Engineering Hall of Fame:

Celebrating the Birth of the "Forgotten Father of the Computer"

by John Vardalas, Ph.D.

December is the century mark for the birth of the first person to construct an electronic digital computer. If I were a gambling man, I would bet that only a handful of technology historians and a few Iowa residents — perhaps even fewer readers — know this inventor’s name. Contrary to popular belief, not all significant events in U.S. computer history occurred on the east or west coast. In fact, the first electronic digital computer came out of Ames, Iowa, in the heart of the Corn Belt.

In the only biography written about this inventor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clark Mollenhoff called him the “forgotten father of the computer.” Have you guessed this man’s name? He is John Vincent Atanasoff.

John Vincent Atanasoff was born on 4 October 1903, just outside Hamilton, New York. From an early age, Atanasoff exhibited a precocious ability in mathematics. By the age of 10, he was familiar with the operations and logarithmic principles of the slide rule, learned the principles of number systems such as binary, and had even started reading a college algebra textbook. He also exhibited a hands-on talent for electrical technology, finding and repairing wiring problems in his family’s home.

Strong Parental Influence

Both parents played a prominent role in fostering their son’s deep curiosity and love of mathematics and technology. His father, Ivan Atanasov, had come to the United States from Bulgaria, when he was 13, with his uncle. Two years later, Ivan’s uncle returned to Bulgaria, leaving Ivan alone. With gritty determination, Ivan supported himself through high school and then through Colgate College, where he earned a general bachelor’s degree. Then, through correspondence courses, Ivan became a self-taught electrical engineer. Atanasoff’s mother, Iva Purdy, taught school before marrying Ivan. Iva, who herself possessed an aptitude for mathematics, encouraged and guided her young son’s early interest in math.

Atanasoff excelled in school, particularly in science and mathematics. In 1925, he graduated from the University of Florida with a 97.6 average in electrical engineering. His first ambition had been to study theoretical physics, but the University of Florida did not yet have such a program. His stellar performance attracted attention from several top graduate schools, including Harvard. Atanasoff chose Iowa State College, the first offer he received. He earned a master’s degree in mathematics a year later, and then took a position as assistant professor there in mathematics. Atanasoff took a leave of absence to pursue a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin, and returned with a doctorate in hand to Iowa State, as an associate professor of math and physics in 1930.

There Has to be a Better Way

His undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and master’s degree in mathematics gave Atanasoff the background he needed to pursue the electronic digital computer. But it was his theoretical physics work that sent him in search of this radically new computational technology. His doctoral research, which looked at the dielectric constant of Helium, required weeks of long, detailed and tedious numerical computations in quantum mechanics. Atanasoff's only aid was the Monroe mechanical desk calculator. That experience convinced him that physicists needed a more productive computational tool. And that there had to be a faster way to extract numerical answers from the complex set of mathematical models that defined modern physics. He vowed to tackle this problem.

From 1930 to 1936, while at Iowa State, Atanasoff grappled with the cocept of computational tools. He carefully studied the state-of-the-art: mechanical desk calculators, IBM's punch card tabulators, and analog computers. In Atanasoff’s mind, none of these devices had the computational power and speed physicists needed. While working on the problem, Atanasoff taught himself more about electronics. Although he had studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate, electronics had not yet become widespread in university curricula. Atanasoff delved into the theory and use of vacuum tubes. This intellectual digression proved to be a turning point in his search for better computational devices, for by 1936, he had concluded that the solution to faster computational devices lay in using pulse electronic techniques.

For many months, he struggled to move beyond the vague idea of using electronics to a more specific set of design principles. With no chart to guide him, Atanasoff was navigating in unknown waters where no one else had yet ventured. Time and time again, he sensed he was on the verge of a discovery, only to see it disappear into the fog.

One day in 1937, when his frustration reached its limits, Atanasoff took a long drive, stopping at a roadhouse in Illinois. Finding a quiet corner, he sat down, ordered a bourbon and pondered his problem. There, the outline of his quest became clear and he jotted down his thoughts on napkins. To dramatically improve scientific computation performance, the calculating engine would have to use pulse electronic techniques, operate on the binary system, compute via logic circuits rather than enumeration, and use a regenerative memory.

By 1938, Atanasoff had a working prototype; by 1941, a full-scale operating version. Moving from his design framework to actual circuitry required more work than he could do alone, and Atanasoff was fortunate to hire Clifford Berry, a brilliant electrical engineering Ph.D. student at Iowa State. Berry quickly became Atanasoff’s intellectual partner.

WWII Takes Atanasoff in a Different Direction

With America’s entry into World War II, Atanasoff focused his energies on war-related problems. In 1942, he left for Washington, D.C., to work as scientist in the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL). After the war he stayed on and became chief of NOL’s Acoustics Division. In 1952, he shifted to director of NOL’s Navy Fuze Program. But he no longer found satisfaction in government service and soon left to form his own company, the Ordnance Engineering Corporation. Atanasoff sold his company to Aerojet General Corporation in 1952, but stayed on as vice president of the company’s Atlantic division. In 1961, he started Cybernetics Inc., and then retired in 1980.

The war had ended Atanasoff’s pioneering work in computer technology, but he remained a keen and interested observer. Meanwhile, on the east coast in 1942, John Mauchley and Presper Eckert started a top-secret military project to also design and build an electronic digital computer, which later became known as ENIAC. In the late 1940s, much to his dismay, Atanasoff learned that Mauchley and Eckert had been granted key patents to the computer. Atanasoff was shocked to learn that Iowa State’s lawyers had never filed the patents for the groundbreaking work that he and Berry had done. He was struck by the similarity of Mauchley and Eckert’s patent claims to the device that he had built nearly six years earlier.

Atanasoff’s despair was mixed with bitterness. Long before the ENIAC concept was articulated, Mauchley had been a guest in Atanasoff’s home. Mauchley had spent several days at Iowa State, closely studying the details of the Atanasoff-Berry computer. The ENIAC project never referred to Atanasoff and Berry. While the world called Mauchley and Eckert the fathers of the digital electronic computer, Atanasoff kept his silence. He was too involved in his present work to brood over possible betrayals and injustices. Nevertheless, he did hope that someday his role in creating the electronic digital computer would come out.

 Atanasoff Gets His Due

Atanasoff realized that dream in 1973. After lengthy court battles that pitted Honeywell and the Control Data Corporation against Sperry Rand, the U.S. District Court in Minneapolis concluded that, between 1939 and 1941, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State College, and his young protégé, Clifford Berry, a graduate student in electrical engineering at Iowa State College, had constructed the first electronic digital computer. Sperry Rand had acquired the Mauchley-Eckert patents when it acquired their company in 1950. Unwilling to pay licensing fees to Sperry Rand, Honeywell and Control Data set out to break the Mauchley-Eckert patents. As thousands of pages of evidence and testimony later demonstrated, their ace in the hole was the rediscovery of the Atanasoff-Berry computer and of Mauchley’s prior, detailed knowledge of the computer.

What If?

This story contains an interesting irony. The war had ended Atanasoff’s involvement in computer technology, but it did launch the Mauchley-Eckert ENIAC project. Whether Mauchley knowingly or unknowingly lifted key ideas from the Atanasoff-Berry computer will never be known. But had it not been for Mauchley, the ideas in the Atanasoff-Berry computer may have easily been overlooked and the progress of the computer delayed considerably. On the other hand, one can only wonder what could have been achieved had Mauchley and Eckert invited Atanasoff and Berry to participate on the ENIAC project.

Further Reading

For an in-depth look at Atanasoff’s life, Clark Mollenhoff’s Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer is the most authoritative book written to date.

 

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John Vardalas is an IEEE Postdoctoral Fellow in the history department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/