John Mauchly

Cocreator of the ENIAC

• Born: August 30, 1907
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: January 8, 1980
• Place of death: Ambler, Pennsylvania

Primary Company/Organization: Unisys

Introduction

With J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly designed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The team also designed the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), and the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) I, the latter the first commercial computer in the United States. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was the first computer company. The team also originated basic concepts such as programming languages, stored programs, and subroutines. Their work was vital to the development and spread of computers in the late 1940s and after.

Early Life

John William Mauchly was born to Sebastian J. and Rachel Scheidemantel Mauchly. He grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and attended schools in Washington, D.C. The Mauchly family was solidly middle class. They lived in a four-bedroom, one-bath frame house in Chevy Chase. Rachel was active in the Women's Club, nagged John about his penmanship, arranged his piano lessons, and made sure the family could afford summer vacations on the Jersey shore. Sebastian was a high school science teacher who received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cincinnati and, when John was eight years old, became chief physicist at the Carnegie Institution's newly created Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Sebastian became prominent after his discovery of diurnal variation in the Earth's magnetic field.

Mauchly attended McKinley Technical High School after showing his engineering potential in elementary school, when he built and installed electric doorbells to replace mechanical bells for the neighbors and also troubleshot the neighbors' electrical problems. His high school performance was stellar, with exceptional achievement in mathematics and physics, editorship of the school paper in 1925 (his senior year), tennis, and walks through the woods with his friends, where they read the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Mauchly received a Maryland state scholarship in 1925 and he used it to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His initial major was in electrical engineering. Sebastian developed a chronic illness and between 1925 and 1928 worked from the Jersey shore, where he was convalescing. He died in 1928.

Mauchly decided to switch his focus to physics and used a special rule that allowed exceptional students to move directly to the Ph.D. program without an undergraduate degree. He received a series of scholarships, continued his education after his father died, and earned a Ph.D. in 1932. His dissertation was titled “The Third Positive Group of Carbon Monoxide Bands.”

Life's Work

Mauchly taught introductory physics at Ursinus College from 1933 to 1941. There he first became interested in creating electronic computers, a project that combined physics and his original background in electronic engineering. The school was too small to afford the laboratory equipment a research physicist required in the 1930s, so he attempted to develop his own instruments.

Mauchly also researched weather analysis at the Carnegie Institution, concluding that there was a need for a mechanical device of some sort to process the massive volume of data involved in weather research: He found a massive volume of weather information but lacked the capability of performing calculations on the tabular data. He bought a used Marchant calculator to perform calculations of molecular energy levels extracted from the weather data.

In the summer of 1936, Mauchly became a temporary assistant physicist in his father's former department at Carnegie, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, working as a human computer for his father's old boss. (At that time the term computer referred to a human who performed calculations using pencil and paper or, at best, a mechanical calculating machine.) After three summers, he submitted an article to the Journal of Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, but the article was rejected because the period of data analysis was too brief. Mauchly sought a method of computing larger volumes of data.

Computers of the day were the product of large engineering projects, particularly electrical engineering. Mauchly used the National Youth Administration to hire students as computers and began looking into tabulating machines. Mauchly focused on finding methods of creating electrical circuits suitable for computing. He and some of his students visited establishments where work was taking place on creating circuits to perform arithmetic computations. He began attempting to build circuits for counting. His new focus and an encounter with John Vincent Atanasoff led him in 1941 to the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the heart of a regional electrical industry in radio, telephones, and other electronic technologies.

At the time, the United States was entering World War II, and the war pushed academics into military-related research. Mauchly was no exception. Moore had a contract with the U.S. Army to teach a ten-week course in electrical engineering for defense industries, a course aimed at mathematics and physics graduates because the Army needed engineers to operate electronic communications and weapons systems. Mauchly completed a course in electronics for defense purposes and afterward became instructor at Moore. He had an opportunity to take a better-paying job in defense training at another university, but Moore had greater appeal. Moore was a center of computer-based research, with the centerpiece Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, designed to integrate systems of differential equations. The machine required a great deal of manual effort to configure, and it consisted of replaceable shafts, wheels, handles, gears, electric motors, and disks. For small problems, engineers used mathematics rather than wasting the days required to set up the machine, but it was worthwhile for projects lasting weeks. Moore already had the differential analyzer, a mechanical analog computer that used wheels and disks to solve differential equations, and Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, one of Mauchly's instructors in the defense electronics course, both worked heavily on the contract to create trajectory tables.

Mauchly tried to get other staffers at the school interested in his ideas for a better computer, but most ignored him. The exception was Eckert; developing a close friendship, the two took every opportunity to exchange and expand on their ideas about electronic computers, and Mauchly wrote a report on the design of an electronic computer that would be easier and faster than the Bush analyzer.

A new director of the Ballistic Research Laboratory, a joint project of the Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Moore School, read Mauchly's report, handed it out for evaluation, and approved funding in April 1943. Then came the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), with Mauchly on the business end while Eckert handled engineering.

Mauchly and Eckert then built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a general-purpose computer with a specific function, creating tables for the trajectories of bombs and shells. The computer, when finished in February 1946 (too late for use in the war), was 2.5 meters tall and 24 meters long. It contained eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and was one thousand times faster than the best electromechanical processor, performed up to five thousand additions per second. Control was through manipulation of wires on plugboards on the outside of the machine. ENIAC was the most complex and influential computer of its day.

Although World War II was over, government secrecy did not dissolve as the Cold War got under way. The ENIAC proved valuable in handling top-secret problems concerning development of nuclear weapons. Mathematician John von Neumann was involved with the nuclear project and used the ENIAC to handle partial differential equations essential to the development of atomic weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In October 1946, Mauchly and Eckert left Moore to form their Electronic Control Company. Their big order was from Northrop Aircraft, for whom they built the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). In use starting in August 1950, BINAC featured data storage on magnetic tape rather than punched cards. Electronic Control became Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which received an order from the National Bureau of Standards for what became the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), the first commercial computer in the United States. In all, there were forty-six UNIVACs. The UNIVAC was the first computer able to handle both alphabetical and numeric data equally well.

Eckert and Mauchly were not good businessmen, and it was nearly impossible to estimate costs of what was a totally new business, so their company struggled financially. It became the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1950, which was itself sold to the Sperry Corporation in 1955. Mauchly left Remington Rand to form the computer consultancy Mauchly Associates, serving as president from 1959 to 1965, at which point he became chairman of the board. Between 1968 and his death in 1980, he was president of Dynatrend, Inc., another consulting firm, and from 1970 until his death he was president of Marketrend, Inc.

Mauchly and Eckert's enterprise also suffered from the impact of patent litigation: ENIAC's patent was eventually held by the Sperry Rand Corporation, which in 1967 sued the Honeywell Corporation for infringing that patent. At the same time, Honeywell countersued for fraud and antitrust violations, claiming that the ENIAC patent was invalid because the work was not unique: Mauchly had earlier examined the John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry's Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). Eventually ENIAC's patent was ruled invalid, although mainly for technical reasons rather than the originality of Mauchly and Eckert's design. Moreover, in 1973 the U.S. District Court ruled that the ABC had been the first electronic digital computer and the electronic digital computer was in the public domain. This conclusion had the long-term salutary impact on the computer industry but of course a negative impact on Eckert and Mauchly's business.

Mauchly became a Fellow of the Institute of Radio Engineers (the IRE, which later became the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE) in 1957, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a lifetime member of the Franklin Institute, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Society for the Advancement of Management. He received the Computer Society's Harry M. Goode Memorial Award in 1966 as a pioneer in the field of computing, particularly the application of electronic computers to business and scientific problems and the creation of ENIAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC. He also received the Potts Medal (awarded by the Franklin Institute) in 1949, the John Scott Award in 1961, and the Philadelphia Award, the Emanuel R. Piore Award, and honorary degrees from Ursinus College and the University of Pennsylvania.

Personal Life

Mauchly was handsome, with brown hair and hazel eyes. He was about six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. Well read, soft-spoken, whimsical, and long-limbed, he conveyed the personality and aura of a scientist. His wife, Mary Augusta Walzl, was a mathematician. They married in 1930 and had two sons

Tragically, Mary was swept out to sea while she and John were swimming in the Atlantic Ocean in 1946. Mauchly later married Kathleen R. McNulty, a former ENIAC programmer, on February 7, 1948, and they had four daughters and a son. Mauchly suffered all his life from a hereditary genetic disease, hemorrhagic telangiectasia, which involved anemia, internal bleeding, bloody noses, and other symptoms. Late in life, he required oxygen to breathe normally.

Although his career was hampered by litigation and tragedy touched his personal life, Mauchly succeeded in developing what is widely regarded as the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer, built a start-up that he sold at a profit to the subsequent manufacturer of his machine, and headed a successful string of consulting businesses. He retired to the Philadelphia suburb of Ambler, dying there in 1980 of complications from an infection during heart surgery.

Bibliography

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