John Mauchly

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John William Mauchly

(born Aug. 30, 1907, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. — died Jan. 8, 1980, Ambler, Pa.) U.S. physicist and engineer. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his graduate studies. During World War II he and J. Presper Eckert were asked by the U.S. Army to devise ways to accelerate the recomputation of artillery firing tables, for which they eventually developed the electronic computer ENIAC. The two men formed a computer-manufacturing firm in 1948, and in 1949 they produced the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), which used magnetic tape instead of punched cards for data storage. Their third computer, the UNIVAC I, was designed to handle business data.

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John Mauchly (1907-1980) was the visionary and co-inventor (with J.P. Eckert) of one of the first electronic computers. Though he is not well known and his career was frustrating, Mauchly essentially invented computer science and was the first computer entrepreneur.

Born on August 30, 1907, in Cincinnati, Ohio, John William Mauchly was the son of Sebastian Jacob and Rachel Elizabeth (maiden name, Schidemantel) Mauchly. Mauchly's father, a well-respected physicist who taught on the high school and college levels, did research in electricity and earth currents. The family (which included Mauchly's sister Helen Elizabeth) moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland when Sebastian Mauchly was offered a job with the Carnegie Institute of Washington, to head its Section of Terrestrial Electricity.

Mauchly was interested in science and engineering from an early age. He enjoyed putting things together and taking them apart, and hoped to pursue a career in engineering. In 1925, Mauchly was offered a scholarship to study engineering at Johns Hopkins University's School of Engineering. He soon grew bored with the subject, and transferred to the physics department. Mauchly's intelligence and abilities so impressed those in the department that he was offered a position in the physics doctoral program. Mauchly never finished his undergraduate degree. Instead her earned his Ph.D. in 1932, after writing a dissertation on the carbon monoxide molecule. While still a student, Mauchly married Mary Augusta Walzl on December 30, 1930. They had two sons, James and Sidney.

Saw Need for Computers

After graduation, Mauchly stayed at Johns Hopkins as a research assistant for a year, 1932-33. Some of his work there focused on calculating energy levels of the formalde-hyde spectrum. Because the calculations took a long time to accomplish manually, Mauchly began thinking about the possibilities of automating functions.

In 1933, Mauchly was hired to head the physics department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. While this was not a prestigious position for Mauchly, it was the height of the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Mauchly was not just the head of the department, he was the only staff member. Because of this situation, Mauchly had many teaching responsibilities that could have severely limited his ability to conduct original research. However, Mauchly was able to find the time for both.

Mauchly's research focused on meteorology, which had come to require complex calculations in recent years. He wanted to find faster ways of doing these calculations. What were called calculators at the time did not work well or fast enough. Mauchly decided to create an electronic apparatus to accomplish this goal, perhaps with vacuum tubes. Since he did not know a lot about the subject, Mauchly decided to learn as much as possible.

In 1940, Mauchly built a small analog computer-like machine. It could do some harmonic analysis of weather data. He used the machine to write a paper on precipitation's quasi-periodicity. But Mauchly wanted to create a better computational device. The following year he visited John V. Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, to study his primitive computer and learn how vacuum tubes were used. Atanasoff had built what he called the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer). Mauchly was disappointed by what he saw because it did not match the ideas he wanted to pursue. Later, this visit would come back to haunt him.

Hired by the University of Pennsylvania

To pursue his goal, Mauchly took a summer class at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania during the summer of 1941. He wanted to learn more about electronics so he could gain a better understanding of the field in order to build something new. Mauchly so impressed faculty members that he was hired as an instructor in electrical engineering.

Mauchly immediately began promoting his computer idea. The school had a contract with United States Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. Mauchly wrote a paper, "The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating," that explained his idea for building a computer. Though it was rejected at first, this paper was later recognized as one of the best early papers on computers. Mauchly outlined his proposition in a memorandum, and got approval in the early 1940s.

Though Mauchly originally wanted to design a computer for his meteorological research, he modified his proposal to suit the war effort. Extensive calculations were required by the army for their artillery range tables to reflect the new battle conditions and types of weapons used in combat during the Second World War. The tables enabled artillery gunners to aim and fire effectively. Mauchly began working on the computer in 1943, with J.P. Eckert and many other scientists. However, Mauchly was the visionary and driving force behind the idea, while Eckert headed the engineering end. The same year, Mauchly was promoted to assistant professor of electrical engineering.

Invented the ENIAC

Mauchly and Eckert completed the computer in 1946. It was called ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first general-purpose computer and the first with the capability to modify a stored program. Costing about $400,000 to construct, the ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 6,000 switches and 10,000 capacitors. Its 30 panels filled a large room. Though this seems large and cumbersome by contemporary standards, it was revolutionary at the time.

The ENIAC was faster than anything else available, not just for trajectory computations but also for solving partial differential equations. It could complete 5,000 additions in one second, and multiplication in 300 microseconds. The army began using the ENIAC in 1947, and continued to use it through the mid-1950s. Among other things, it was used to provide some of the calculations for the atomic bomb.

Though computers had become practical, the ENIAC had many drawbacks, in addition to its size. It was costly to run, in part because of its huge power requirements. There was no memory and punched cards were the medium of both input and output. Setting switches externally was the only way to input instructions. The ENIAC could only store 20 ten-digit numbers.

Mauchly and Eckert left the University of Pennsylvania the same year the ENIAC made its public debut in a patent dispute. Pennsylvania had recently instituted a policy that all patents applied for by their employees became the property of the university. The inventors wanted to hold on to their patents because Mauchly saw the potential of selling computers to businesses. After the war ended, the pair applied for their patent and started a new company, the Electronic Control Company. It was to design and manufacture electronic digital computing equipment for commercial and science applications.

Formed Own Computer Company

Before they left the University of Pennsylvania, Mauchly and Eckert had already begun work on a new computer, the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) as early as 1944. It was supposed to be smaller, faster, and more reliable than the ENIAC because it had fewer vacuum tubes and therefore malfunctioned less frequently than ENIAC. The EDVAC was superior for other reasons as well. Programs could be stored, making it the first computer to have this capability. Work on the EDVAC was not completed until 1951 because of the patent dispute.

Mauchly and Eckert's company was renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in 1947. Mauchly was president of the company. He was responsible for logic design and ran the operation. Mauchly would give talks about computer science to gain government business. He did much to promote the future of computers. Mauchly was instrumental in the establishment of the Eastern Association of Computing Machinery in 1947 and was its second president in 1948. This organization was later renamed the Association for Computing Machinery.

The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. negotiated a contract to provide a binary computer for the Northrop Aircraft Company. It was to be small, airborne, and calculate missile trajectories. Mauchly and Eckert came up with the BINAC in 1949, which was essentially a refined version of their other computers. Faster and cheaper than the ENIAC, it used magnetic tape instead of punched cards, the first computer to do so. As with the EDVAC, computer programs could be stored internally.

While Mauchly's professional life was progressing, his personal life underwent a transformation. Mary Mauchly had drowned while on vacation at the Jersey shore in 1946. On February 7, 1948, Mauchly married Kathleen Rita McNulty, who was a programmer on the ENIAC. They eventually had five children: Sara Elizabeth, Kathleen Ann, John William, Virginia, and Eva. The following year, the main investor in Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. died in a plane crash. This resulted in a loss of funds, a severe problem for the already under-funded operation. Despite contracts from companies like AC Nielsen and Prudential Insurance, Mauchly and Eckert were forced to sell their company.

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. was sold to Remington Rand in 1950. Mauchly's company became a division of Rand. Before the buyout, Mauchly and Eckert had been working on a new computer, the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) for many years. The UNIVAC was officially introduced in 1951. Created for the United States Census, the UNIVAC was the first commercial data processor using magnetic tape and the first widely used commercial computer. Mauchly guided its logic design and aspects of its software. The UNIVAC proved to be a huge financial success. A refined version, the UNIVAC II, came out in 1957.

In 1955, Mauchly became the director of the UNIVAC Applications Research Center, the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand Corp. (Remington Rand had merged with the Sperry Corp. in 1955). Mauchly was responsible for the development of the C-10 programming code. He left in 1959 after being asked to leave laboratory work for a full-time marketing position. Eckert remained at Sperry Rand, while Mauchly formed his own company, Mauchly Associates, Inc., which focused on computer development. One major accomplishment here was the development of the critical path method (now known as CPM) which scheduled the use of computers. In 1967, Mauchly also set up a consulting organization, Dynatrend.

By the 1970s, some controversy had emerged regarding the ENIAC and UNIVAC patent rights. A battle was waged in court between Sperry Rand and Honeywell. The court ruled that Mauchly and Eckert were not the inventors of electronic digital computers. Atanasoff, the Iowa State University professor Mauchly visited all those years ago, was held to have come up with the idea first. There were accusations that Mauchly stole his idea from Atanasoff. Mauchly spent the rest of his life arguing against this claim in papers and other public forums. This charge lingered for years, even after Mauchly's death. While it was generally agreed that Atanasoff did come up with the first digital computer, most experts believed that this did not detract from Mauchly's accomplishments. If nothing else, Atanasoff's design was for a single machine, not an entire system. Mauchly started an industry.

Mauchly died on January 8, 1980, in Abington, Pennsylvania, during surgery to correct a heart ailment. Though his contributions to the computer industry were relatively unknown because of the circumstances under which he worked, he drew the map for the development of the computer industry as we know it today.

John Mauchly
Eckert and Mauchly examine a printout of ENIAC results in a newsreel from February 1946.
Born	August 30, 1907 (1907-08-30) Cincinnati, Ohio
Died	January 8, 1980 (1980-01-09) Ambler, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	physics
Institutions	Ursinus College University of Pennsylvania
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins University
Known for	ENIAC, UNIVAC

Early life and education

Mauchly, was born August 30, 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland while his father Sebastian Mauchly was a physicist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D.C. He earned the Engineering Scholarship of the State of Maryland, which enabled him to enroll at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1925 as an undergraduate in the Electrical Engineering program. In 1927 he enrolled directly in a Ph.D. program there and transferred to the graduate physics program of the university. He completed his Ph.D. in 1932 and became a professor of physics at Ursinus College near Philadelphia, where he taught from 1933 to 1941. At Ursinus he worked for several years developing a digital electronic computing machine to test the theory that solar fluctuations, sun spots in particular, affect our weather.

Moore School

In 1941 Dr. Mauchly took a course in wartime electronics at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, part of the University of Pennsylvania. There he met J. Presper Eckert, a recent Moore School graduate. Mauchly accepted a teaching position at the Moore School, which was a center for wartime computing. Eckert encouraged Mauchly to believe that vacuum tubes could be made reliable with proper engineering practices. The critical problem that was consuming the Moore School was ballistics: the calculation of firing tables for the large number of new guns that the U.S. Army was developing for the war effort.

ENIAC

In 1942 Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the building of a general-purpose electronic computer. The proposal, which circulated within the Moore School (but the significance of which was not immediately recognized), emphasized the enormous speed advantage that could be gained by using digital electronics with no moving parts. Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, who was the liaison between the United States Army and Moore School, picked up on the idea and asked Mauchly to write a formal proposal. In April 1943, the Army contracted with the Moore School to build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). Mauchly led the conceptual design while Eckert led the hardware engineering on ENIAC. A number of other talented engineers contributed to the top secret project "PX".

Because of its high-speed calculations, ENIAC could solve problems that were previously unsolvable. It was roughly a thousand times faster than the existing technology. It could add 5,000 numbers or do 357 10-digit multiplications in one second.

ENIAC could be programmed to perform sequences and loops of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square-root, input/output functions, and conditional branches. Programming was initially accomplished with patch cords and switches, and reprogramming took days. It was redesigned in 1948 to allow the use of stored programs with some loss in speed.

EDVAC

The ENIAC design was frozen in 1944 to allow construction. Eckert and Mauchly were already aware of the limitations of the machine and began plans on a second computer, to be called EDVAC. By January 1945 they had procured a contract to build this stored-program computer. Eckert had proposed a mercury delay line memory to store both program and data. Later that year, mathematician John von Neumann learned of the project and joined in some of the engineering discussions. He produced what was understood to be an internal document describing the EDVAC.

The term von Neumann architecture arose from von Neumann's paper, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC^[1] . Dated June 30, 1945, it was an early written account of a general purpose stored-program computing machine (the EDVAC). Goldstine, in a move that was to become controversial, removed any reference to Eckert or Mauchly and distributed the document to a number of von Neumann's associates across the country. The ideas became widely known within the very small world of computer designers.

Besides the lack of credit, Eckert and Mauchly suffered additional setbacks due to Goldstine's actions. The ENIAC patent U.S. Patent 3,120,606, issued in 1964^[2] was filed on June 26, 1947, and granted February 4, 1964, but the public disclosure of design details of EDVAC in the First Draft (which were also common to ENIAC) was later cited as one cause for the 1973 invalidation of the ENIAC patent.

The Moore School Lectures

Main article: Moore School Lectures

In March 1946, just after the ENIAC was announced, the Moore School decided to change their patent policy, in order to gain commercial rights to any future and past computer development there. Eckert and Mauchly decided this was unacceptable; they resigned. However they had already been contracted to do one more thing at the Moore School: to give a series of talks on computer design.

The course "The Theory and Techniques for Design of Digital Computers", ran from July 8 to August 31, 1946. Eckert gave 11 of the lectures; Mauchly and Goldstine each delivered 6. "The Moore School Lectures", as they came to be known, were attended by representatives from the army, the navy, MIT, the National Bureau of Standards, Cambridge University, Columbia, Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, IBM, Bell Labs, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and National Cash Register. A number of the attendees were to later go on to develop computers, such as Maurice Wilkes, of Cambridge, who built EDSAC.

Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation

In 1947 Eckert and Mauchly formed the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC); Mauchly was president. They secured a contract with the National Bureau of Standards to build an "EDVAC II", later named UNIVAC. UNIVAC, the first computer designed for business applications, had many significant technical advantages such as magnetic tape for mass storage. As an interim product The company created and delivered a smaller computer, BINAC, but were still in shaky financial situation. They were purchased by Remington Rand and became the UNIVAC division.

Software

Very early in the history of EMCC, John Mauchly assumed responsibility for programming, coding, and applications for the planned computer systems. His early interaction with representatives of the Census Bureau in 1944 and 1945, and discussion with people interested in statistics, weather prediction, and various business problems in 1945 and 1946 focused his attention on the need to provide new users with the software to accomplish their objectives. He knew it would be difficult to sell computers without application materials, and without training in how to use the systems. And so, EMCC began to assemble a staff of mathematicians interested in coding in early 1947. (from Norberg)

Mauchly’s interest lay in the application of computers, as well as to their architecture and organization. His experience with programming the ENIAC and its successors led him to create Short Code (see "The UNIVAC SHORT CODE"), the first programming language actually used on a computer (predated by Zuse’s conceptual Plankalkul). It was a pseudocode interpreter for mathematical problems proposed in 1949 and ran on the UNIVAC I and II. Mauchly's belief in the importance of languages led him to hire Grace Murray Hopper to develop a compiler for the UNIVAC.

John Mauchly has also been credited for being the first one using the verb "to program" in his 1942 paper on electronic computing, although in the context of ENIAC, not in its current meaning.

Career

Dr. Mauchly stayed involved in computers for the rest of his life. He was a founding member and President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and also helped found the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The Eckert-Mauchly Corporation was bought by Remington Rand in 1950 and for ten years Dr. Mauchly remained as Director of Univac Applications Research. Leaving in 1959 he formed Mauchly Associates, a consulting company that later introduced the Critical Path Method (CPM) for construction scheduling by computer. In 1967 he founded Dynatrend, a computer consulting organization. In 1973 he became a consultant to Sperry Univac.

Awards

Mauchly received numerous award and honors. He was a life member of the Franklin Institute, the National Academy of Engineering and the Society for Advancement of Management. He was elected a Fellow of the IRE, a predecessor society of IEEE, in 1957, and was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He received an LLD (Hon) degree from the University of Pennsylvania and aDSc(Hon) degree from Ursinus College. He was a recipient of the Philadelphia Award, the Scott Medal, the Goode Medal of AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies), the Pennsylvania Award, the Emanual R. Piore Award, the Howard N. Potts Medal, and numerous other awards.

Patent controversy

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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2008)

Mauchly and Eckert's patent claim on the 1946 ENIAC was invalidated by U.S. Federal Court decision in October, 1973 for several reasons. Some had to do with the time between publication (the First Draft) and the patent filing date (1947.) Judge Larson ruled that "the subject matter was derived" from the earlier Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC). This statement has become the center of a controversy.

Critics note that while the court said that the ABC was the first electronic digital computer, it did not define the term computer. It had originally referred to a person who computes, but was adapted to apply to a machine. Some of these critics say that the ABC does not meet their modern definition, which requires programmability.^{[citation needed]}

Critics of the court decision also note that there is, at a component level, nothing in common between the two machines. The ABC was binary; the ENIAC was decimal. The ABC used regenerative drum memory; The ENIAC used electronic decade counters. The ABC used its tubes to implement a binary serial adder while the ENIAC used tubes to implement a complete set of decimal operations. The ENIAC's general-purpose instruction set, together with the ability to automatically sequence through them, made it a general-purpose computer.

Another point frequently raised is that the ABC was never completely functional. The input-output mechanism was not reliable enough to finish a problem (30 equations with 29 unknowns) without error. Also, the machine used a 60 Hz clock, limiting it to 30 operations per second. But these issues have no relevance to the patentability of the ABC or of the ENIAC.

Proponents for the court decision emphasize that the testimony established that Mauchly definitely had complete access to Atanasoff's machine and the documents describing it. Letters he wrote to Atanasoff show that he was at one time at least considering building on Atanasoff's approach.

Others claim that the decision was made irrespective of who had invented the computer, it was actually made to break up a monopoly created by a secretive deal between IBM and Sperry, when they traded licenses to IBM's punch card and Sperry's ENIAC patent.

Mauchly consistently maintained that it was the use of high-speed electronic flip-flops in cosmic-ray counting devices at Swarthmore College that gave him the idea for computing at electronic speeds.

References

McCartney, Scott (1999). ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer. Walker & Co.. ISBN 0-8027-1348-3.
Shurkin, Joel N. (1996). Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors. W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01804-0.
Antonelli, Kathleen R. (April 1984). "John Mauchly's Early Years". Annals of the History of Computing 6 (2): 116–138. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1984.10022.
Stern, Nancy (1981). From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers. Bedford, Massachusetts: Digital Press. ISBN 0-932376-14-2.
Norberg, Arthur L. (2005-06-01). Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957. The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-14090-X.

External links

John W. Mauchly, Sperry Univac Point of View address, 13 November 1973, Rome, Italy at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Discusses challenges in building ENIAC at Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania.
Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania and the interaction of the personnel at the Moore School.
John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer - by Asaf Goldschmidt and Atsushi Akera, An Exhibition in the Department of Special Collections Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania