1939 - Technology

Technology

Hewlett-Packard is founded January 1 by California engineers William R. (Redington) Hewlett, 26, and David Packard, 27, who set up shop in the garage behind Packard's Palo Alto house to develop an audio oscillator that the two have invented. They have scrounged up about $1,000 in grant money to help fund work on the oscillator, start with $538 in capital, toss a coin to decide whose name will go first on the new partnership, and supply eight 200B oscillators for Walt Disney Studios to test the sound equipment that will be used for the 1940 film Fantasia. The outbreak of hostilities in Europe late in the year brings a stream of government orders, Hewlett-Packard test and measurement products begin to gain acceptance among engineers and scientists, and the partners will move next year from the garage to a rented building as net revenue rises to $34,000 (see 1942).

Bell Laboratories begins construction in April of a prototype computer using the telephone relays employed by mathematician George R. Stibitz in 1937. Under pressure to solve increasingly complex mathematical problems, company executives have agreed to finance the project (see 1940).

Hamilton, N.Y.-born Iowa State University physicist John (Vincent) Atanasoff, 35, and his Iowa-born graduate student Clifford (Edward) Berry, 21, build the world's first electronic calculator. Completed in December and programmed with binary Boolean algebra (see science, 1854), it has a volatile memory that is constantly refreshed; its drum storage device has capacitors that store 30 numbers on each of two drums, with each number stored in two bits, keeping the data temporarily until it can be processed by separate logic circuits (a combination of not, and, or, and nor logic gates) (see 1942).

Cambridge, Mass., chemist Bradley Dewey, now 52, opens a pilot plant for making synthetic rubber (see Semon, 1926). An MIT graduate who cofounded Dewey & Almy in 1919, he has conducted research on rubber-like elastomers and will complete one of the first U.S. synthetic rubber plants in 1942 (see Goodrich tire, 1940).

Union Carbide and Carbon resumes synthetic rubber research, acquiring Bakelite Corp. to pursue studies of butadiene as a source of synthetic rubber (see Bakelite, 1909).

E. I. du Pont introduces nylon on a commercial basis, but most of it goes into parachutes and tents (see Carothers, 1937; first nylon stockings, 1940).

The spectrophotometer invented by industrial chemist Arnold O. Beckman measures the amount of ultraviolet light that a substance absorbs (see pH meter, 1934). Beckman's simple but costly electronic instruments save endless hours of laborious laboratory work.