Frederic Williams

Coinventor of the Manchester Mark I computer

• Born: June 26, 1911
• Birthplace: Romiley, Cheshire, United Kingdom
• Died: August 11, 1977
• Place of death: Manchester, United Kingdom

Primary Company/Organization: University of Manchester

Introduction

Frederic Williams worked on a range of projects for the British government during World War II and after the war saw the possibilities in developing a computer with a digital memory using a cathode-ray tube. He designed and built the first computer with a digital memory, which was known as the Baby, at the University of Manchester. This was followed by another computer, which was manufactured for sale. Although in comparison to current machines these early computers were large and cumbersome, they were important steps in the development of computers.

Early Life

Frederic Calland Williams was born on June 26, 1911, the younger child and the only son of Frederic Williams and Ethel Alice Smith Williams. His father was a locomotive draughtsman who worked for Beyer Peacock and had married Ethel in 1909 at Leigh, Lancashire. With the family living close to the railway line, the young Freddie, as he was nicknamed, became interested in engines. He attended a small private school in the village of Romiley. When he was nine or ten, he saw a wireless set at the house of his uncle and studied it closely. When he returned home, he made one using a cigar box. For his secondary education, he went to Stockport Grammar School. In 1929, he won the Matthew Kirtley scholarship, which allowed him to go to the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester. In his class at Manchester were George Kenyon and J. A. L. Matheson, both later knighted at the same time as Williams.

Williams graduated in 1932 with first class honors. He also won the Fairbairn Award. Remaining at the University of Manchester, he researched under Frank Roberts and gained his master of science degree in 1933, then joined the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company but did not finish his two-year course. Instead, he moved to Oxford, where he studied at Magdalen College and was awarded his doctorate in 1936. In addition to conducting his studies, he coached the college rowing team. He then returned to Manchester, studying for his doctorate there, which he earned in 1939.

Life's Work

During World War II, Williams was involved in work on radio direction finding (RDF), later known as radiolocation, or radar. The British government was establishing a chain of radar stations around the country to give warnings of approaching aircraft. However, soon the British military wanted to have some way of differentiating between their own and enemy aircraft. This led to Williams working on the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system. Transponders were attached to Allied aircraft; they used super-regenerative receivers that produced oscillations different from those of enemy aircraft. After trials in late 1939 and early 1940, it was possible to install an IFF set at the Royal Air Force base at Leuchars for the Hudson squadron based there.

In mid-1940, Williams handed over his work on IFF to B. V. Bowden (later Lord Bowden) and went to work with A. D. Blumlein, who came up with the idea of an operational amplifier. For much of the rest of the war, Williams was based at Malvern, where he worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (later renamed the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment). At the end of the war, Williams was a principal scientific officer.

In 1946, Williams was appointed the Edward Stocks Massey Chair of Electrotechnics at the Victoria University of Manchester. He had also been appointed as the editor of Volumes 19 and 20 of the Radiation Laboratory Series. The former was on waveforms and the latter on electrical time measurements. For his work on these publications, Williams in November 1945 visited the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he heard about the idea of storing binary digits on cathode-ray tubes. He returned to the United States in June 1946 and went again to the Radiation Laboratory, where he learned more about the use of cathode-ray tubes.

After returning to England in July 1946, Williams set about making his own cathode-ray tube. Based at the University of Manchester from December 1946, he had considerable financial support with M. H. A. Newman, the Fielden Professor of Pure Mathematics, having been awarded £35,000 in 1946 to help with computer development. Williams also had the help of Tom Kilburn, Geoff Tootill, and others.

After a large number of experiments, Williams managed to devise a system of storing binary digits on the screen of a cathode-ray tube. In 1974, he was to write, “I never was, never have been, and never will be a mathematician. I did not even know there was any system of numbers other than the scale of ten.…” By December 1947, the design of the computer was under way, and the initial one, reported in Nature on August 3, 1948, was able to store, on a single cathode-ray tube, thirty-two words each of thirty-two digits. This became known as the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicknamed Baby.

The development of Baby represented was a major advance. Previous digital computers had not managed to store their work. What Williams had managed to do was to make a cathode-ray tube that stored digits as a charge pattern on the screen, and this was to form the basis of the first stored-program digital computer. This work continued through 1948 and early 1949. A second prototype machine, the Manchester Automatic Digital Computer (MADC), became known as the Manchester Mark I. The Ferranti company then produced a commercial version known as the Ferranti Mark 1, and soon there were twenty of these computers. In 1957, Williams became the first to win the Benjamin Franklin Medal, given by the Royal Society of Arts.

Following the success of Baby and its progeny, Williams gathered together some computer specialists and started to work on new designs for an induction motor. This team managed to produce a spherical motor, a log motor, and a phase change motor. However, although these were able to be made in the laboratory, they could not be produced commercially at this stage. Subsequently, Williams designed an automatic transmission for a motor car and installed one in his car, which he drove for one or two years. The first Clifford Steadman Prize was awarded to him by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers for his description of how this transmission worked.

Williams received a large number of other honors for his work. The Order of the British Empire was conferred on him in 1945, and he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1961. In 1976, just before his death, he was made a Knight Bachelor in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.

Personal Life

Williams spent most of his life living in the county of Cheshire, working in Manchester. In 1938 in Cheshire, he married Gladys Ward, daughter of Thomas Ward, a builder from his home village of Romiley. They had two children, Frederic and Susan. Williams and his wife settled at Spinney End, at The Village, Prestbury, Cheshire. Williams was interested in philosophy and from 1968 was a director of Granada Television Ltd. He played golf, a sport he had developed as a student and one he enjoyed for the rest of his life.

In the mid-1970s, Williams became increasingly ill, and he was not able to attend the ceremony at Buckingham Palace during which knighthood was conferred on him in 1976. He died on August 11, 1977, in a hospital in Manchester. His funeral service was held at Prestbury Parish Church on August 15, and his body was subsequently cremated at the Macclesfield Crematorium, where his ashes were interred.

There had been a tradition in the Williams family for the oldest son to be called Frederic (without the k), but Williams named his son Frederick. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, St. John's College at Cambridge, and the University of Bristol. From 1964 until 1967 he was a lecturer in civil engineering at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria, and then was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham from 1967 until 1975. He became a professor of civil engineering at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology in Cardiff, working as a consultant to the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Bibliography

Copeland, B. Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. A study of the computing machines used during World War II and the early designs made by Williams.

Kilburn, T., and L. S. Piggott. “Frederic Calland Williams, 26 June 1911–11 August 1977,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society Vol. 24 (November 1978), pp. 583-604. Print. A long and comprehensive account of the scientific career of Sir Williams by some of his collaborators.

Laithwaite, Eric Roberts. An Inventor in the Garden of Eden. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. An autobiography of a scientist who worked as a demonstrator for Williams at Manchester.

O'Regan, Gerard. A Brief History of Computing. New York: Springer, 2012. Print. An overview of the early computers including those designed by Williams.

“Obituary: Sir Frederic Williams; Major Developments in Computers.” The Times 18 Aug. 1977: 14. Print. An overview of Williams's life and a tribute to his achievements.

Piggott, L. S. “Williams, Sir Frederic Calland (1911–1977).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. 10 Aug. 2012. A detailed biographical essay.

Watson-Watt, Sir Robert Alexander. Three Steps to Victory. London: Odhams Press, 1957. Print. An account that contains details of the early work of Williams.

Williams, F. C., T. Kilburn, and G. E. Thomas. “Universal High-Speed Digital Computers: A Magnetic Store.” Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 99 (1952). Print. A seminal paper on digital storage.