1944 - Technology

Technology

Bakelite inventor Leo H. Baekeland dies on his estate at Beacon, N.Y., February 23 at age 80.

The first automatic, general-purpose digital computer is formally dedicated August 7 at Harvard University, where it has been built under the aegis of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project and Engineering School mathematics professor Howard (Hathaway) Aiken, 44, with a $5 million grant from IBM, whose chairman Thomas Watson said last year, "I think there is a world market for about five computers" (see Watson, 1924; Bush, 1930; science [Turing], 1936; Shannon, 1940). IBM engineers James Bryce, Benjamin Durfee, Francis Hamilton, and Clair Lake have translated Aiken's specifications (actually an abstract statement of computations) into a workable machine, Aiken's graduate student Robert Campbell has written the initial programs for it, and the Harvard-IBM Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator has been calculating tedious Navy problems that would take weeks or months to work out absent such a device. It has 760,000 parts and 500 miles of wire, requires 4 seconds to perform a simple multiplication, 11 seconds for a simple division, and is subject to frequent breakdown, but the navy assigns New York-born WAVES lieutenant Grace M. Hopper (née Grace Brewster Murray), 37, to develop operating programs for the massive contraption. A Vassar graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, Hopper is the third person to program the computer (when a moth gets into Mark I's circuits she coins the term bug to connote unexplained computer failures; see 1952; ENIAC, 1946).