Howard H. Aiken

Designer of the Harvard Mark I computer

• Born: March 8, 1900
• Birthplace: Hoboken, New Jersey
• Died: March 14, 1973
• Place of death: St. Louis, Missouri

Primary Company/Organization: IBM

Introduction

In the late 1930s, college professor Howard H. Aiken sold International Business Machines (IBM) on developing the digital computer he had designed. Although other claimants exist, Aiken, according to historians, has the strongest claim of any of the contenders to the title of inventor of the digital computer. His Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was the progenitor if not the prototype of the modern computer.

Early Life

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Daniel and Margaret Emily Mierisch Aiken, Howard Hathaway Aiken grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. To help support his family he took a night job as a switchboard operator for the local utility. The school superintendent, Milo Stewart, hearing that Aiken was working the twelve-hour-shift night job as well as attending school, allowed Aiken to test out of classes to cover a shortage of credits and graduate early. He graduated from Arsenal Tech's first graduating class. Stewart also wrote recommendations to every public utility in the university town of Madison, Wisconsin, where Aiken found a job as a telephone operator. He moved there with his mother, establishing her in her own apartment while he roomed with two or three others. In 1919, Aiken began attending the University of Wisconsin, graduating in electrical engineering in 1923. After graduation, he took a job at an electric plant and worked in Madison, Chicago, and Detroit until 1932. Graduate work at the University of Chicago and Harvard University came later; Aiken received an A.M. from Harvard in 1937 and his Harvard doctorate in physics in 1939. His mother traveled to Cambridge with him and remained there while Aiken was on the faculty, even after his postwar marriage. She prepared a hot lunch for him every day. Aiken said it was a good way to guarantee that she had at least one meal a day. Aiken became assistant professor and naval lieutenant commander in 1941.

Life's Work

In graduate school, Aiken became aggravated by the time it took to do the computations involved in differential equations integral to his electronics studies. Thinking that he and other scientists could better spend their time on real problems than on simple arithmetic, Aiken decided to invent a machine to handle the simple tasks. It was a bit harder than merely collecting parts and putting them together, however.

Aiken read the work of Charles Babbage and used it as the basis for his design. Aiken began working on the machine in 1935, when he joined the Harvard staff as instructor in physics and communications engineering. The machine required two years of theoretical work and six years of construction. Aiken was a naval reserve officer on leave to Harvard for the project.

In 1937, he developed a way to identify numbers in binary code using the on/off characteristic of electrical relays. Beginning work in 1939, Aiken made his machine as simple as he could while getting it to use positive and negative numbers, sines and other mathematical functions, and common mathematical sequences. Operation had to be automatic in what IBM labeled the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, more familiarly the Mark I.

Aiken's colleagues thought the calculator would be far too expensive to build and directed him to IBM, a major manufacturer of accounting machines, tabulators, calculators, and other office machines. IBM used punch card technology, accumulated data, and transferred data across devices as accounting tools. IBM was the only company in the world that had the expertise and components that Aiken needed. Later machines—for instance ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)—would be created through custom parts, but Aiken took IBM's experience and parts and used them for his new device.

Aiken met with James Bryce, holder of more than 500 patents, and the two broached the idea of the ASCC to IBM president Thomas Watson. IBM agreed to fund two-thirds of the bill, and the government financed the other third of the half-million-dollar project. IBM took on a project well beyond anything it had attempted before. It required new engineering and design, not just assembly from off-the-shelf parts. Aiken was more attuned to broader concepts, and he had no particular interest in the nuts and bolts.

There were few mechanical calculators in existence in 1943, when, as a Harvard professor, Aiken contacted IBM. His Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) had no keyboard or screen. It was powered by electricity and used punch cards to give commands and magnetic switches to perform the computations at speeds impossible for humans. The ASCC debuted in 1943. Called the Mark I, it added, subtracted, divided, and multiplied to 23 decimal places and referred back to its earlier results. It gave access to multiple users simultaneously (at least two). It weighed 35 tons, stood 8 feet tall, and required 500 miles of wire and most of the space in a laboratory at Harvard. It had 750,000 parts, was 5 inches thick, and had 3,000 relays that clicked noticeably, making the Mark I in operation sound like a knitter's convention. Operations entailed working with 1,400 switches and running four punched paper tapes, but the machine could add or subtract 23-digit numbers in 0.3 second, multiply in 4 seconds, and divide in 12 seconds. Aiken and several IBM employees shared the patent.

Although journalists called it an electronic brain, the Mark I had no electronics but was instead an electromechanical device. Slow by modern standards, the Mark I nevertheless began the modern computing industry and made the United States its world leader.

Later designs—the Mark II, III, and IV computers—were more streamlined. The Mark series enabled the U.S. Navy to calculate trajectories for bombs and missiles during and after World War II. It appeared to be a mechanical brain, a threat to humanity, but it did relieve human beings of massive amounts of drudge work.

The Mark II's data relay switch failed because of a dead moth between two contacts. After that, any correction to a computer was referred to as “debugging.”

Bryce was the only person at IBM whom Aiken respected and for whom he had no harsh words. Watson had a deep respect for the Ivy League and a strong commitment to using his company for the betterment of humanity. However, as head of IBM, a major business, Watson was not inclined to bend to Aiken, who also was not inclined to compromise. According to Ralph Niemann, who worked with Aiken in Dahlgren, Virginia, Aiken was “fiercely independent and dynamic.” Working at IBM's labs in Endicott, New York, he encountered friction: Aiken and IBM each regarded the other as taking too much credit for the machine.

Aiken was also practical, however, asking interviewee mathematicians if they knew how to handle a screwdriver. He was available night and day for workers who encountered problems and understood the importance of what he was doing in pioneering large-scale computers. He considered himself not only a designer but also a teacher and molder of people. He initially believed that the computer would be suited only for mathematical uses, but he came to recognize that it had business applications as well. Aiken's Mark II, known as the Aiken Relay Computer, was developed for the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren. The Mark II and Mark III were built at a combined cost of $2 million. When designing computers Aiken sought to balance the speed of the calculator with the capacity of the input-output devices.

When Harvard opened a new computer facility, later named for Aiken, Aiken was its first director. He was also instrumental in establishing university-level computer science. Courses in computer science began at Columbia in 1946–47, the year before they did at Harvard. In 1947, Aiken established the first master's program focusing on computing machines, a precursor to the computer science program. Many of Aiken's students went on to become key figures in the development of computing.

The ASCC was known in Nazi Germany, and in the 1950s preparers of lineages and family trees of computing commonly gave the ASCC a prominent position as the first, with Aiken as the inventor. When he received the initial Harry Goode Memorial Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Computing, it recognized his major impact on the field, as did the 1965 renaming of the Harvard center for him.

Personal Life

Aiken's personality clash with Watson led him to deny Watson's involvement in the development of the ASCC. When he retired, he moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he received a distinguished professorship from the University of Miami. He developed the university's computer center and computer science program. He became a consultant, founding Howard Aiken Industries Incorporated, and specialized in taking over and reviving struggling businesses and then selling them. He also consulted for Lockheed Missiles and Monsanto. He developed a method of encrypting data for information security.

Aiken had married Lousie Mancill in 1939. After they divorced in 1942, he married Agnes Montgomery, a Latin teacher. He divorced Agnes and married his final wife, Mary McFarland. He had two children: Rachel Ann by his first wife and Elizabeth (Betsy) by his second.

Aiken was 6 feet, 4 inches tall with a large head and an intimidating presence. He had a quick temper and could be difficult to work with. Isaac Auerbach tells the story of how, while taking a course at Harvard with Aiken, he sought summer employment with J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company in Philadelphia. Aiken had a with-us-or-with-the-enemy attitude and apparently a jealousy of Eckert and Mauchly because their ENIAC was competing successfully with his Mark I. From that point Auerbach was a pariah, shunned by Aiken on contact, until finally Auerbach moved to Burroughs, at which point Aiken renewed his friendship with Auerbach.

Aiken also had a soft side, however, and was regarded by many as affable, sociable, and generous. When John Harr was a graduate student in mathematics, Aiken initially turned him down for a job as a programmer because he preferred not to work with graduate students and others who could not commit to programming full time. Aiken relented after Harr returned and, not mentioning graduate school, said he needed work and would study as time permitted. Harr got the job and the degree and worked for Aiken for eight years.

While on a business trip to St. Louis, Aiken died on March 14, 1973. He was seventy-three years old.

Bibliography

Bonasia, J. “Aiken, the Computer Master.” Investor's Business Daily 18 July 2008: n. pag. Business Source Complete. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. A brief overview of Aiken's invention of the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.

Cohen, I. Bernard. Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer. Boston: MIT, 2000. Print. Biography of Aiken by a colleague at Harvard acknowledges Aiken's contributions but also indicates that the development of the digital computer was more than a one-person effort.

Cohen, I. Bernard, Gregory W. Welch, and Robert V. D. Campbell, eds. Makin' Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer. Boston: MIT, 1999. Print. Full of Aiken's work, including the technical element.

Esmenger, Nathan L. “Howard Aiken/Makin' Numbers.” Business History Review 73.4 (1999): 761. Print. Reviews Cohen's biography as well as the companion piece, Cohen's coedited collection of essays Makin' Numbers. The focus is on technical development of the ASCC, the Harvard Mark I, and Aiken's role in developing computer science as a discipline.

Karwatka, Dennis. “Howard Hathaway Aiken.” Tech Directions 55.9 (1996): 12. Business Source Complete. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. Profiles Aiken's career.

Pugh, Emerson. Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology. Boston: MIT, 1995. Print. Traces the history of the company through the 1990s.