Early Years| John William Mauchly was born 30 August 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Sebastian J. and
Rachel Mauchly. During Mauchly's childhood, his father received an appointment
as a physicist at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D.C., a prestigious scientific
institution established during the interwar years as part of an effort to raise the level of
scientific research in the United States. S.J. Mauchly had come to the Carnegie Institute
to study the phenomena of terrestrial magnetism, a subject that had suddenly become
important after the connection between magnetism and radio propagation became
increasingly clear. But this research often took the father away from home, as when he
wrote to his eight-year-old son from New York's Hotel St. George. The letter came as S.J.
Mauchly prepared for one of his ocean voyages aboard a meteorological research
vessel.
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 Certificate issued to J. W. Mauchly by McKinley Technical High School, Washington, D.C., 10 June 1925. (click to expand to 55k) | Shortly after they moved to Washington, D.C., in 1913, the family settled into the
comfortable suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. Located near other major scientific
facilities such as the National Bureau of Standards, this suburb housed many scientists,
engineers, and other well-educated professionals. This is not to suggest that Mauchly's
upbringing was exceptional. Mauchly was not raised like the Hungarian physicists
or the German mathematicians whose intellectual virtuosity had stunned the world during
the 1930s. Mauchly represented part of a nascent community of technical elites
that was emerging in the United States. Quite apart from brilliant minds like Albert
Einstein or Claude Hilbert, it was the greater ranks of U.S. born scientists and engineers
who were to carry the nation into and beyond the extensive technical developments of
World War II.
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His father's occupation afforded Mauchly a good education, beginning with his
schooling at the McKinley Technical High School in downtown Washington. Still, in
balancing his school work with tennis matches and walks through the woods, or one
of Edgar Allen Poe's ghost stories read in the dark among friends, Mauchly led a
reasonably comfortable existence of an upper middle-class youth. It is only in such items
as his "Daily Record," where Mauchly meticulously recorded his daily sleep, that one perceives a child socialized into a particular, technical way of thought. Perhaps
Mauchly had also drawn some inspiration from Benjamin Franklin's
Autobiography. In any case, his academic achievements brought him the
Engineering Scholarship of the State of Maryland, which enabled him to enroll at Johns
Hopkins University in the fall of 1925.
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 Letter of J. W. Mauchly to Senator .. Jones, 26 September 1925, regarding graduate fellowship. (click to expand to 83k) |
Last update: Monday, 03-Feb-2003 11:09:19 EST
