The Man Who Invented the Computer

Chapter One.

The man who invented the computer.

The biography of John Atanasoff, digital pioneer.

Jane Smiley.

Introduction.

The story of how the computer on my desk got to me is one of the most peculiar tales of the twentieth century, and it demonstrates many tropes often considered merely literary-peripeteia (a sudden reversal in the plot), hamartia (an error in judgment or a mistake), anagnorisis (unexpected recognition), catharsis (strong feelings), as well as significant amounts of tragedy, terror, and pathos, and even some comedy. Many characters took part, and they did, indeed, act in character-some were dedicated, brave, enterprising, and lucky. Others were hotheaded, deceptive, foolish, and unfortunate. All were brilliant, but the story of the computer shows how they were brilliant in different ways. At least one, the most sociable one, turns out also to have been the most mysterious but maybe the most pivotal. And oddly enough, no inventor of the computer got rich off the invention, even though a few tried.

The inventor of the computer was a thirty-four-year-old a.s.sociate professor of physics at Iowa State College named John Vincent Atanasoff. There is no doubt that he invented the computer (his claim was affirmed in court in 1978) and there is no doubt that the computer was the most important (though not the most deadly) invention of the twentieth century. But on the MIT Inventor Archive, there is no "Atanasoff" between Barbara Askins (Method of Obtaining Intensified Image from Developed Photographic Films and Plates) and Mike Augspurger (Handcycle). Where and when did Atanasoff invent the computer? In a roadhouse in Rock Island, Illinois, while having a drink. He jotted his notes on a c.o.c.ktail napkin.

At the time John Vincent Atanasoff conceived of his invention, he lived in Ames, Iowa, north of Des Moines, and taught in the physics department at Iowa State College (later to be renamed Iowa State University). He had been attempting to come up with a calculating machine since the early thirties, and he had tried all sorts of ideas. On that night in December 1937, frustrated that his work seemed stalled and baffling, he left his house on Woodland Street after supper and went back to his office in the physics building, but that was no good, either. So he jumped in his new car and headed for the Lincoln Highway-the two-lane road that was the first highway to connect the East Coast with the West Coast (Times Square in New York with Lincoln Park in San Francisco). Atanasoff drove east for some sixty or seventy miles, through the flat prairies of Story County and Marshall County, to Tama, then he turned southeast toward Marengo. He drifted past Iowa City on Highway 6. The landscape of eastern Iowa was rolling and forested-decidedly different from the flatlands around Ames. He drove rather fast, and so his trip demanded concentration and was a relief from his recent obsessive focus on his computing problem.

Atanasoff later recalled, "I had reached the Mississippi River and was crossing into Illinois at a place where there are three cities ... one of which is Rock Island. I drove into Illinois and turned off the highway into a little road, and went into a roadhouse, which had bright lights ... I sat down and ordered a drink ... As the delivery of the drink was made, I realized that I was no longer so nervous and my thoughts turned again to computing machines."

The youthful professor came up with four ideas about how a computer might work. They came to him all at once-four parts of a system that he had not been able to get a handle on in the previous five to seven years of concentrated effort. After he finished his drink (or two, though his son later maintained that more than one drink tended to put him to sleep, and that he had been known to stretch out on the carpet at parties after two), he got back into his car, drove home, and set about working out his ideas in detail. Within two years, he and a graduate student named Clifford Berry had constructed a working prototype at a cost of $650 ($450 to pay his a.s.sistant and $200 for materials).

If this sounds like the American dream, it is-Atanasoff"s invention of the computer came about as a result of immigration to the United States from a troubled area, internal migration around the United States in search of better opportunities, and a system of general, and inexpensive, public education that was based upon the land-grant universities established by the Morrill Act of 1862. Atanasoff"s American dream also included wholesome family values, innovative genius, and, eventually, vindication, but the path from those notes written on a napkin in Rock Island to this computer on my desk was a tortuous one. The story of the invention of the computer is a story of how a general need is met by idiosyncratic minds, a story of how a thing that exists is a thing that could have easily existed in another way, or, indeed, not existed at all.

But although this volume is a biography of Atanasoff and focuses on him, his story can only be told in the context of other stories, because in that December of 1937, others too were pondering the difficulties of calculation. Alan Turing, a visiting fellow at Princeton, was wondering if the Liverpool tide-predicting machine, a system of pulleys and gears used to measure and predict tides on the river Mersey, could serve as a core idea for a general calculating machine. Tommy Flowers, an engineer at the General Post Office outside London, was wondering if vacuum tubes (or "valves" as they were called in England) could be used for telephone system relays. Max Newman, a Cambridge mathematician, was nervous about what was going on in Europe but hadn"t turned his thoughts to computers yet. John Mauchly, aged thirty, was teaching at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania-his pa.s.sion was weather prediction, and he had his students attempting to find mathematical correlations between U.S. rainfall and patterns of solar rotation. J. Presper Eckert, only eighteen, was applying to college at MIT, though in the end he went to business school at the University of Pennsylvania. Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, had already built one computer (the Z1) in his parents" apartment. He later said that if the building had not been bombed, he would not have been able to get his machine out of the apartment. John von Neumann, born in Hungary but living in Princeton, New Jersey, had become so convinced that war in Europe was inevitable that he had applied for U.S. citizenship. He received his naturalization papers in December 1937. Von Neumann was one of the most talented mathematicians of his day, but he wasn"t yet involved with computers. It is the weaving of these individual stories that makes up the whole story and causes it to become not merely the tale of an invention, but a saga of how the mind works, and of how the world works.

Atanasoff invented the computer as a labor-saving device. In 1930, when he was studying quantum mechanics at the University of Wisconsin, he decided to do his doctoral thesis on using a quantum mechanical method of calculating the capacity of helium to reduce the intensity of an applied electric field relative to that in a vacuum. His dissertation, only ten pages long, involved weeks of arithmetic on a heavy metal desk calculator with a hundred typewriter-like keys designed to perform addition and subtraction (multiplication and division were performed through repeated additions or subtractions). Atanasoff found performing the calculations extremely laborious, and when he began teaching the following year, he realized that his students were trapped in the same tedious difficulty-by the 1930s, solving mathematical equations with large numbers of variables was becoming a serious obstacle to progress not only in education and science, but also in industry, government, and the military. In 1940, Atanasoff estimated that it would take a person 8 hours to solve eight equations with eight unknowns, 125 hours for twenty equations and twenty unknowns. Another computer scientist for Bell Labs suggested in 1948 that there was "a practical limitation on the size of systems to be solved ... It is believed that this will limit the process used, even if used iteratively, to about 20 or 30 unknowns." The problem was a product of increasing knowledge about how numbers work, how the world works, and how the one might be applied to the other. It was likewise the product of industrialization and modernization, of hundreds of years of ingenuity and the inventions and the observations and theories that ingenuity permitted.

Each of the inventors I will discuss in this volume had different motives for turning his thoughts to ideas of a new variety of machine, and the genius of each was idiosyncratically formed by temperament, education, family history, by restrictions as well as by opportunities. In some ways, Alan Turing was Atanasoff"s precise opposite, drawn to pure mathematics rather than practical physics, educated to think rather than to tinker, disorganized in his approach rather than systematic, never a family man and required by his affections and his war work to be utterly secretive. His figure is now so mysterious and tragically evocative that he has become the most famous of our inventors. The man who was best known in his own lifetime, John von Neumann, has retreated into history, more a.s.sociated with the atomic bomb and the memory of the cold war than with the history of the computer, but it was von Neumann who made himself the architect of that history without, in some sense, ever lifting a screwdriver (in fact, his wife said that he was not really capable of lifting a screwdriver). It is von Neumann for whom partisans of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert reserve their greatest wrath-with some justification-but Mauchly and Eckert have their own story of imagination, ambition, and disappointment, all of which grew out of their characteristic ways of thinking and doing. Perhaps the oddest duck in our gallery of odd ducks was Konrad Zuse, whose work on the computer can only be described as an adventure of the most daring kind. Zuse was two years older than Turing, born in Berlin but reared in a small town in East Prussia and lured into computer design not out of a pa.s.sion for numbers or a pedagogical desire to advance mathematical computation but through an interest in art and design. Zuse conceived and built his computer without any contact with the world outside of Germany or even Berlin, and under the most adverse of circ.u.mstances. It is as if we have several movies running simultaneously-a sunlit-apple-pie-American-progress movie in one theater, a noirish tale of cold war deception, paranoia, and intrigue in the theater next door, a version of Mrs. Miniver crossed with a spy movie set in the blacked-out streets of London in a third, and, as a bonus in the fourth theater, a terrifying German resistance film, set in a collapsing Berlin, but with a happy ending.

The great event all these films share is World War II. In his recent volume of essays, historian John Lukacs catalogs the ways in which, seventy years later, World War II is still shaping the world we live in, even though all the power relationships and ideologies then in play, among the Allies and the Soviet Union and Hitler"s Germany, have shifted utterly. In the index of Lukacs"s book, no mention is made of the computer. But, as we will see, the Second World War was the sine qua non of the invention of the computer and the transformation of the nature of information and the nature of human thought that the computer age has brought about. However, we begin with another war, a small war in a place very far removed from Rock Island, Illinois.

Chapter One.

John Vincent Atanasoff"s father, Ivan, was born in 1876, in the midst of a period of climaxing political unrest. His parents were landed peasants in the Bulgarian village of Boyadzhik (about eighty miles from the Black Sea and perhaps halfway between Istanbul and Sofia). The Ottoman Empire was breaking up-Serbia had won independence in 1830 and Greece in 1832. Revolutionary agitation in Bulgaria, which intensified in the 1870s, culminated in the April Uprising of 1876, in which bands of Christian resistance fighters attacked Ottoman government offices and police enclaves. The attacks were followed by a campaign of reprisal on the part of the Ottoman government. Ivan"s father, Atanas, and his mother, Yana, were forced to flee their village, Atanas carrying the baby Ivan in his arms. In the course of the melee, Yana was knocked unconscious and Atanas was shot in the back. The bullet killed Atanas and creased the baby"s scalp as it exited through his father"s chest, but Ivan and Yana survived (though American translator Eugene Schuyler estimated from his own observations at the time that fifteen thousand Bulgarians were killed, and five monasteries and fifty-eight villages-including Boyadzhik-were destroyed in these attacks). The revolution was put down for the time being and the Ottoman response was widely publicized and deplored, and then in mid-1877, Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans with the express purpose of liberating the Balkan Christian states and regaining access to the Black Sea that Russia had lost in the Crimean War. The conflict was short-the autonomy of Bulgaria was recognized in the Treaty of San Stefano, signed on March 3, 1878. Among the Russian cheerleaders for the war were Ivan Turgenev, who thought Bulgaria should be liberated, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who hoped to unite all Eastern Orthodox churches under the Russian church.

Yana subsequently married a local cattle breeder who could afford to educate little Ivan, while her brother made contact with American missionaries, who helped him get to America. When this uncle returned on a visit to Bulgaria in the late 1880s, young Ivan, now thirteen, decided to go back to America with him. Yana financed the trip by selling a piece of land that Atanas had left her.

At Ellis Island, Ivan Atanasov"s name was changed to John Atanasoff. Although he had a bit of money, it was only enough to rent a room in New York City so that he could work at a series of menial restaurant and handyman jobs while he improved his English. Life was difficult and jobs were scarce, though he did manage to keep a chicken in his room for a while. A charitable local minister he met through his uncle found him a place as a student at the prestigious Peddie School, in Hightstown, New Jersey (not far from Princeton), where he worked hard and did well, but upon graduation, his education at first seemed to be of little use-his uncle had returned to Bulgaria, and there were no more family funds forthcoming. He was homeless for a while, working temporary jobs, but then he related his tale to a Baptist minister named Cooke, who encouraged him to seek the aid of various local congregations. Once he had acc.u.mulated $200 in savings and gifts, Pastor Cooke helped him find a spot at Colgate, at that time a Baptist-affiliated college.

At Colgate, John met the sister of two brothers who were fellow students, a girl named Iva Purdy, a descendant of early settlers in Connecticut and generations of farmers in upstate New York. Iva, herself a high school graduate with a talent for mathematics, was teaching in a nearby school. After courting Iva, John married her at Christmas 1900 and then graduated from Colgate the following June. John Vincent was born on October 4, 1903.

Although John had taken his degree in philosophy, he found work in industrial engineering at the Edison power plant in Orange, New Jersey. When work at the plant (possibly chemicals used in the manufacture of lightbulbs) seemed to be adversely affecting his health, he moved on to the power plant in Utica, New York, then to the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad electrical plant in Hoboken, New Jersey. At night, he took correspondence courses in electrical engineering. Four children had been born by the time John Vincent was nine-two who lived and two who died in infancy. John and Iva came to feel that the family was not thriving because, in addition to John"s own respiratory problems, the children were suffering repeated bouts of illness. They decided to move to the newly founded town of Brewster, Florida, on the west coast, some thirty miles as the crow flies southeast of Tampa, where American Cyanamid was in the process of exploiting local phosphate deposits. John got a good job, and the children"s health improved. John Vincent attended school at the local two-room schoolhouse.

Iva Atanasoff gave her oldest child considerable freedom, both of action and of thought, in part because other children were born in Florida (eventually there were seven) and she oversaw a large garden in addition to the household. But Iva also retained her interest in intellectual pursuits-according to family stories, she liked to sit in her rocking chair and read while John and his younger brothers and sisters played about her. By the time young John got to school, he already knew how to read and calculate, and at first he was a difficult pupil-he was used to following his own agenda. Since he had no trouble doing his work, he finished ahead of the other children, and once he had done so, he made himself a "pest," according to his younger sister. But he was an inconvenient pupil also because he was inquisitive and knew more than many of his teachers. He was easily offended, especially by teasing and slurs, and he didn"t mind getting into fights. Some teachers handled him well and some did not, but however they handled him, his p.r.o.nounced eagerness to learn persisted-he eagerly explored both the countryside and whatever books he could get hold of.

In 1913, when he was not quite ten, John helped his father wire their home for electricity (subsequently, they wired the homes of some of their neighbors, too). In 1914, John mastered the owner"s manual of his father"s new Ford Model T, and at eleven he was driving it. John read his mother"s books, including Ruskin and Spenser, and he read his father"s books-including a manual on radiotelephony (wireless sound transmission). When his father ordered an up-to-date slide rule, then decided that he didn"t really need it, John mastered it within a couple of weeks and thereupon became, in his own mind, a nascent mathematician. He found his father"s old college algebra textbook and began to work his way through it. What he could not understand (differential calculus, infinite series, logarithms) Iva explained to him. During this period, he learned about various number systems other than the decimal system-this unusual familiarity with nondecimal ways of counting and calculating and his practice using them was what would eventually distinguish his ideas about calculators from those of his contemporaries.

John liked to make things and to demonstrate his skills-in sixth grade, because some older girls who had already finished elementary school were gathering in the back of the cla.s.sroom and crocheting, he learned to crochet. He pursued his project at school, no longer undaunted by teasing but stimulated by it-he flaunted his work and bragged about his skills until the teacher banned crocheting at school. He soon learned to sew. In fact, John Vincent Atanasoff seemed to see every new idea or object as an opportunity to explore and master whatever his world had to offer. Atanasoff"s parents gave him plenty of freedom, encouraged his enterprise, and helped him pursue what he wanted to master. They also made a stable life for him in an out-of-the-way spot where there was plenty to do and plenty of s.p.a.ce to do it in.

The Atanasoffs" life in Brewster was not untroubled-the Atanasoff family, with its strange name and alien ways, was sometimes hara.s.sed and their property vandalized. John Atanasoff encountered resentment at work. The larger culture seethed with prejudice and vigilantism. A local Catholic lawyer was run out of the area. Between 1909, when the Atanasoffs arrived in Brewster, and 1920, more than fifty black people were lynched in Florida-Atanasoff himself remembered witnessing a lynching as a teenager, in Mulberry (about eleven miles north of Brewster), though that one is not attested to in Ralph Ginzburg"s 100 Years of Lynchings.

In 1912, John and Iva purchased a 155-acre farm southwest of Brewster, which included a 30-acre orange grove and 120 acres of timber. For young John, the farm meant more scope for exploration and, in particular, endless chances to not only repair the machinery used on the farm, but to take it apart and improve its design. The boy became interested in farming itself-he subscribed to Wallaces" Farmer (the publication founded in Iowa by the grandfather of Vice President Henry A. Wallace) and tried the latest farming techniques. Since John Atanasoff worked full time, young John became the one who organized and ran the farm. In the meantime, he graduated from the high school in Mulberry, completing his coursework in two years, at fifteen. The teachers at the high school did not attempt to control Atanasoff"s independence or restrict his education-they encouraged his curiosity and his enterprise. Once he had graduated, Atanasoff got himself certified to teach math cla.s.ses and saved the money he earned toward his college education, which he already knew would be in math and science. He worked for a year as a phosphate prospector and entered the University of Florida in 1921, just before his eighteenth birthday.

The University of Florida is and was a land-grant university. The Morrill Act of 1862, under which both the University of Florida and Iowa State College were founded, was written for a specific educational purpose: "to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial cla.s.ses in the several pursuits and professions in life." In other words, the land-grant colleges were intended to focus on the useful. In what is perhaps the paradigm of public higher education, the three state-funded colleges in Iowa are an example of this idea of the distinct (and cla.s.s-based) purposes of higher education: postgraduate degrees are offered by the medical school, the art school, the music school, the graduate school, the law school, and the business school at the University of Iowa. Postgraduate degrees in engineering, agriculture, veterinary medicine, design, and industrial engineering are offered at Iowa State (though these categories have gotten somewhat less distinct in the last twenty-five years). The third state-funded school was, until 1961, Iowa State Teachers College, a normal school. Although the system of higher education was not as distinct in every state as it was in Iowa (the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota have all types of programs on the same campus), the land-grant colleges retained their focus on disciplines applicable to the health and wealth of the individual states. The Morrill Act promised to fund these colleges by granting each state thirty thousand acres of federal land, the proceeds of which would go to the colleges. The land did not have to be inside the state-New York State was granted land in Wisconsin, for example.

The Morrill Act did not originally cover Florida, because the Confederate states had seceded from the Union before the pa.s.sage of the act, but the act was extended in 1890 to the former Confederate states. Most of these states used money from the act to fund the useful arts at the main campus and to fund the establishment of separate, segregated black colleges. In 1905, Florida Agricultural College, in Lake City, was moved fifty miles south to Gainesville and renamed the University of the State of Florida. At the time of John Vincent Atanasoff"s matriculation, the university was all male and all white-women students went to Florida Female College, in Tallaha.s.see, and black students of both s.e.xes went to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, also in Tallaha.s.see. Related to the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 was the Hatch Act of 1887, which funded (also through land grants) the establishment of agricultural experiment stations in each of the states. These stations were normally attached to the land-grant colleges, broadening their practical mandate.

By the time he began college, Atanasoff knew he wanted to study physics and to be a physicist. He was familiar with and excited by Einstein"s theories and by the other work being done in the field, but no physics major was offered at the university, so he went into electrical engineering, the most theoretical scientific major offered. In Gainesville, Atanasoff was surrounded by opportunities to think, but also opportunities to do. Requirements of the electrical engineering major included building models and projects, so Atanasoff took cla.s.ses in machine shop, forge and foundry, and electrical mechanics. He also pursued his earlier interest in radio communication. He tutored students for money and worked summers-one summer in Jacksonville, he found a lucrative job surveying the city streets. He was, in short, brilliant, eager, enterprising, highly directed, and hardworking. Just as John Atanasoff"s life had been almost a paradigm of the cla.s.sic immigrant story, John Vincent Atanasoff"s life was almost a paradigm of the cla.s.sic ambitious American tale-a Tom Sawyerlike boyhood followed by a Horatio Algerstyle self-funded and successful career.

But the elder Atanasoff"s life remained difficult-while John Vincent was away in Gainesville, John and Iva decided to sell the farm and move to Bradley Junction, a town between Brewster and Mulberry. One night when John was coming home, he was attacked by a mob clad in white robes and nearly killed. He was saved by the wife of the Cyanamid plant manager, who heard the ruckus and ran outside with a shotgun. The mob was revealed to be made up, in part, of neighbors whose children Iva tutored in math and, in part, men who worked for John at the plant, all apparently motivated by the strangeness of John"s name and origins. The attackers broke John"s leg and ribs, and there were so many internal injuries that John was bedridden for weeks; John Vincent had to return from college to help take care of him. Although the attack was foiled, the younger Atanasoff children suffered for years from the xenophobia, and probably the envy, of the local population.

Atanasoff"s childhood and adolescence const.i.tute a case history of creativity-of the sometimes overlapping psychological characteristics of creative people enumerated in R. Keith Sawyer"s Explaining Creativity. According to family anecdotes, the young Atanasoff seems to have exhibited every trait Sawyer cites, from self-confidence, independence, high energy, and willingness to take risks, to above-average intelligence, openness to experience, and preference for complexity. In the crocheting, we even see what Sawyer calls "balanced personality"-that is, a willingness to do things that are considered the province of the opposite s.e.x. The key component of a creative mind that Atanasoff consistently showed as a child and a young man is what Sawyer calls "problem finding"-that is, the ability to productively formulate a problem so that the terms of the problem lead to a solution. Young Atanasoff"s pleasures on the family farm seem precisely those of "problem solving" evolving into "problem finding." When a fence required fixing or a machine broke down or work needed organizing, he didn"t figure out how to return things to their original configuration-rather, his goal was to understand how the original operated and then to streamline and improve those operations, as when he took apart and repaired farm machinery, or when he tried new cropping ideas without consulting his parents, or when he organized his siblings" ch.o.r.es, not forgetting to include a lesson or two for them in biology or mechanics.

In 1925, when Atanasoff graduated from the University of Florida, he had the highest grade average ever recorded up to that point at the university. He applied to master"s programs in physics, his true love; the first to respond with offers of admission and aid was Iowa State. Atanasoff accepted the offer and made his plans to go to Ames. Sometime later, he received an offer from Harvard, but he turned it down. He was to remain in the land-grant system, and his tenure there was to profoundly shape his career.

Iowa Agricultural College was founded in Ames in 1856, ten years after Iowa statehood. Ames lies at the southern end of a geological feature known as the Des Moines Lobe, deposited by the Wisconsin ice sheet when the glaciers retreated ten to fifteen thousand years ago. The landscape is open, frequently marshy, and pockmarked by small lakes. For this reason, north-central Iowa was somewhat slower to be settled than eastern Iowa; when settlers first entered the Des Moines Lobe region, they found tall-gra.s.s prairie that stretched for hundreds of miles. But the land proved exceptionally fertile, and though the climate was marked by winds and weather extremes, Iowans understood very early that farming was the future of the state-the preMorrill Act state college included a model farm. In 1862, the Iowa legislature was one of the earliest state legislatures to accept the terms of the Morrill Act. The first undergraduates, a cla.s.s of twenty-four men and two women, entered in 1869 and graduated in 1872; the Iowa Experiment Station was set up along with the college in the 1860s (by contrast, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station was set up in 1875 and the University Farm of the University of California was not set up until 1905).

By the time Atanasoff arrived in 1921, Iowa State was already famous as the alma mater of Carrie Chapman Catt, a prominent nineteenth-century feminist, and of George Washington Carver, a botanist and inventor, the first black student at the college and the first black researcher at the Experiment Station. An 1893 alumnus, Bert Benjamin, had invented the Farmall tractor, which was the first tractor that could be used to perform all farm operations.

Atanasoff"s stipend for teaching undergraduate math cla.s.ses at Iowa State for the school year 192526 was $800, enough to allow him to find a room on Knapp Street south of campus. The campus was then and is now self-contained but s.p.a.cious. Although a train ran between the campus and Ames, Atanasoff bought himself a bicycle to get around. At first he did his work and kept to himself-according to his granddaughter, Tammara Burton. "Hurrying toward his destination, he typically wore an expression of severe concentration as he worked to solve the equation that was of greatest interest to him at the moment. With his foreign name, his unfashionable clothes, and his dark unruly hair, he soon earned the nickname around campus of "The Mad Russian." " In addition, he spoke in an alien southern drawl as a result of his childhood in Florida. But he impressed his professors, soon gaining a reputation for brilliance. He taught his math students and took his own courses, and these activities were time-consuming. However, Knapp Street was not far from Fraternity Row on Ash Avenue, and it was there, at a mixer for southern students, that he met Lura Meeks, who had come to Iowa State from Cheyenne, Oklahoma, a place at least as wild, in its way, as Florida. Lura was somewhat older than John but still an undergraduate, putting herself through college. Her personality was in many ways the female counterpart to John"s-she had always played the piano, painted, done wood carvings, and written poetry while working on the family farm and doing ch.o.r.es on neighboring farms for cash. At Iowa State, she was on the tennis team and the swimming team, and she was a devoted reader, like Iva. Herself intelligent, energetic, and enterprising, she recognized both John"s talent and his ambition. They were married shortly after he received his master"s degree in physics, in June 1926. Atanasoff then accepted a position at Iowa State for $1,800 per year, teaching mathematics and physics while taking more cla.s.ses to prepare for his doctoral studies at another land-grant inst.i.tution, the University of Wisconsin.

Things did not go smoothly in the early months of the marriage. Lura left for Montana, where she had a contract to teach high school, but not wishing to be away from John, she gave up her job and came home in November; John"s contract with Iowa State was not completed in the winter of 1927 until after cla.s.ses at the University of Wisconsin had already commenced. Money was tight, and Lura got pregnant. John, however, was not much daunted-after he arrived in Madison in the winter of 1927, he began his cla.s.swork, knowing that he would soon catch up. The only professor who was offended by this plan was the professor of quantum mechanics, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck. Quantum mechanics is the science that predicts what happens in systems, and in the 1920s it was the most up-to-date and exciting field in physics.

Professor John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was only four and a half years older than his graduate student, but he was from a much different background-his grandfather was an astronomer and his father was a mathematician. He had grown up in Madison and completed his degrees at Harvard at the age of twenty-four. By the time he encountered Atanasoff (and his southern drawl), he had already taught at the University of Minnesota. After the University of Wisconsin, he would return to Harvard. He would eventually win the n.o.bel Prize in 1977, along with Philip Warren Anderson and Sir Neville Francis Mott ("for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems"). Though only in his late twenties, Van Vleck already possessed the means to begin a serious art collection. He did not want to allow Atanasoff to enter his cla.s.s late, and he did not think Atanasoff would be able to do the work. Owing to tight finances, though, John and Lura could not afford to stay an extra semester in order for John to take the course from the beginning. In a replay of his behavior in elementary school, John attended lectures, spoke up in cla.s.s, asked questions, and, perhaps Van Vleck felt, made himself a pest. At any rate, Van Vleck felt no hesitation about denigrating Atanasoff"s performance and often appended remarks to his answers such as, "If you had been here in the first half of the semester, you wouldn"t have to ask that question." The course was so difficult that only a few of the students completed it-Atanasoff told Clark Mollenhoff, the Des Moines Register writer who wrote Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer in the late eighties, "There were perhaps twenty-five graduate students in the cla.s.s, and ... only five even bothered to take the final examination. I wrote for seven hours on that test, and when Dr. Van Vleck called me in later he told me it was one of the best and indicated that it was the best, but made no comment of congratulation." Van Vleck was not the last scientist to fail to appreciate Atanasoff.

Since Atanasoff hoped to specialize in quantum mechanics, Van Vleck was his a.s.signed major professor, but Van Vleck went on leave in 192930, so Atanasoff worked under Gregor Wentzel, visiting from Zurich, where he had succeeded Erwin Schrodinger (who was to receive the n.o.bel Prize in 1933 for his contributions to quantum mechanics) in the chair for theoretical physics. Although he was only a year older than Van Vleck, Wentzel was more sympathetic to Atanasoff and oversaw Atanasoff"s dissertation, "The Dielectric Constant of Helium."

Atanasoff"s dissertation and his degree were in theoretical physics, his long-standing pa.s.sion. The "dielectric constant" or "relative static permittivity" is a practical measurement, the ratio of the electric field in a vacuum to the electric field in a medium. He did the calculation by using the governing partial differential equation of quantum physics, the Schrodinger equation. The thesis was concerned only with theory and was not an experimental measurement (this had already been done by someone else). Atanasoff"s calculation, accurate to within 5 percent of the measured value, used a mathematical technique called the Ritz variational method. The solutions to the linear equations he had to solve so laboriously were coefficients of the approximate wave functions he used in the variational calculation. The thesis result was important because it showed that the answer was obtainable by theoretical quantum mechanics. His calculations were about the probability that electrons in helium would act in a certain way when subjected to an electric field. But as always, his work pointed in more than one direction: what he was calculating demonstrated the utility of quantum mechanics as applied to atomic structure, but more important, as it turned out, the difficulty of making his calculations forced him to encounter, over and over, the flaws of modern computing machines.

Atanasoff was awarded his PhD by the University of Wisconsin in July 1930. He was twenty-six years old and had been married for four years. His daughter, Elsie, was just over a year old and Lura was expecting a second child. His first job offer-a.s.sistant professor of mathematics and physics-came from Iowa State. His salary was to be $2,700 dollars per year, $900 more than he had made as a student teacher after receiving his master"s. Jobs in physics were scarce, and Atanasoff once again committed himself to the Iowa State position, only to be subsequently offered a job at Harvard that he once again could not accept.

In 1929, when John Vincent Atanasoff was working on his PhD in physics at the University of Wisconsin, Alan Turing, seventeen (born June 23, 1912), was sitting for his Higher School Certificate examination. The examiner who evaluated his mathematics paper wrote, "He appeared to lack the patience necessary for algebraic verification, and his handwriting was so bad that he lost marks frequently-sometimes because his work was definitely illegible and sometimes his misreading his own writing led him into mistakes." He had to take this examination three times and switch his major subject from science to mathematics in order to gain acceptance (with a scholarship) to his preferred school, King"s College, Cambridge.

He was already an interesting young man. Turing"s parents, Julius and Ethel, were both born into the English civil service in India. Ethel Stoney"s father was in the medical corps; she was born in Madras and lived most of her life (with occasional trips back to England) in c.o.o.noor. Julius served as a peripatetic official, head a.s.sistant collector, near Madras. They met on a ship returning to England by the eastern route, stopping in California. Part of their courtship was a transcontinental journey across the United States, with a sojourn in Yellowstone Park. Alan was born in London in 1912, while his parents were once again on leave. Alan had one older brother, John, born in 1908. Alan was born in Paddington, and then the family settled in the southeast, near Hastings. When Alan was nine months old, his father returned to India. When he was fifteen months old, Ethel followed Julius, leaving John and Alan in the care of a retired army couple. Both parents went back and forth between India and England for the next five years, sometimes together and sometimes separately. They never had a house of their own in England.

Alan was quick as a child and eccentric-he taught himself to read in three weeks, and he had no trouble expressing his opinion. He tended to get caught up in observing things-serial numbers, daisies-but failed to grasp other apparently simple ideas, such as the fact that Christmas came at the same time every year. He was not indulged, and his failure to conform to English (and, no doubt, military and bureaucratic) standards of behavior often led to arguments and tantrums. Descriptions of Alan"s childhood seem to leap out of the writings of Oliver Sacks. The boy was busy, untidy, inventive, inquisitive, and obviously brilliant, but the Turings were bureaucrats-several generations had served as officials in British India. Alan"s mother"s family, the Stoneys, was known to be inventive and commercial-one great-uncle designed sluice gates for water-level control on the Thames and other rivers, while his grandfather worked as chief engineer on the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway and also designed a type of indoor fan. As bureaucrats, they had status but little money. They had expectations, however, and a cla.s.s ident.i.ty to maintain. Much of this maintenance depended on conforming to strict standards of behavior and attending the proper sort of school. Even though Alan readily learned such things as long division and also showed an eager interest in the "underlying principles" of every operation (according to his mother), he did poorly on exams and was always more or less unpopular. He was also sloppy. According to his brother, "It was all the same thing to him which shoe was on which foot."

Like the young Atanasoff, Turing was enterprising, opinionated, and inquisitive-in Scotland, at age six, he located a beehive by observing where the flight paths of the bees intersected and gathered honey for the family tea. Like Atanasoff, he did not fit into school very well-he pursued his own projects (such as origami and maps), but unlike Atanasoff, he did not care enough to do the a.s.signed work as well as his own projects (or he found it difficult because of such things as poor handwriting). He was terrible at sports and later said that he learned to run fast in order to avoid the ball.

Like Atanasoff, he learned things on his own. One of his favorite books was one he received at the age of ten-Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know, by Edwin Tenney Brewster. In this book, Brewster set out a picture of the natural world that was organized and understandable, as well as scientific and machinelike. Brewster describes the process of evolution and says of the human body, "It really is a gas engine, like the engine of an automobile, a motor boat, or a flying machine." This machine a.n.a.logy would prove seminal in Turing"s later work. About the same time, chemistry became his pa.s.sion, and his family let him pursue various experiments in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the house they were living in.

As Alan approached the age when it was necessary for the Turings to find a public school for him, the problems posed by his eccentricities became more pressing. He took an entrance exam for the school his brother was attending, and was admitted, but John thought life there would be too difficult for him. Eventually, he ended up at the Sherborne School. It was not a good choice. School was not, in the expressed opinion of the Sherborne headmaster A. J. P. Andrews, a place for learning information or developing one"s capacity for critical thinking, but rather where the English cla.s.s system was to be reinforced and boys to be shown their place within it.

Andrew Hodges writes in his biography that in his first year at Sherborne School, "Alan had no friend, and at least once in this year he was trapped underneath some loose floorboards in the house day-room by the other boys. He tried to continue chemistry experiments there, but this was doubly hated, as showing a swottish mentality, and producing nasty smells." Alan Turing was from long lines of inventive people on his mother"s side and his father"s side, and he showed a ready and determined fascination with practical things from earliest childhood, but he was repeatedly diverted from these interests by the cla.s.s system that he was born into and the educational system that was his only route to social respectability. Although, like Atanasoff, and in the manner described by creativity researcher R. Keith Sawyer, Turing persistently looked for problems to solve and then solved them, and also exhibited self-confidence, independence, high energy, willingness to take risks, above-average intelligence, openness to experience, and preference for complexity, his world was not one where he could cultivate these qualities. Iva and John Atanasoff seem to have accepted the fact that, as painful as it could sometimes be to live at the periphery of their society, it was also freeing, and it gave their children valuable experience not only in getting things accomplished, but also in flouting received opinion. The same mode of thinking, and course of action, seems not to have been available to the Turings, and Alan spent his entire youth being balked in his attempts to go his own way. One telling detail is that when he did try his chemistry experiments at Sherborne, they were invariably found and thrown away. The result was that he switched his field, and his thinking, from practical physics to pure mathematics, but he never gave up his interest in machines.

Chapter Two.

Atanasoff was now at Iowa State, where his primary responsibility was teaching, not research. Although he might have said that his first love was theoretical physics, or even quantum mechanics, Iowa State did not have a course in quantum mechanics until Atanasoff began teaching one. Atanasoff did have quite a few students, however, and teaching them reminded him over and over of the difficulties of calculation. By all accounts, Atanasoff was a gifted teacher who used an individualized Socratic approach, engaging his students in discussions and questioning them, trying to discover their areas of expertise and ignorance. He saw over and over that all scientific and engineering progress would be r.e.t.a.r.ded until some sort of breakthrough in methods of calculation. He also employed his students in investigating ways of calculating. One of these students came up with an idea for a type of small a.n.a.log calculator, something like a slide rule, that measured fourteen inches by three inches by three inches. Atanasoff, the student, and another colleague designed it to calculate the geometry of surfaces and called it a "Laplaciometer," after the eighteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, but its uses were limited.

Most calculators in the 1930s were a.n.a.log, that is, they were similar to a slide rule in that something is measured in order to ascertain a number. As Atanasoff later explained to Clark Mollenhoff, his first biographer, the thing measured "can be anything: a distance, an electric voltage, a current of electricity, air pressure, etc." Calculating ever larger numbers requires ever more sensitive measurements, so that, for example, a slide rule, which calculates numbers by measuring distance, would have to be enormous ("the length of a football field, or in some instances a mile or more") in order to represent the numbers Atanasoff was interested in calculating.

One famous a.n.a.log calculator that Atanasoff read about in the thirties was the Bush Differential a.n.a.lyzer, developed in 192731 at MIT by Vannevar Bush, who had already founded the company that was to become Raytheon and would later head the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (which was in charge of what would become the Manhattan Project from 1941 until it was taken over by the army in 1943). The Differential a.n.a.lyzer may be pictured as an automobile gearing mechanism used for calculation. It was "in essence a variable-speed gear, and took the form of a rotating horizontal disk on which a small knife-edged wheel rested. The wheel was driven by friction, and the gear ratio was altered by varying the distance of the wheel from the axis of rotation of the disk." What was measured (as the slide rule measures distance) were the various positions of the shaft as it turned. These positions were a.s.signed values like the numbers on a slide rule.

When, in 1936, Atanasoff and his colleagues decided that the possibilities of the Laplaciometer were limited, Atanasoff turned his attention to what might be done with the Monroe calculator, the same typewriter-like machine he had used at the University of Wisconsin when he was doing the math for his dissertation. The solution he thought up was similar to the mechanically based solutions others were trying, such as linking thirty machines and thereby enlarging their capacity. But enlarging capacity did not change the theory behind calculation-adding and subtracting remained the essential operations. Atanasoff did not have access to thirty machines, though. Instead, he got together with an Iowa State colleague, statistics professor A. E. Brandt, whom he had first met as a student in 1925. Brandt had access to a single IBM tabulator owned by the statistics department.

In the mid-1930s, IBM was a fairly new company, the product of several mergers, but having its origins in the Tabulating Machine Company, which had been founded in 1896 by inventor Herman Hollerith-his first model had been used in the census of 1900. In 1911, several companies joined to form the CTR (Computing Tabulating Recording) Corporation, which offered a wide range of services to businesses-calculating, but also timekeeping and meat-slicing (a product called the Dayton Safety Electric Meat Chopper-the division was sold to Hobart Manufacturing Company in 1934). Thomas J. Watson, Sr., had become president in 1915, and the name of the company was changed to International Business Machines in 1924. In 1928, IBM introduced the standard eighty-column punch card (the Hollerith card) that came to be familiar to students and secretaries for decades afterward. A 1931 model, developed for and used solely by the Columbia University Statistical Bureau to tabulate results of observations and experiments made at Columbia, seemed exciting at the time-one astronomer declared himself thrilled just watching how quickly the machine went through its additions and subtractions.

The less advanced device Atanasoff and Brandt decided to modify looked more like an upright piano than a desk calculator and operated in the customary Hollerith/IBM fashion, by reading a deck of punched cards and adding or subtracting the values represented by holes in the cards. With the help of IBM representatives, Atanasoff and Brandt modified the Iowa Stateowned version of the tabulator in several significant ways and published an article about their product in 1936 in the Journal of the Optical Society of America ent.i.tled "Application of Punched Card Equipment to the a.n.a.lysis of Complex Spectra." It reads rather dryly, but what Atanasoff and Brandt were really doing was something Atanasoff had been doing since childhood-fiddling with a machine and redesigning it in order to get it to perform in a better or faster or more complex way. At the end of the article abstract is the line "The advantages of the method include high speed, accuracy as high as desired without checking with an adding machine, and the fact that only one simple modification is needed of standard equipment that is available almost everywhere." According to Mollenhoff"s biography of Atanasoff, while IBM representatives cooperated with Atanasoff and Brandt in modifying the IBM calculator that they were using, IBM internal memorandums at the time were highly critical of Atanasoff and Brandt for "meddling with the tabulators and using them in ways the corporation officials had not intended that they be used." According to Tammara Burton, who may have heard it from her grandfather, the memo said, "Keep Atanasoff out of the IBM tabulator."

IBM was jealous of its intellectual property, something that another computer innovator was also discovering. If Atanasoff had ended up at Harvard, he might have met Howard H. Aiken (born March 8, 1900), whom he also might have met at the University of Wisconsin. Aiken, too, was eager to develop a calculating machine that would solve differential equations, and Aiken was not unlike Atanasoff in other ways-he had put himself through high school while working at the local electric company in Indianapolis and then through the University of Wisconsin (at precisely the same time that Atanasoff was putting himself through the University of Florida) by working at the gas company in Madison. After earning his bachelor"s degree, he worked in the private sector before going to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard for his master"s and his PhD. His dissertation, "Theory of s.p.a.ce Charge Conductions," was similar to "The Dielectric Constant of Helium"-it considered "the properties of vacuum tubes-devices in which electric currents are pa.s.sed across an empty s.p.a.ce between two metal contacts." Like Atanasoff, Aiken was exhausted by the calculations required to prove his thesis, or, as his biography puts it, "The mathematical complexities involved in describing s.p.a.ce charge conduction made calculating solutions to his problems impossible." While Atanasoff was pondering the Laplaciometer, Aiken, at Harvard, was trying to conceive of a way to improve Charles Babbage"s original Difference Engine. Harvard offered Aiken even less support than Atanasoff found at Iowa State College-in fact, President Conant actively discouraged him. Aiken then approached several mechanical calculating machine companies without success.

Most computer inventors in the 1930s, including Vannevar Bush and Howard Aiken, were convinced that the future of computing lay in its past-in the theories of Charles Babbage (17911871), who had begun laying out his ideas for a mechanical calculator in 1822 and proposed constructing it to the Royal Astronomical Society. It was an a.n.a.log device, designed to solved polynomial equations using shafts and toothed gears. Babbage worked on it for twenty-five years, redesigning it at least once, but nineteenth-century machining wasn"t up to the precision of the task, and the Difference Engine never really worked. Even so, Babbage grew more ambitious and designed a machine he called the a.n.a.lytical Engine. All of the twentieth-century computer inventors were aware of Babbage"s work (except Konrad Zuse, isolated in Germany). Howard Aiken proposed to update Babbage"s ideas with more modern industrial techniques-the machining of gears and shafts had advanced considerably in the hundred years since Babbage"s time. His Mark I was to be a relay-switch-based computer. And it was to be huge. It was to be built of a power supply and electric motor for driving the machine; four master control panels, controlled by instructions on punched rolls of paper tape and synchronized with the rest of the machine; manual adjustments for controlling the calculation of functions; 24 sets of switches for entering numerical constants; 2 paper tape readers for entering additional constants; a standard punched card reader; 12 temporary storage units; 5 units each-add/subtract, multiply, divide; various permanent function tables (e.g. sine, cosine, etc.); acc.u.mulators; and printing and card punching equipment. All of these components should be built to accommodate figures up to 23 digits long. Finally, Aiken estimated the speed of the calculator based upon the speed of contemporary IBM machines, 750 8-digit multiplications per hour, representing a vast increase in speed and accuracy over manual methods of calculation.

It used a decimal number system, and even though Aiken had done his dissertation on vacuum tubes, his was a mechanical switching system.

At some point, perhaps reflecting on his efforts to get his computer built, Aiken is said to have remarked, "Don"t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you"ll have to ram them down people"s throats." Perhaps in this, too, Aiken would have found a sympathetic listener in Atanasoff.

But Atanasoff was at least in a place where he could gather together the information he needed. Right around the time of the Laplaciometer, he discovered an electronic engineering textbook ent.i.tled The Thermionic Vacuum Tube and Its Applications, by Hendrik Johannes Van der Bijl, a South African physicist who had studied in Germany before returning to South Africa to design the national power grid and other state-sponsored enterprises. According to Burton, after reading Van der Bijl"s book, Atanasoff built some vacuum tubes on his own and began to think about novel ways he could put them to use.

A simple vacuum tube, called a diode, works like an incandescent lightbulb: a filament, called a cathode, is heated and then releases negatively charged electrons, which stream toward a positively charged metal plate, called an anode. The mechanism is enclosed within a tube of gla.s.s, which preserves the vacuum and disperses the heat generated by the filament. Numerous improvements in the diode were made throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, mostly for the purpose of improving radio design, reliability, and transmission. In 1936, the vacuum tube was used in radios to amplify transmission and reception of signals, and tubes continued to be used in radios and televisions until the invention of the transistor. The tubes were delicate and expensive to operate because of energy loss through the gla.s.s sh.e.l.l. But Atanasoff didn"t want his tubes to do much-he just wanted them to turn on and off. The measurement required by an a.n.a.log calculator would be replaced by counting. Since this is similar to the way a child counts on his fingers, this came to be known as digital calculation.

The difference between measuring and counting, for Atanasoff"s purposes, was enormous: counting is precise, infinite, and as portable as an abacus. No quant.i.ties such as distance are involved, and no estimation needs to be made (as it does, for example, when the mark giving the result of a slide rule calculation falls between two marks indicating numbers). However, counting had its problems, too, since it is repet.i.tive and mind-numbing. And for most of those attempting to invent the computer, the problem was that they themselves were used to counting in a base-ten (09) number system; there was no way to invent a simply constructed calculator that could do that. It is probably also true that the more that the inventors made use of mechanical calculators such as the Monroe, the more the idea of base-ten counting was reinforced, since a Monroe calculator consisted of a hundred black and white keys arranged in a ten-by-ten grid (using the digits 09), with red function keys set in two rows, across the bottom and down the right side as the operator faced the machine.

As a young man with a wife and young children, Atanasoff was busy at home as well as at school. Although faculty salaries were cut in the early 1930s as a result of the Great Depression, Atanasoff managed to get promoted quickly and to save up enough money to buy ten acres on Woodland Street, which runs due west from the ISU campus. He chose a plot for himself, designed a brick house, and oversaw its construction, moving his family into the bas.e.m.e.nt in the summer after the February 1935 birth of his third child, a son named John Vincent II. Since Atanasoff believed in pay-as-you-go, progress on the house depended on ready cash. As a result, the family lived in the bas.e.m.e.nt through the winter of 193536, protected from the cold and snow at times only by tarps and the floorboards of the partially constructed ground floor. Lura cooked in the laundry room. Atanasoff himself installed the electricity and plumbing, as well as the heating system for the baby"s room.

Shortly after the house was completed, Elsie, the older daughter, aged eight, became seriously ill with asthma and allergies. According to Burton, the standard treatment of the day, adrenaline shots, had a negative effect on Elsie"s condition, so Atanasoff threw himself into reading about allergies and observing his daughter. He decided that she was allergic to cow"s milk, chocolate, and wheat, and he bought two pregnant female goats, which Lura cared for and milked in the backyard of the Woodland Street house. He rigged up a system for circulating fresh air into Elsie"s room and became so knowledgeable about allergies that a local doctor used him as a consultant. His daughters also gave him entree to the grammar school authorities-when teachers complained that the girls were often late because Atanasoff was dropping them off on his way to the college, he got interested in how the teachers were doing their jobs-investigated how school resources were being used and made suggestions about what the science and math curriculum should look like. When the school nurse suggested that one of the girls have her tonsils removed, Atanasoff lectured her on why they should not be removed. His arguments were always complete and forcefully presented, and school authorities soon learned to leave well enough alone. Once, Burton writes, "when the family"s enormous vegetable garden produced a large crop of soybeans, he immediately addressed the problem of sh.e.l.ling the beans by rigging the washing-machine clothes-wringer to a.s.sist in the task. Whole soybeans were hand-fed into the electric clothes wringer and came out sh.e.l.led on the other side."

But he worked late at the office, worked at home, and read the newspaper at the supper table. Home, like the office, was an arena for projects and creative thinking, not interaction, familial relationships, or leisure enjoyments-in fact, Atanasoff rather disdained pursuits such as art, music, and literature that Lura enjoyed. Lura understood Atanasoff"s pressing commitment to solving the problem of calculating, both as the inner drive to solve a problem creatively and as an essential scientific task. Burton indicates that Atanasoff"s frustration with the failures of the solutions he and his colleagues were coming up with in the mid-thirties was making him moody and hard to live with, but also that Lura"s own close-knit family of origin had not prepared her for the lonely life she found herself leading. Atanasoff was not happy. He wrote later, "I had been forced to the conclusion that if I wanted a computer suited to the general needs of science and, in particular, suited to solving systems of linear equations, I would have to build it myself. I was leading a full life and had too much to do; I did not want to search and invent, but sadly I turned in that direction." He feared he would be wasting his best years on an endeavor that might prove fruitless. And he had no way of knowing who was inventing what in the world of computing or how his thinking fit into that of others-even if it worked, his invention could easily be preempted by another.

Like all land-grant universities, Iowa State was provincial and local, and intended to be so. Its obligations were to the state of Iowa, not to the larger worlds of industry or intellect. Atanasoff"s field was physics-he wanted a tool, and the tool was missing. It was characteristic of both his personality and his education that he decided to invent the tool, but it was also realistic on his part to fear that inventing the tool would be a waste of time he could be spending on other projects-his schedule was full and he had no real confidence that he could come up with the solution he sought.

Atanasoff spent 1936 and 1937 reading as much as he could about every calculator then in existence, and also about what other innovators thought possible. He also moved his office from the mathematics department to the new physics building, which was more s.p.a.cious and more practically oriented. According to Burton, he felt that mathematics as a field was moving in the wrong direction-toward greater and greater abstraction-while physicists continued to be interested in concrete problems. In the meantime, Alan Turing was wrestling with similar dissatisfactions.

Alan Turing"s life at Sherborne was punctuated at the end with tragedy-in the winter of his last year (1930), his dearest friend, Christopher Morcom, died of tuberculosis. Morcom, slightly older and gifted with the star power that eluded Turing, had won many prizes at Sherborne, and then a scholarship to Trinity College. The two young men shared scientific and mathematical interests, and Turing profoundly respected not only Morcom"s intelligence, but also his thoroughness and his broad interests-he could play the piano and he could also do his work legibly without making arithmetical mistakes. Moreover, he was fun-among other pranks, he once sent gas-filled balloons over Sherborne Girls. It may have been Morcom"s
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