John William Mauchly

1907-1980

American Computer Engineer

John W. Mauchly was a pioneer of modern computing. In the 1940s Mauchly headed the project that produced the ENIAC, the world's first general purpose electronic digital computer. He also co-founded the nation's first commercial computer manufacturer.

John William Mauchly was in born on August 30, 1907, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where his father worked as a physicist at the prestigious Carnegie Institute. Mauchly received a solid scientific education at the McKinley Technical High School, and in 1925 was awarded the Engineering Scholarship of the State of Maryland. Two years after enrolling in an electrical engineering program at Johns Hopkins University, Mauchly transferred directly into a graduate program in physics. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1932.

Like many depression-era academics, Mauchly had difficulty finding a position at a major research institution. He ended up accepting a job teaching physics at Ursinus, a small liberal arts college located outside of Philadelphia. Faced with a lack of resources and laboratory equipment, Mauchly turned his sights on meteorology, a field in which experimental data was inexpensive and plentiful. Mauchly soon discovered that analyzing this abundance of data required massive amounts of manual computation. He began to consider ways in which he might use electronics to automate these tedious calculations. In 1941 he enrolled in a special course in defense engineering taught at the nearby Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania. Although the course was intended to teach young engineers to operate advanced electronic weapons and equipment, for Mauchly it served as a crash course in the logic and circuitry required for electronic computing.

Upon completion of the program, Mauchly was offered a position at the Moore School as an adjunct instructor. In 1942 he drafted a proposal outlining an electronic digital computer designed for general numeric computation. His proposal was enthusiastically received by Lieutenant Herman Goldstine of the United States Navy Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. Goldstine encouraged the Moore School and the Ordnance Department to fund Mauchly's proposal, and in 1943 Mauchly began work on the machine that would come to be known as the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).

Working closely with the brilliant Moore School engineer J. Presper Eckert (1919-1985), Mauchly designed a general-purpose computer capable of performing over 5,000 additions or 300 multiplications per second. Together Eckert and Mauchly overcame what was considered to be the major barrier to the construction of a useful computer: the unreliability of vacuum tube circuits. Although the design of the ENIAC was almost certainly influenced by the earlier work of Iowa State College professor John Atanasoff (1903-1995), whom Mauchly had visited to discuss computers in 1941, the construction of a working electronic computer was, in 1946, a unique and extraordinary achievement.

In spite of the success of the ENIAC (or perhaps because of it), Mauchly and Eckert were forced to resign from the Moore School in a dispute over patent rights. In 1946 they founded the Electronic Controls Company and began work on a small mobile computer for the Northrop Aircraft Company. Two years later they received a Census Bureau contract to build a larger, general-purpose computer. The first UNIVAC (UNIVersal Automatic Computer) was completed in 1951, and for a short time the name UNIVAC was synonymous with computer. By that time, however, Mauchly and Eckert had run out of capital and sold their company to the Remington Rand Corporation. Mauchly was never really content working at Rand, and he left the company in 1959.

John Mauchly spent the remainder of his career working as a consultant and serving as the president of several small technology companies. For his role in the invention of the computer Mauchly was awarded many honors, among them the Potts Medal of the Franklin Institute and the Harry Goode Medal of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. He died in his home in Ambler, Pennsylvania, in 1980 at the age of 72.

NATHAN L. ENSMENGER