"Dr. Mauchly's initial studies on weather prediction drew him to computing.
In 1936, he was doing painstaking, protracted research on how sunspots might
affect the weather."

Unfortunately, there are zero sunspots at the start of the third millennium,
hence any calculated correlation would be zero.

John William Mauchly: The Brain Behind The Giant Brain:?Part 1

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Dr. Rocco L. Martino, For The Bulletin

Editor's Note: This is the second in a series to run each Tuesday.

Wikipedia, the Free (Internet) Encyclopedia, in its description of the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ENIAC, contains the following
history:

"In 1942 [Dr. John William] Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the building of a
general-purpose electronic computer. The proposal, which circulated within
the Moore School (but the significance of which was not immediately
recognized), emphasized the enormous speed advantage that could be gained by
using digital electronics with no moving parts. Lieutenant Herman Goldstine,
who was the liaison between the United States Army and Moore School, picked
up on the idea and asked Mauchly to write a formal proposal. In April 1943,
the Army contracted with the Moore School to build the ENIAC. Mauchly led
the conceptual design while [Dr. John Presper] Eckert [Jr.] led the hardware
engineering on ENIAC. A number of other talented engineers contributed to
the top-secret project 'PX.'

"Because of its high-speed calculations, ENIAC could solve problems that
were previously unsolvable. It was roughly a thousand times faster than the
existing technology. It could add 5,000 numbers or do fourteen 10-digit
multiplications in one second.

"ENIAC could be programmed to perform sequences and loops of addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division, square-root, input/output functions,
and conditional branches. Programming was initially accomplished with patch
cords and switches, and reprogramming took days. It was redesigned in 1948
to allow the use of stored programs with some loss in speed."

Dr. Mauchly was born on Aug. 30, 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Even as a young
boy, he strove to understand how things worked. A natural tinkerer, he took
apart locks and studied the components of telephones. Climbing into a
telephone company ditch outside his home in Chevy Chase, Md., he would hook
up wires from the trunk line to his room, and even fashioned an intercom
system for his pals. To read past his bedtime, he furtively placed a sensor
under the steps leading to his room, alerting him of his parents' approach.
His curiosity for electricity was in his blood, as his dad, Sebastian J.
Mauchly, worked with the Terrestrial Electricity and Magnetism section at
Washington, D.C.'s Carnegie Institute, devising gear to measure electrical
fields over land and water. As a high school student, recalled Dr. Mauchly's
future wife, Kathleen "Kay" McNulty, he worked nights and weekends helping
his father with scientific calculations.

At Baltimore's John Hopkins University, Dr. Mauchly started out as an
engineering major but, wishing to see "the big picture," moved over to
physics and graduated with a doctorate at age 25. Although the Great
Depression was in full swing, he was offered an associate professorship of
physics at small Ursinus College, 25 miles from Philadelphia, for $3,800 a
year.

Dr. Mauchly's initial studies on weather prediction drew him to computing.
In 1936, he was doing painstaking, protracted research on how sunspots might
affect the weather. With funds from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
National Youth Administration, he employed students to pour through the
Carnegie Institution's mammoth collection of atmospheric observations. But
sorting through the data by hand, or even with punch cards, would have taken
decades. This drove Dr. Mauchly to find ways of simplifying and speeding up
his calculations.

He knew the limiting factor for timely weather prediction was calculations -
the mathematical tabulation of temperature, wind and precipitation data
required to make accurate predictions fast enough to be useful. It is
worthless, after all, to predict today's weather tomorrow. Archives at the
University of Pennsylvania reveal that Dr. Mauchly began dreaming of a
machine to do the work of a mechanical calculator, but automatically, with
electronic switches for retrieval and storage, and electronic tubes to do
math at speed-of-light pace. His concept was a fully electronic machine with
no moving parts that would take a problem from beginning to end without
intermediate recording and then re-entering of any number as must be done
with any machine that has no memory capability. In the mid-1930s, he set
along the path of creating such a machine by building counting devices by
hand, using parts he acquired with his own money from secondhand stores.

Dr. Mauchly knew that scientists had recently devised electronic instruments
for counting cosmic rays. The challenge was recording hundreds of "cosmic
events" per second, a rate that overwhelmed electromechanical recorders. In
response, physicists came up with so-called scaling circuits using
high-speed vacuum tubes to bring the pulses down to a manageable number. As
one writer puts it: "When, say, eight events struck the sensors, the first
set of circuits dispatched four electrical pulses to the second set, which
sent two pulses to the third ring, which in turn issued a single pulse to
the recorder." Dr. Mauchly was to apply such circuits to his electronic
calculator.

Invention is often a solitary, even artistic, task. For example, Mozart once
stated he would go for a long walk, and new music would begin circulating in
his mind. Then he would write the music out as his mind dictated it.
Einstein also spoke of invention as a form of art, and referred to other
great scientists as artists. He spoke of conceiving his notions of
relativity by imagining that he was traveling along a light beam traveling
through space. In similar fashion, Dr. Mauchly conjured up most of the logic
behind the first digital, general-purpose computer as he imagined the ideal
way to perform tedious calculations. While he certainly had knowledge of
electronics, he knew that he needed a partner in his quest who was a gifted
specialist in circuits and electronics. In 1941, he found such a partner in
Dr. Eckert, with whom he teamed to produce not only the first ever
electronic computer, ENIAC, but also the first production machine, UNIVAC.
While Dr. Mauchly was the conceptual genius who "traveled the light beams of
space," Dr. Eckert was the gifted genius who could make music from wires and
tubes. The physicist and the engineer made history. Together they dreamed,
worked, designed, built teams, built computers and changed the world
forever.

To a creative thinker like Dr. Mauchly, the construction of devices and
systems took place through a process akin to composing a poem. Poetry is an
economical, harmonious assembly of words directed to a desired purpose or
theme. The poet needs to know how to fit together many complex pieces to
create a compelling whole. In a similar way, Dr. Mauchly envisioned the
solution to an intricate puzzle, and set about making the right pieces to
fit within the solution.

Dr. Rocco Martino is the founder and CEO of CyberFone Technologies and a
pioneer in the computer industry. He knew and worked with both of the
inventors of ENIAC. He is completing a book on the history of the computer
entitled Innovation: From ENIAC to the Cyber Age.