore Engineering School at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1941 and his master's degree in 1943.
Born in 1907, in Cincinnati, Ohio, John William Mauchly was extended a scholarship to study engineering at Johns Hopkins University's School of Engineering. He soon became bored with the field, and transferred to the physics department. Mauchly's intelligence and abilities so affected those in the department that he was provided a position in the physics doctoral program.
Saw Need for Computers
After graduation, Mauchly remained at Johns Hopkins as a research assistant for a year then he was hired to lead the physics department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania where his research centered on meteorology, which called for complicated calculations. In 1940, Mauchly assembled a small analog computer-like machine and utilized the machine to publish a paper about precipitation. Mauchly took a summer course at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania during the summer of 1941 and so impressed academics that he was hired as an instructor in electrical engineering. While there, Mauchly wrote a paper, "The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating," that explained his thoughts for making a computer. This paper was later acknowledged as one of the best early reports about computers.
Though Mauchly originally sought to design a computer for his meteorological research, he altered his proposal to suit the war campaign. Considerable calculations were needed by the army for their artillery range tables to reflect the Modern combat conditions and types of weapons employed in combat during the Second World War. Mauchly started working on the computer in 1943, with J.P. Eckert and numerous others. Soon before the close of World War II, Eckert and Mauchly, with grudging license from the Moore School of Engineering, commenced the drawn-out process of patenting the ENIAC. In early 1946, one administrator resolved that the Moore School would hold back future patents on all projects produced by employees of the school. When called to sign a form accepting this, Eckert and Mauchly declined, and resigned in March 1946.
Invented First General Purpose Electronic Computer
The first of the four computers that Eckert made with Mauchly was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). ENIAC wasn't the first computer in world history. It did, all the same, dramatically improve computing technology. Archaic by contemporary computing standards, for the time period, ENIAC was a marvelous machine. In a single second, it could perform five thousand additions, thirty-eight divisions, or three hundred multiplications. It was one thousand times quicker than calculators of this period of time. ENIAC could calculate a trajectory for an artillery shell in 30 seconds, while it required a human using a mechanical desk calculator 20 hours to execute the same calculation, with the possibility of error. The ENIAC was a general-purpose computer that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, compare amounts, and express square roots. It didn't go into operation until after World War II. The ENIAC cleared its first full functional test on December 10, 1945 and in August 1947, it was employed to solve trajectory problems and calculate ballistics tables at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, and was subsequently employed in the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Construction of ENIAC started in 1944. It required workers 18 months to finish the machine, and it cost over 500,000 dollars. ENIAC weighed over thirty tons and was comprised of 17,468 vacuum tubes, seventy thousand resistors, five million soldered joints, ten thousand capacitors, six thousand manual switches, and 1,500 electrical relays. The computer overlaid 1,800 square feet of floor space. Separate wire panels characterized each of its programs, which signified that operators had to switch its wiring manually by twisting dials, shifting switches, and running cables every time they converted to a new program. Contributing to its complexity were almost 18,000 vacuum tubes, any one of which could burn off at any time and stop a calculation.
Developed First Commercial Computer
Before they departed the University of Pennsylvania, Mauchly and Eckert had already started work on a new computing machine, the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) as early as 1944. It was expected to be smaller, quicker, and more dependable than the ENIAC because it had less vacuum tubes and so malfunctioned less often than ENIAC. The EDVAC was superior for additional reasons also. Programs could be stored, making it the first computer to possess this capability.
Mauchly and Eckert came out with the BINAC in 1949, which was basically a polished version of their other computers. Faster and more affordable than the ENIAC, it employed magnetic tape rather than punched cards, and was the first computer to do so. As with the EDVAC, computer programs could be stored internally. Though IBM had bade Eckert a job and his own laboratory for building computers, Mauchly talked him into collectively starting the Electronic Control Company. Their first work, in 1946 and 1947, was with the National Bureau of Standards and the Census Bureau. They formulated the specs for a computer later called the UNIVAC. The BINAC (completed in August 1949) and the UNIVAC were the first computers to use magnetic tape drives for data storage. Slimmer in size and made up of fewer components than the ENIAC, both machines possessed internal memories for storing programs and could be accessed through typewriter keyboards.The first UNIVAC, presented to the Census Bureau in March 1951, evidenced its value in the 1952 presidential election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, when it accurately forecast outcomes less than an hour after the polls closed.
Eckert obtained 87 patents and many awards for his innovations. He died on June 3, 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Mauchly stayed involved in the computer industry for the remainder of his life. He formed Dynatrend, another consulting firm. Mauchly died on January 8, 1980.
