1940 - Technology

Technology

Bell Laboratories puts its Complex Number Calculator (CNC) into operation January 8 (see 1939). Not only can it add, subtract, multiply, and divide complex numbers, as George R. Stibitz demonstrates in September at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College, but the prototype computer can also be hooked up to a telegraph system, receive problems at New York, and wire the solutions back to Dartmouth (see Harvard-IBM Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, 1944).

Michigan-born MIT electrical engineer Claude (Elwood) Shannon, 24, applies Boolean algebraic logic to the problem of electrical switching and lays the groundwork not only for electronic computers (see 1939; Mark I, 1944)but also for information systems based on the binary code, using "bits" for electronic communication.

German girls are reported in May to be saving their hair for production of felt needed in the war effort.

B. F. Goodrich exhibits the first commercial synthetic rubber tires. Its Ameripol tires are made of butadiene synthesized from soap, gas, petroleum, and air.

Goodyear and Dow Chemical form a joint venture to produce synthetic rubber from styrene and butadiene. The only U.S. producer of synthetic rubber has been Du Pont, whose factories make 2,468 long tons of neoprene this year employing research done by the late Julius A. Nieuwland (see 1925; 1942).

President Roosevelt acts to build U.S. natural crude rubber reserves in the event of a cutoff of supplies from the Far East. The Rubber Reserve Co. created by the president in June is an agency of the Reconstruction Finance Corp. (see 1942).

Metallurgist Henry Livingstone Sulman dies at Croydon, Surrey, January 31 at age 79, having helped to develop a froth flotation process for concentrating ores prior to extraction of their minerals; Tommy gun co-inventor Brig. Gen. John Taliaferro Thompson, U.S. Army (ret.) dies of a heart attack at his Great Neck, L.I., home June 21 age 79; metallurgist Sir Robert Abbot Hadfield at London September 30 at age 81 as his factory at Tinsley turns out cast steel shells and projectiles for the military.