The John Atanasoff Controversy | Two controversies serve as counterpoints to the story of John Mauchly and Pres Eckert and
the invention of the ENIAC computer. The first of these concerned the contributions of
an Iowa State College professor, John V. Atanasoff, who had designed and built an
electronic computing device between 1937 and 1942 with the assistance of his graduate
student, Clifford Berry. While there are some doubts as to whether the Atanasoff-Berry
Computer (ABC) was ever fully operational, Mauchly visited Atanasoff during the
summer of 1941 and had a close look at the machine. The controversy has been over the
extent to which Mauchly borrowed Atanasoff's ideas, and whether Atanasoff was the
true inventor of the modern electronic computer. |
 Letter from John V. Atanasoff to J. W. Mauchly, 7 March 1941. (click to expand to 165k) |
 News account of ABC, 7 April 1942 (click to expand to 86k) |
Recognition for invention is highly prized among scientists and academic engineers, whose rewards tend to be more intangible than those of their counterparts in industry.
Presper Eckert has been more fortunate than Mauchly in this regard, because his
reputation is based on his contributions to the engineering
work involved in developing the ENIAC computer. The material artifact itself stood as a
demonstration of the superb engineering that had produced an operational large-scale
electronic computer. As the principal architect during the early design work
on the ENIAC, Mauchly could only rest his claims on the design contributions that he had made
to the project. The invisibility of design work has made it possible for others to question
from where Mauchly had derived his ideas. |
|
There is actually little doubt that Mauchly was inspired by Atanasoff's work. In 1941
Atanasoff knew more about basic elements of electronic computation than Mauchly and
openly shared this knowledge. The ABC, with its several hundred vacuum tubes,
represented one of the most complicated electronic circuits at the time, and Mauchly,
with his then very limited experience, would have been impressed by its design. Still, the
ABC had been designed as a special purpose computer designed only to solve large
systems of
linear equations. Certain aspects of its design also precluded the ABC from
computing at truly electronic speeds. Upon arriving at the Moore School, Mauchly
gained access to many other sources of ideas not the least of which was the concept of
ganged adding machines proposed by the faculty member Irven Travis. The ENIAC was,
in other words, a combination of many different design ideas. Mauchly may have
continued to draw ideas from Atanasoff's further reflections on electronic computing, but
it was ultimately Mauchly who, working with Eckert, designed the first general-
purpose electronic computer. Whether Mauchly gave credit to Atanasoff's
contributions remains a separate historical question. |
 Four panels of ENIAC, with Betty Jennings and Frances Bilas (right) arranging the program settings on the master programmer, 1946. (click to expand to 83k) |
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