J. Presper Eckert

J. Presper Eckert
Born April 9, 1919
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died June 3, 1995(1995-06-03) (aged 76)
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania
Nationality American
Occupation electrical engineer
Known for ENIAC

John Adam Presper "Pres" Eckert Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory.

Contents

Education

Eckert was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a wealthy real estate developer John Eckert and was raised in a large house in Philadelphia's Germantown section. During elementary school, he was driven by chauffeur to William Penn Charter School, and in high school joined the Engineer's Club of Philadelphia and spent afternoons at the electronics laboratory of television inventor Philo Farnsworth in Chestnut Hill. He placed second in the country on the math portion of the College Board examination.[1]

Eckert initially enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to study business at the encouragement of his parents, but in 1937 transferred to Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. In 1940, at age 21, Eckert applied for his first patent, "Light Modulating Methods and Apparatus".[2] At the Moore School, Eckert participated in research on radar timing, made improvements to the speed and precision of the Moore School's differential analyzer, and in 1941 became a laboratory assistant for a defense training summer course in electronics offered through the Moore School by the United States Department of War.

Invention of the ENIAC

Dr. John Mauchly, then chairman of the physics department of nearby Ursinus College, was a student in the summer electronics course, and the following fall secured a teaching position at the Moore School. Mauchly's proposal for building an electronic digital computer using vacuum tubes, many times faster and more accurate than the differential analyzer for computing ballistics tables for artillery, caught the interest of the Moore School's Army liaison, Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, and on April 9, 1943 was formally presented in a meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground to director Colonel Leslie Simon, Oswald Veblen, and others. A contract was awarded for Moore School's construction of the proposed computing machine, which would be named ENIAC, and Eckert was made the project's chief engineer. ENIAC was completed in late 1945 and was unveiled to the public in February, 1946.

Many women were also involved in the invention of the ENIAC. But because they were women, they did not get the recognition they needed for the help they provided in creating the first electronic computer.[3]

In 2002, for his work on ENIAC he was inducted, posthumously, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[4]

Entrepreneurship

Both Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School in March 1946 over a dispute involving assignment of claims on intellectual property developed at the University. In that year, the University of Pennsylvania adopted a new patent policy to protect the intellectual purity of the research it sponsored, which would have required Eckert and Mauchly to assign all their patents to the University had they stayed beyond March.

Eckert and Mauchly's agreement with the University of Pennsylvania was that Eckert and Mauchly retained the patent rights to the ENIAC but the University could license it to the government and non-profit organizations. The University wanted to change the agreement so that they would also have commercial rights to the patent.

In the following months, Eckert and Mauchly started up the Electronic Control Company which built the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). One of the major advances of this machine, which was used from August 1950, was that data was stored on magnetic tape. The Electronic Control Company soon became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and it received an order from the National Bureau of Standards to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). He was awarded the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1949. In 1950, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation ran into financial troubles and was acquired by Remington Rand Corporation. The UNIVAC I was finished on December 21, 1950.

In 1968, "For pioneering and containuing contributions in creating, developing, and improving the high-speed electronic digital computer", he was awarded the National Medal of Science.[5]

Later career

Eckert remained with Remington Rand and became an executive within the company. He continued with Remington Rand as it merged with the Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys in 1986. In 1989, Eckert retired from Unisys but continued to act as a consultant for the company. He died of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Some computer historians—and Eckert himself—believed that the widely-adopted term "von Neumann architecture" should properly be known as the "Eckert Architecture," since the stored-program concept central to the von Neumann architecture had already been developed at the Moore School by the time von Neumann arrived on the scene in 1944-1945.

References

  1. ↑ McCartney, Scott (1999). ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer. New York: Walker and Company. ISBN 0-8027-1348-3. 
  2. ↑ http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT2283545&id=R7ZuAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4
  3. ↑ Light, Jennifer S. "When Computers Were Women".
  4. ↑ National Inventors Hall of Fame
  5. ↑ National Science Foundation - The President's National Medal of Science

External links

United States National Medal of Science laureates
 
Engineering sciences
1960s

1962: Theodore von Karman · 1963: Vannevar Bush · John Robinson Pierce · 1964: Charles S. Draper · 1965: Hugh L. Dryden · Clarence L. Johnson · Warren K. Lewis · 1966: Claude E. Shannon · 1967: Edwin H. Land · Igor I. Sikorsky · 1968: J. Presper Eckert · Nathan M. Newmark · 1969: Jack St. Clair Kilby
1970s

1970: George E. Mueller · 1973: Harold E. Edgerton · Richard T. Whitcomb · 1974: Rudolf Kompfner · Ralph Brazelton Peck · Abel Wolman · 1975: Manson Benedict · William Hayward Pickering · Frederick E. Terman · Wernher von Braun · 1976: Morris Cohen · Peter C. Goldmark · Erwin Wilhelm Müller · 1979: Emmett N. Leith · Raymond D. Mindlin · Robert N. Noyce · Earl R. Parker · Simon Ramo
1980s

1982: Edward H. Heinemann · Donald L. Katz · 1983: William R. Hewlett · George M. Low · John G. Trump · 1986: Hans Wolfgang Liepmann · T. Y. Lin · Bernard M. Oliver · 1987: R. Byron Bird · H. Bolton Seed · Ernst Weber · 1988: Daniel C. Drucker · Willis M. Hawkins · George W. Housner · 1989: Harry George Drickamer · Herbert E. Grier
1990s

1990: Mildred S. Dresselhaus · Nick Holonyak Jr. · 1991: George Heilmeier · Luna B. Leopold · H. Guyford Stever · 1992: Calvin F. Quate · John Roy Whinnery · 1993: Alfred Y. Cho · 1994: Ray W. Clough · 1995: Hermann A. Haus · 1996: James L. Flanagan · C. Kumar N. Patel · 1998: Eli Ruckenstein · 1999: Kenneth N. Stevens
2000s

2000: Yuan-Cheng B. Fung · 2001: Andreas Acrivos · 2002: Leo Beranek · 2003: John M. Prausnitz · 2004: Edwin N. Lightfoot · 2005: Jan D. Achenbach · Tobin J. Marks · 2006: Robert S. Langer · 2007: David J. Wineland · 2008: Rudolf E. Kalman