2: The Computer’s Past
Although it seemed to burst upon us suddenly, the jet airplane can trace its beginnings back through the fabric wings of the Wrights to the wax wings of Icarus and Daedalus, and the steam aerophile of Hero in ancient Greece. The same thing is true of the computer, the “thinking machine” we are just now becoming uncomfortably aware of. No brash upstart, it has a long and honorable history.
Naturalists tell us that man is not the only animal that counts. Birds, particularly, also have an idea of numbers. Birds, incidentally, use tools too. We seem to have done more with the discoveries than our feathered friends; at least no one has yet observed a robin with a slide rule or a snowy egret punching the controls of an electronic digital computer. However, the very notion of mere birds being tool and number users does give us an idea of the antiquity and lengthy heritage of the computer.
The computer was inevitable when man first began to make his own problems. When he lived as an animal, life was far simpler, and all he had to worry about was finding game and plants to eat, and keeping from being eaten or otherwise killed himself. But when he began to dabble in agriculture and the raising of flocks, when he began to think consciously and to reflect about things, man needed help.
First came the hand tools that made him more powerful, the spears and bows and arrows and clubs that killed game and enemies. Then came the tools to aid his waking brain. Some 25,000 years ago, man began to count. This was no mean achievement, the dim, foggy dawning of the concept of number, perhaps in the caves in Europe where the walls have been found marked with realistic drawings of bison. Some budding mathematical genius in a skin garment only slightly shaggier than his mop of hair stared blinking at the drawings of two animals and then dropped his gaze to his two hands. A crude, tentative connection jelled in his inchoate gray matter and he shook his head as if it hurt. It was enough to hurt, this discovery of “number,” and perhaps this particular pioneer never again put two and two together. But others did; if not that year, the next.
Armed with his grasp of numbers, man didn’t need to draw two mastodons, or sheep, or whatever. Two pebbles would do, or two leaves or two sticks. He could count his children on his fingers—we retain the expression “a handful” to this day, though often our children are another sort of handful. Of course, the caveman did not of a sudden do sums and multiplications. When he began to write, perhaps 5,000 years later, he had formed the concept of “one,” “two,” “several,” and “many.”
Besides counting his flock and his children, and the number of the enemy, man had need for counting in another way. There were the seasons of the year, and a farmer or breeder had to have a way of reckoning the approach of new life. His calendar may well have been the first mathematical device sophisticated enough to be called a computer.
It was natural that numbers be associated with sex. The calendar was related to the seasons and the bearing of young. The number three, for example, took on mystic and potent connotation, representing as it did man’s genitals. Indeed, numbers themselves came quaintly to have sex. One, three, and the other odd numbers were male; the symmetrical, even numbers logically were female.
The notion that man used the decimal system because of his ten fingers and toes is general, but it was some time before this refinement took place. Some early peoples clung to a simpler system with a base of only two; and interestingly a tribe of Australian aborigines counts today thus: enea (1), petchaval (2), enea petchaval (3), petchaval petchaval (4). Before we look down our noses at this naïve system, let us consider that high-speed electronic computers use only two values, 1 and 0.
But slowly symbols evolved for more and more numbers, numbers that at first were fingers, and then perhaps knots tied in a strip of hide. This crude counting aid persists today, and cowboys sometimes keep rough tallies of a herd by knotting a string for every five that pass. Somehow numbers took on other meanings, like those that figure in courtship in certain Nigerian tribes. In their language, the number six also means “I love you.” If the African belle is of a mind when her boyfriend tenderly murmurs the magic number, she replies in like tone, “Eight!”, which means “I feel the same way!”
From the dawn of history there have apparently been two classes of us human beings, the “haves” and the “have nots.” Nowadays we get bills or statements from our creditors; in early days, when a slate or clay tablet was the document, a forerunner of the carbon copy or duplicate paper developed. Tallies were marked for the amount of the debt, the clay tablet was broken across the marks, and creditor and debtor each took half. No chance for cheating, since a broken half would fit only the proper mate!
Numbers at first applied only to discrete, or distinctly separate, things. The scratches on a calendar, the tallies signifying the count of a flock; these were more easily reckoned. The idea of another kind of number inspired the first clocks. Here was a monumental breakthrough in mathematics. Nature provided the sunrise that clearly marked the beginning of each day; man himself thought to break the day into “hours,” or parts of the whole. Such a division led eventually to measurement of size and weight. Now early man knew not only how many goats he had, but how many “hands” high they were, and how many “stones” they weighed. This further division ordained another kind of mechanical computer man must someday contrive—the analog.
The first counting machines used were pebbles or sea shells. For the Stone Age businessman to carry around a handful of rocks for all his transactions was at times awkward, and big deals may well have gone unconsummated for want of a stone. Then some genius hit on the idea of stringing shells on a bit of reed or hide; or more probably the necklace came first as adornment and the utilitarian spotted it after this style note had been added. At any rate, the portable adding machine became available and our early day accountant grew adroit at sliding the beads back and forth on the string. From here it was only a small step, taken perhaps as early as 3000 B.C., to the rigid counter known as the abacus.
The word “counter” is one we use in everyday conversation. We buy stock over the counter; some deals are under the counter. We all know what the counter itself is—that wide board that holds the cash register and separates us from the shopkeeper. At one time the cash register was the counter; actually the counting board had rods of beads like the abacus, or at least grooves in which beads could be moved. The totting up of a transaction was done on the “counter”; it is still there although we have forgotten whence came its name.
The most successful computer used for the next 5,000 years, the portable counter, or the abacus, is a masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness. Though only a frame with several rows of beads, it is sophisticated enough that as late as 1947 Kiyoshi Matsuzake of the Japanese Ministry of Communications, armed with the Japanese version—a soroban, bested Private Tom Wood of the U. S. Army of Occupation punching the keys of an up-to-the-minute electric calculating machine in four of five problem categories! Only recently have Japanese banks gone over to modern calculators, and shopkeepers there and in other lands still conduct business by this rule of thumb and forefinger.
The abacus, ancient mechanical computer, is still in use in many parts of the world. Here is the Japanese version, the soroban, with problem being set up.
The name abacus comes to us by way of the Greek abax, meaning “dust.” Scholars infer that early sums were done schoolboy fashion in Greece with a stylus on a dusty slate, and that the word was carried over to the mechanical counter. The design has changed but little over the years and all abacuses bear a resemblance. The major difference is the number of beads on each row, determined by the mathematical base used in the particular country. Some in India, for example, were set up to handle pounds and shillings for use in shops. Others have a base of twelve. The majority, however, use the decimal system. Each row has seven beads, with a runner separating one or two beads from the others. Some systems use two beads on the narrow side, some only one; this is a mathematical consideration with political implications, incidentally: The Japanese soroban has the single-bead design; Korea’s son pan uses two. When Japan took over Korea the two-bead models were tabu, and went out of use until the Koreans were later able to win their independence again.
About the only thing added to the ancient abacus in recent years is a movable arrow for marking the decimal point. W. D. Loy patented such a gadget in the United States. Today the abacus remains a useful device, not only for business, but also for the teaching of mathematics to youngsters, who can literally “grasp their numbers.” For that reason it ought also to be helpful to the blind, and as a therapeutic aid for manual dexterity. Apparently caught up in the trend toward smaller computers, the abacus has been miniaturized to the extent that it can be worn as earrings or on a key chain.
Even with mechanical counters, early mathematicians needed written numbers. The caveman’s straight-line scratches gave way to hieroglyphics, to the Sumerian cuneiform “wedges,” to Roman numerals, and finally to Hindu and Arabic. Until the numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and that most wonderful of all, 0 or zero, computations of any but the simplest type were apt to be laborious and time-consuming. Even though the Romans and Greeks had evolved a decimal system, their numbering was complex. To count to 999 in Greek required not ten numbers but twenty-seven. The Roman number for 888 was DCCCLXXXVIII. Multiplying CCXVII times XXIX yielded an answer of MMMMMMCCXCIII, to be sure, but not without some difficulty. It required an abacus to do any kind of multiplication or division.
Indeed, it was perhaps from the abacus that the clue to Arabic simplicity came. The Babylonians, antedating the Greeks, had nevertheless gone them one better in arithmetic by using a “place” system. In other words, the position of a number denoted its value. The Babylonians simply left an empty space between cuneiform number symbols to show an empty space in this positional system. Sometime prior to 300 B.C. a clever mathematician tired of losing track and punched a dot in his clay tablet to fill the empty space and avoid possible error.
The abacus shows these empty spaces on its rows of beads, too, and finally the Hindus combined their nine numerals with a “dot with a hole in it” and gave the mathematical world the zero. In Hindu it was sifr, corrupted to zephirium in Latin, and gives us today both cipher and zero. This enigma of nothingness would one day be used by Leibnitz to prove that God made the world; it would later become half the input of the electronic computer! Meantime, it was developed independently in various other parts of the world; the ancient Mayans being one example.
Impressed as we may be by an electronic computer, it may take some charity to recognize its forebears in the scratchings on a rock. To call the calendar a computer, we must in honesty add a qualifying term like “passive.” The same applies to the abacus despite its movable counters. But time, which produced the simple calendar, also furnished the incentive for the first “active” computers too. The hourglass is a primitive example, as is the sundial. Both had an input, a power source, and a readout. The clock interestingly ended up with not a decimal scheme, but one with a base of twelve. Early astronomers began conventionally bunching days into groups of ten, and located different stars on the horizon to mark the passage of the ten days. It was but a step from here to use these “decans,” as they were called, to further divide each night itself into segments. It turned out that 12 decans did the trick, and since symmetry was a virtue the daylight was similarly divided by twelve, giving us a day of 24 hours rather than 10 or 20.
From the simple hourglass and the more complex water clocks, the Greeks progressed to some truly remarkable celestial motion computers. One of these, built almost a hundred years before the birth of Christ, was recently found on the sea bottom off the Greek island of Antikythera. It had been aboard a ship which sank, and its discovery came as a surprise to scholars since history recorded no such complex devices for that era. The salvaged Greek computer was designed for astronomical work, showing locations of stars, predicting eclipses, and describing various cycles of heavenly bodies. Composed of dozens of gears, shafts, slip rings, and accurately inscribed plates, it was a computer in the best sense of the word and was not exceeded technically for many centuries.
The Greek engineer Vitruvius made an interesting observation when he said, “All machinery is generated by Nature and the revolution of the universe guides and controls. Our fathers took precedents from Nature—developed the comforts of life by their inventions. They rendered some things more convenient by machines and their revolutions.” Hindsight and language being what they are, today we can make a nice play on the word “revolution” as applied to the machine. The Antikythera computer was a prime example of what Vitruvius was talking about. Astronomy was such a complicated business that it was far simpler to make a model of the many motions rather than diagram them or try to retain them in his mind.
There were, of course, some die-hard classicists who decried the use of machines to do the work of pure reasoning. Archytas, who probably invented the screw—or at least discovered its mechanical principle—attempted to apply such mechanical devices to the solving of geometrical problems. For this he was taken to task by purist Plato who sought to preserve the distinct division between “mind” and “machine.”
Yet the syllogistic philosophers themselves, with their major premise, minor premise, and conclusion, were unwittingly setting the stage for a different kind of computer—the logic machine. Plato would be horrified today to see crude decks of cards, or simple electromechanical contrivances, solving problems of “reason” far faster than he could; in fact, as fast as the conditions could be set into them!
The Mechanics of Reason
Aristotle fathered the syllogism, or at least was first to investigate it rigorously. He defined it as a formal argument in which the conclusion follows logically from the premises. There are four common statements of this type:
| All S (for subject) | is P (for predicate) |
| No S (for subject) | is P |
| Some S (for subject) | is P |
| Some S (for subject) | is not P |
Thus, Aristotle might say “All men are mortal” or “No men are immortal” as his subject. Adding an M (middle term), “Aristotle is a man,” as a minor premise, he could logically go on and conclude “Aristotle, being a man, is thus mortal.” Of course the syllogism unwisely used, as it often is, can lead to some ridiculously silly answers. “All tables have four legs. Two men have four legs. Thus, two men equal a table.”
Despite the weaknesses of the syllogism, nevertheless it led eventually to the science of symbolic logic. The pathway was circuitous, even devious at times, but slowly the idea of putting thought down as letters or numbers to be logically manipulated to reach proper conclusions gained force and credence. While the Greeks did not have the final say, they did have words for the subject as they did for nearly everything else.
Let us leave the subject of pure logic for a moment and talk of another kind of computing machine, that of the mechanical doer of work. In the Iliad, Homer has Hephaestus, the god of natural fire and metalworking, construct twenty three-wheeled chariots which propel themselves to and fro bringing back messages and instructions from the councils of the gods. These early automatons boasted pure gold wheels, and handles of “curious cunning.”
Man has apparently been a lazy cuss from the start and began straightway to dream of mechanical servants to do his chores. In an age of magic and fear of the supernatural his dreams were fraught with such machines that turned into evil monsters. The Hebrew “golem” was made in the shape of man, but without a soul, and often got out of hand. Literature has perpetuated the idea of machines running amok, as the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” but there have been benevolent machines too. Tik-Tok, a latter-day windup man in The Road to Oz, could think and talk and do many other things men could do. He was not alive, of course, but he had the saving grace of always doing just what he “was wound up to do.”
Having touched on the subject of mechanical men, let us now return to mechanical logic. Since the Greeks, many men have traveled the road of reason, but some stand out more brightly, more colorfully, than others. Such a standout was the Spanish monk Ramón Lull. Lull was born in 1232. A court page, he rose in influence, married young, and had two children, but did not settle down to married domesticity. A wildly reckless romantic, he was given to such stunts as galloping his horse into church in pursuit of some lady who caught his eye. One such escapade led to a remorseful re-examination of himself, and dramatic conversion to Christianity.
He began to write books in conventional praise of Christ, but early in his writings a preoccupation with numbers appears. His Book of Contemplation, for example, actually contains five books for the five wounds of the Saviour, and forty subdivisions for the days He spent in the wilderness. There are 365 chapters for daily reading, plus one for reading only in leap years! Each chapter has ten paragraphs, symbolizing the ten commandments, and three parts to each chapter. These multiplied give thirty, for the pieces of silver. Beside religious and mystical connotations, geometric terms are also used, and one interesting device is the symbolizing of words and even phrases by letters. This ties in neatly with syllogism. A sample follows:
… diversity is shown in the demonstration that the D makes of the E and the F and the G with the I and the K, therefore the H has certain scientific knowledge of Thy holy and glorious Trinity.
This was only prologue to the Ars Magna, the “Great Art” of Ramón Lull. In 1274, the devout pilgrim climbed Mount Palma in search of divine help in his writings. The result was the first recorded attempt to use diagrams to discover and to prove non-mathematical truths. Specifically, Lull determined that he could construct mechanical devices that would perform logic to prove the validity of God’s word. Where force, in the shape of the Crusades, had failed, Lull was convinced that logical argument would win over the infidels, and he devoted his life to the task.
Renouncing his estate, including his wife and children, Lull devoted himself thenceforth solely to his Great Art. As a result of dreams he had on Mount Palma, the basis for this work was the assumption of simple premises or principles that are unquestionable. Lull arranged these premises on rotating concentric circles. The first of these wheels of logic was called A, standing for God. Arranged about the circumference of the wheel were sixteen other letters symbolizing attributes of God. The outer wheel also contained these letters. Rotating them produced 240 two-term combinations telling many things about God and His good. Other wheels prepared sermons, advised physicians and scientists, and even tackled such stumpers as “Where does the flame go when the candle is put out?”
From the Enciclopedia universal illustrada,
Barcelona, 1923
Lull’s wheel.
Unfortunately for Lull, even divine help did not guarantee him success. He was stoned to death by infidels in Bugia, Africa, at the age of eighty-three. All his wheelspinning logic was to no avail in advancing the cause of Christianity there, and most mathematicians since have scoffed at his naïve devices as having no real merit. Far from accepting the Ars Magna, most scholars have been “Lulled into a secure sense of falsity,” finding it as specious as indiscriminate syllogism.
Yet Lull did leave his mark, and many copies of his wheels have been made and found useful. Where various permutations of numbers or other symbols are required, such a mechanical tool is often the fastest way of pairing them up. Even in the field of writing, a Lullian device was popular a few decades ago in the form of the “Plot Genii.” With this gadget the would-be author merely spun the wheels to match up various characters with interesting situations to arrive at story ideas. Other versions use cards to do the same job, and one called Plotto was used by its inventor William Wallace Cook to plot countless stories. Although these were perhaps not ideas for great literature, eager writers paid as much as $75 for the plot boiler.
Not all serious thinkers relegated Lull to the position of fanatic dreamer and gadgeteer. No less a mind that Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz found much to laud in Lull’s works. The Ars Magna might well lead to a universal “algebra” of all knowledge, thought Leibnitz. “If controversies were to arise,” he then mused, “there would be no more reason for philosophers to dispute than there would for accountants!”
Leibnitz applied Lull’s work to formal logic, constructed tables of syllogisms from which he eliminated the false, and carried the work of the “gifted crank” at bit nearer to true symbolic logic. Leibnitz also extended the circle idea to that of overlapping them in early attempts at logical manipulation that foreshadowed the work that John Venn would do later. Leibnitz also saw in numbers a powerful argument for the existence of God. God, he saw as the numeral 1, and 0 was the nothingness from which He created the world. There are those, including Voltaire whose Candide satirized the notion, who question that it is the best of all possible worlds, but none can question that in the seventeenth century Leibnitz foresaw the coming power of the binary system. He also built arithmetical computers that could add and subtract, multiply and divide.
A few years earlier than Leibnitz, Blaise Pascal was also interested in computing machines. As a teen-ager working in his father’s tax office, Pascal wearied of adding the tedious figures so he built himself a gear-driven computer that would add eight columns of numbers. A tall figure in the scientific world, Pascal had fathered projective geometry at age sixteen and later established hydrodynamics as a science. To assist a gambler friend, he also developed the theory of probability which led to statistical science.
Another mathematical innovation of the century was that of placing logarithms on a stick by the Scot, John Napier. What he had done, of course, was to make an analog, or scale model of the arithmetical numbers. “Napier’s bones” quickly became what we now call slide rules, forerunners of a whole class of analog computers that solve problems by being actual models of size or quantity. Newton joined Leibnitz in contributing another valuable tool that would be used in the computer, that of the calculus.
The Computer in Literature
Even as Plato had viewed with suspicion the infringement of mechanical devices on man’s domain of higher thought, other men have continued to eye the growth of “mechanisms” with mounting alarm. The scientist and inventor battled not merely technical difficulties, but the scornful satire and righteous condemnation of some of their fellow men. Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist who took a swipe at many things that did not set well with his views, lambasted the computing machine as a substitute for the brain. In Chapter V, Book Three, of Gulliver’s Travels, the good dean runs up against a scheming scientist in Laputa:
The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with Forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room; he said, perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble exalted Thought never sprang in any other Man’s Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was a Twenty Foot Square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superfices was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine to work. The Pupils at his Command took each the hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded Six and Thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This work was repeated three or four Times, and at every Turn the Engine was so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as the square Bits of Wood moved upside down.
Six hours a-day the young Students were employed in this Labour; and the Professor showed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of Art and Sciences; which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the Publick would raise a Fund for making and employing five Hundred such Frames in Lagado....
Fortunately for Swift, who would have been horrified by it, he never heard Russell Maloney’s classic story, “Inflexible Logic,” about six monkeys pounding away at typewriters and re-creating the world great literature. Gulliver’s Travels is not listed in their accomplishments.
The French Revolution prompted no less an orator than Edmund Burke to deliver in 1790 an address titled “Reflections on the French Revolution,” in which he extols the virtues of the dying feudal order in Europe. It galled Burke that “The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
Seventy years later another eminent Englishman named Darwin published a book called On the Origin of Species that in the eyes of many readers did little to glorify man himself. Samuel Butler, better known for his novel, The Way of All Flesh, wrote too of the mechanical being, and was one of the first to point out just what sort of future Darwin was suggesting. In the satirical Erewhon, he described the machines of this mysterious land in some of the most prophetic writing that has been done on the subject. It was almost a hundred years ago that Butler wrote the first version, called “Darwin Among the Machines,” but the words ring like those of a 1962 worrier over the electronic brain. Butler’s character warns:
There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time.
Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man ... what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.
Butler envisioned the day when the present rude cries with which machines call out to one another will have been developed to a speech as intricate as our own. After all, “... take man’s vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? What prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with some of these machines in their own line?”
Noting another difference in man and his creation, Butler says,
... Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary, it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull, it needs no slumber.... May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?
It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant.... This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master, and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated ... man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks.
Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?
Butler considers the argument that machines at least cannot copulate, since they have no reproductive system. “If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry, and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapor-engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. [But] surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system.”
Butler repeats his main theme. “... his [man’s] organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machine is advancing. This is the most alarming feature of the case, and I must be pardoned for insisting on it so frequently.”
Then there is a startlingly clear vision of the machines “regarded as a part of man’s own physical nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal limbs. Man ... as a machinate mammal.” This was feared as leading to eventual weakness of man until we finally found “man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action.” And so the Erewhonians in self-defense destroyed all inventions discovered in the preceding 271 years!
Early Mechanical Devices
During the nineteenth century, weaving was one of the most competitive industries in Europe, and new inventions were often closely guarded secrets. Just such an idea was that of Frenchman Joseph M. Jacquard, an idea that automated the loom and would later become the basis for the first modern computers. A big problem in weaving was how to control a multiplicity of flying needles to create the desired pattern in the material. There were ways of doing this, of course, but all of them were unwieldy and costly. Then Jacquard hit on a clever scheme. If he took a card and punched holes in it where he wanted the needles to be actuated, it was simple to make the needles do his bidding. To change the pattern took only another card, and cards were cheap. Patented in 1801, there were soon thousands of Jacquard looms in operation, doing beautiful and accurate designs at a reasonable price.
To show off the scope of his wonderful punched cards, Jacquard had one of his looms weave a portrait of him in silk. The job took 20,000 cards, but it was a beautiful and effective testimonial. And fatefully a copy of the silk portrait would later find its way into the hands of a man who would do much more with the oddly punched cards.
At about this same time, a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen decided that machines could play games as well as work in factories. So von Kempelen built himself a chess-playing machine called the Maelzel Chess Automaton with which he toured Europe. The inventor and his machine played a great game, but they didn’t play fair. Hidden in the innards of the Maelzel Automaton was a second human player, but this disillusioning truth was not known for some time. Thus von Kempelen doubtless spurred other inventors to the task, and in a short while machines would actually begin to play the royal game. For instance, a Spaniard named L. Torres y Quevedo built a chess-playing machine in 1914. This device played a fair “end game” using several pieces, and its inventor predicted future work in this direction using more advanced machines.
Charles Babbage was an English scientist with a burning desire for accuracy. When some mathematical tables prepared for the Astronomical Society proved to be full of errors, he angrily determined to build a machine that would do the job with no mistakes. Of course calculating machines had been built before; but the machine Babbage had in mind was different. In fact, he called it a “difference engine” because it was based on the difference tables of the squares of numbers. The first of the “giant computers,” it was to have hundreds of gears and shafts, ratchets and counters. Any arithmetic problem could be set into it, and when the proper cranks were turned, out would come an answer—the right answer because the machine could not make a mistake. After doing some preliminary work on his difference engine, Babbage interested the government in his project since even though he was fairly well-to-do he realized it would cost more money than he could afford to sink into the project. Babbage was a respected scientist, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and because of his reputation and the promise of the machine, the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised to underwrite the project.
For four years Babbage and his mechanics toiled. Instead of completing his original idea, the scientist had succeeded only in designing a far more complicated machine, one which would when finished weigh about two tons. Because the parts he needed were advanced beyond the state of the art of metalworking, Babbage was forced to design and build them himself. In the process he decided that industry was being run all wrong, and took time out to write a book. It was an excellent book, a sort of forerunner to the modern science of operations research, and Babbage’s machine shop was doing wonders for the metalworking art.
Undaunted by the lack of progress toward a concrete result, Babbage was thinking bigger and bigger. He was going to scrap the difference engine, or rather put it in a museum, and build a far better computer—an “analytical engine.” If Jacquard’s punched cards could control the needles on a loom, they could also operate the gears and other parts of a calculating machine. This new engine would be one that could not only add, subtract, multiply, and divide; it would be designed to control itself. And as the answers started to come out, they would be fed back to do more complex problems with no further work on the operator’s part. “Having the machine eat its own tail!” Babbage called this sophisticated bit of programming. This mechanical cannibalism was the root of the “feedback” principle widely used in machines today. Echoing Watt’s steam governor, it prophesied the coming control of machines by the machines themselves. Besides this innovation, the machine would have a “store,” or memory, of one thousand fifty-digit numbers that it could draw on, and it would actually exercise judgment in selection of the proper numbers. And as if that weren’t enough, it would print out the correct answers automatically on specially engraved copper plates!
Space Technology Laboratories
“As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise—by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?” Charles Babbage—The Life of a Philosopher, 1861.
It was a wonderful dream; a dream that might have become an actuality in Babbage’s own time if machine technology had been as advanced as his ideas. But for Babbage it remained only a dream, a dream that never did work successfully. The government spent £17,000, a huge sum for that day and time, and bowed out. Babbage fumed and then put his own money into the machine. His mechanics left him and became leaders in the machine-tool field, having trained in Babbage’s workshops. In despair, he gave up on the analytical engine and designed another difference engine. An early model of this one would work to five accurate places, but Babbage had his eyes on a much better goal—twenty-place accuracy. A lesser man would have aimed more realistically and perhaps delivered workable computers to the mathematicians and businessmen of the day. There is a legend that his son did finish one of the simpler machines and that it was used in actuarial accounting for many years. But Babbage himself died in 1871 unaware of how much he had done for the computer technology that would begin to flower a few short decades later.
Singlehandedly he had given the computer art the idea of programming and of sequential control, a memory in addition to the arithmetic unit he called a “mill,” and even an automatic readout such as is now standard on modern computers. Truly, the modern computer was “Babbage’s dream come true.”
Symbolic Logic
Concurrently with the great strides being made with mechanical computers that could handle mathematics, much work was also being done with the formalizing of the logic. As hinted vaguely in the syllogisms of the early philosophers, thinking did seem amenable to being diagrammed, much like grammar. Augustus De Morgan devised numerical logic systems, and George Boole set up the logic system that has come to be known as Boolean algebra in which reasoning becomes positive or negative terms that can be manipulated algebraically to give valid answers.
John Venn put the idea of logic into pictures, and simple pictures at that. His symbology looks for all the world like the three interlocking rings of a well-known ale. These rings stand for the subject, midterm, and predicate of the older Aristotelian syllogism. By shading the various circles according to the major and minor premises, the user of Venn circles can see the logical result by inspection. Implicit in the scheme is the possibility of a mechanical or electrical analogy to this visual method, and it was not long until mathematicians began at least on the mechanical kind. Among these early logic mechanizers, surprisingly, was Lewis Carroll who of course was mathematician Charles L. Dodgson before he became a writer.
Carroll, who was a far busier man than most of us ever guess, marketed a “Game of Logic,” with a board and colored cardboard counters that handled problems like the following:
All teetotalers like sugar.
No nightingale drinks wine.
By arranging the counters on Carroll’s game board so that: All M are X, and No Y is not-M, we learn that No Y is not-X! This tells the initiate logician that no nightingale dislikes sugar; a handy piece of information for bird-fancier and sugar-broker alike.
Lewis Carroll’s “Symbolic Logic.”
Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, was only slightly less controversial than his prime minister, William Pitt. Scientifically he was far out too, writing books on electrical theory, inventing steamboats, microscopes, and printing presses among an odd variety of projects; he also became interested in mechanical logic and designed the “Stanhope Demonstrator,” a contrivance like a checkerboard with sliding panels. By properly manipulating the demonstrator he could solve such problems as:
Eight of ten children are bright.
Four of these children are boys.
What are the minimum and maximum number of bright boys? A simple sliding of scales on the Stanhope Demonstrator shows that two must be boys and as many as four may be. This clever device could also work out probability problems such as how many heads and tails will come up in so many tosses of a coin.
In 1869 William S. Jevons, an English economist and expert logician, built a logic machine. His was not the first, of course, but it had a unique distinction in that it solved problems faster than the human brain could! Using Boolean algebra principles, he built a “logical abacus” and then even a “logical piano.” By simply pressing the keys of this machine, the user could make the answer appear on its face. It is of interest that Jevons thought his machine of no practical use, since complex logical questions seldom arose in everyday life! Life, it seems, was simpler in 1869 than it is today, and we should be grateful that Jevons pursued his work through sheer scientific interest.
More sophisticated than the Jevons piano, the logic machine invented in America by Allan Marquand could handle four terms and do problems like the following:
There are four schoolgirls, Anna, Bertha, Cora, and Dora.
When Anna or Bertha, or both, remain home, Cora is at home.
When Bertha is out, Anna is out.
Whenever Cora is at home, Anna is too.
What can we tell about Dora?
The machine is smart enough to tell us that when Dora is at home the other three girls are all at home or out. The same thing is true when Dora is out.
The Census Taker
Moving from the sophistication of such logic devices, we find a tremendous advance in mechanical computers spurred by such a mundane chore as the census. The 1880 United States census required seven years for compiling; and that with only 50 million heads to reckon. It was plain to see that shortly a ten-year census would be impossible of completion unless something were done to cut the birth rate or speed the counting. Dr. Herman Hollerith was the man who did something about it, and as a result the 1890 census, with 62 million people counted, took only one-third the time of the previous tally.
Hollerith, a statistician living in Buffalo, New York, may or may not have heard the old saw about statistics being able to support anything—including the statisticians, but there was a challenge in the rapid growth of population that appealed to the inventor in him and he set to work. He came up with a card punched with coded holes, a card much like that used by Jacquard on his looms, and by Babbage on the dream computer that became a nightmare. But Hollerith did not meet the fate of his predecessors. Not stoned, or doomed to die a failure, Hollerith built his card machines and contracted with the government to do the census work. “It was a good paying business,” he said. It was indeed, and his early census cards would some day be known generically as “IBM cards.”
While Jacquard and Babbage of necessity used mechanical devices with their punched cards, Hollerith added the magic of electricity to his card machine, building in essence the first electrical computing machine. The punched cards were floated across a pool of mercury, and telescoping pins in the reading head dropped through the holes. As they contacted the mercury, an electrical circuit was made and another American counted. Hollerith did not stop with census work. Sagely he felt there must be commercial applications for his machines and sold two of the leading railroads on a punched-card accounting system. His firm merged with others to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, and finally International Business Machines. The term “Hollerith Coding” is still familiar today.
International Business Machines Corp.
Hollerith tabulating machine of 1890, forerunner of modern computers.
Edison was illuminating the world and the same electrical power was brightening the future of computing machines. As early as 1915 the Ford Instrument Company was producing in quantity a device known as “Range Keeper Mark I,” thought to be the first electrical-analog computer. In 1920, General Electric built a “short-circuit calculating board” that was an analog or model of the real circuits being tested. Westinghouse came up with an “alternating-current network analyzer” in 1933, and this analog computer was found to be a powerful tool for mathematics.
International Business Machines Corp.
A vertical punched-card sorter used in 1908.
While scientists were putting the machines to work, writers continued to prophesy doom when the mechanical man took over. Mary W. Shelley’s Frankenstein created a monster from a human body; a monster that in time would take his master’s name and father a long horrid line of other fictional monsters. Ambrose G. Bierce wrote of a diabolical chess-playing machine that was human enough to throttle the man who beat him at a game. But it remained for the Czech playwright Karel Čapek to give the world the name that has stuck to the mechanical man. In Čapek’s 1921 play, R.U.R., for Rossum’s Universal Robots, we are introduced to humanlike workers grown in vats of synthetic protoplasm. Robota is a Czech word meaning compulsory service, and apparently these mechanical slaves did not take to servitude, turning on their masters and killing them. Robot is generally accepted now to mean a mobile thinking machine capable of action. Before the advent of the high-speed electronic computer it had little likelihood of stepping out of the pages of a novel or movie script.
As early as 1885, Allan Marquand had proposed an electrical logic machine as an improvement over his simple mechanically operated model, but it was 1936 before such a device was actually built. In that year Benjamin Burack, a member of Chicago’s Roosevelt College psychology department, built and demonstrated his “Electrical Logic Machine.” Able to test all syllogisms, the Burack machine was unique in another respect. It was the first of the portable electrical computers.
The compatibility of symbolic logic and electrical network theory was becoming evident at about this time. The idea that yes-no corresponded to on-off was beautifully simple, and in 1938 there appeared in one of the learned journals what may fairly be called a historic paper. Appearing in Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” was written by Claude Shannon and was based on his thesis for the M.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a year earlier. One of its important implications was that the programming of a computer was more a logical than an arithmetical operation. Shannon had laid the groundwork for logical computer design; his work made it possible to teach the machine not only to add but also to think. Another monumental piece of work by Shannon was that on information theory, which revolutionized the science of communications. The author is now on the staff of the electronics research laboratory at M.I.T.
Two enterprising Harvard undergraduates put Shannon’s ideas to work on their problems in the symbolic logic class they were taking. Called a Kalin-Burkhart machine for its builders, this electrical logic machine did indeed work, solving the students’ homework assignments and saving them much tedious paperwork. Interestingly, when certain logical questions were posed for the machine, its circuits went into oscillation, making “a hell of a racket” in its frustration. The builders called this an example of “Russell’s paradox.” A typical logical paradox is that of the barber who shaved all men who didn’t shave themselves—who shaves the barber? Or of the condemned man permitted to make a last statement. If the statement is true, he will be beheaded; if false, he will hang. The man says, “I shall be hanged,” and thus confounds his executioners as well as logic, since if he is hanged, the statement is indeed true, and he should have been beheaded. If he is beheaded, the statement is false, and he should have been hanged instead.
World War II, with its pressingly complex technological problems, spurred computer work mightily. Men like Vannevar Bush, then at Harvard, produced analog computers called “differential analyzers” which were useful in solving mathematics involved in design of aircraft and in ballistics problems.
A computer built by General Electric for the gunsights on the World War II B-29 bomber is typical of applications of analog devices for computing and predicting, and is also an example of early airborne use of computing devices. Most computers, however, were sizable affairs. One early General Electric analog machine, described as a hundred feet long, indicates the trend toward the “giant brain” concept.
Even with the sophistication attained, these computers were hardly more than extensions of mechanical forerunners. In other words, gears and cams properly proportioned and actuated gave the proper answers whether they were turned by a manual crank or an electrical motor. The digital computer, which had somehow been lost in the shuffle of interest in computers, was now appearing on the scientific horizon, however, and in this machine would flower all the gains in computers from the abacus to electrical logic machines.
The Modern Computer
Many men worked on the digital concept. Aiken, who built the electromechanical Mark I at Harvard, and Williams in England are representative. But two scientists at the University of Pennsylvania get the credit for the world’s first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, a 30-ton, 150-kilowatt machine using vacuum tubes and semiconductor diodes and handling discrete numbers instead of continuous values as in the analog machine. The modern computer dates from ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.
Remington Rand UNIVAC
ENIAC in operation. This was the first electronic digital computer.
Shannon’s work and the thinking of others in the field indicated the power of the digital, yes-no, approach. A single switch can only be on or off, but many such switches properly interconnected can do amazing things. At first these switches were electromechanical; in the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC, completed for the government in 1946, vacuum tubes in the Eccles-Jordan “flip-flop” circuit married electronics and the computer. The progeny have been many, and their generations faster than those of man. ENIAC has been followed by BINAC and MANIAC, and even JOHNNIAC. UNIVAC and RECOMP and STRETCH and LARC and a whole host of other machines have been produced. At the start of 1962 there were some 6,000 electronic digital computers in service; by year’s end there will be 8,000. The golden age of the computer may be here, but as we have seen, it did not come overnight. The revolution has been slow, gathering early momentum with the golden wheels of Homer’s mechanical information-seeking vehicles that brought the word from the gods. Where it goes from here depends on us, and maybe on the computer itself.
“Theory is the guide to practice, and practice is the ratification and life of theory.”
—John Weiss