Joseph Desch
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Joseph Desch (1907–August 3, 1987) was an American engineer. During World War II, he worked on the US version of the bombe, a codebreaking machine designed to help solve German Enigma cipher messages.
Desch was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1907 to a Roman Catholic family of wagon makers. He attended the Catholic elementary school of his family's German neighborhood parish, then won a scholarship to the preparatory (high) school of the University of Dayton. While attending college at University of Dayton, Desch worked evenings as an inspector at Day-Fan Electric in Dayton, supervising radio testing and production.
After graduation in 1926 he began to work at General Motors Radio where he supervised radio testing, and met Robert Mumma, who quickly began a friendship which lasted over 50 years. After supervising the liquidation of General Motors Radio in 1933, he conducted teletype communications research for Telecom Laboratories, a company financed by Charles Kettering of automotive pioneering fame through General Motors and Delco. Two years later he was hired by Harry Williams to be foreman on the Process Laboratory at the Frigidaire Division of General Motors, once again in Dayton. He then followed Williams to the National Cash Register Company in 1938 to form the innovative Electrical Research Laboratory at the direction of Edward A. Deeds, then president of the company.
At Deeds' direction he conducted research to implement pioneering ideas regarding the use of tubes and circuitry in counting devices, with the idea of developing high speed mathematical computing machines to augment or replace the Company's mechanical machines. The idea of applying electronic counting to calculating mechanisms occurred to him when reading of a thyratron (gas-filled tube) counting ring of five places (5 digits, not five orders) developed by English scientist Wynn Williams.
In 1940 his research in the area of computing machines made him prime candidate to evaluate the design for a totally electronic deciphering device created by a group of MIT academics used for codebreaking. While not an expert in cryptanalysis, he gave the opinion that the implementation of the design was not possible, primarily because of the large number of tubes necessary. Believing that the American version of the bombe decryption machine could be built using mechanical and electronic components, and recognizing the NCR Corporation's past accomplishments, the Navy moved ahead with a contract with NCR.
In 1943 Desch's team, working in Building 26 of NCR's Dayton campus, had success in creating their own decoding machine for breaking the Enigma code. Later he was asked to help break Japanese codes. In the Pacific the information from the decoded messages was used to implement large scale defeats of the Japanese. The loss of life affected him to the point that he quit the program but he did later help with problems his staff was unable to solve.
In 1946 Joe filed an application for a patent on an electronic calculator designed by him and Bob Mumma, as part of an application initiated in March of 1940. This brought about three intereferences filed in the US Patent Office between their application and one by Arthur Dickinson of IBM.
Eventually these were settled in favor of Desch, in part because he proved Dickinson's design unworkable, and gave Desch and Mumma the first patent on the modern digital computer. His career after this point was noteworthy, and he was especially proud in later years of his work with Bob Mumma in the development of the NCR 304, the first completely solid state computer. He continued to be an integral part of NCR until his retirement in 1972.
For his efforts in building the Bombe, he was awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit by President Harry S. Truman in 1947.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Dayton Daily News, Dayton's Code Breakers.
- Jim DeBrosse and Colin Burke, The Secret in Building 26: The Untold Story of America's Ultra War Against the U-boat Enigma Codes, 2004, ISBN 0-375-50807-4.
- Dayton Codebreakers Web site, DaytonCodebreakers.org. Information about Desch, personnel of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory.
