John Presper Eckert is prominent for his role as chief engineer that created the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) project during World War II at the University of Pennsylvania. Later he assisted in establishing one of the first computer companies in America and also oversaw technical development of its foremost commercial computers.
Background
Eckert was the only child of real estate developer born on April 9, 1919, in Philadelphia. Eckert’s father, John Eckert was a very prominent person in Philadelphia, and Ethel Hallowell Eckert, was his mother. With his family, he traveled extensively abroad and in the United States he visited all the contiguous 48 states, Alaska and other key foreign cities. Eckert revealed from an early age a strong interest in electronics. He tinkered with phonographs and radios.
Education
Eckert’s parents valued education and this was apparent as he did his schooling in a private prestigious school, William Penn Charter School. Besides his formal schooling, he worked with the staff at Philo Farnsworth’s television laboratory and Franklin Institute on electronics projects.
Eckert initially wished to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) electrical engineering. His father enrolled him at the nearby University of Pennsylvania at a business oriented Wharton School. He joined the Wharton institute in 1937, but it did not suit his interests and thus he got transferred to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert graduated in 1941.
Career
After graduation in 1941, Eckert considered offers from RCA and Philco Laboratories. Nevertheless, he did not move and pursed as a teaching assistant at the Moore School. His one of the foremost assignments was the summer course laboratory supervisor in the Moore School and this was conducted for the military. There he met a physics professor, John Mauchly, who was teaching at a nearby Ursinus college and he became Eckert’s colleague and lifelong partner.
Eckert, twenty two, and Mauchly, then thirty four, spent hours discussing engineering and scientific topics. They were both fascinated by the electronic circuits speed and its different ways of using it to improve calculation and measurement. Mauchly was also hired as an instructor by the Moore School and Eckert got involved in various other projects. He spent his time notably on Moore School contract for a switching amplifier with the MIT Radiatino Laboratory. He checked for moving target indicator timing equipment and thus developed a device known as mercury delay line. This device used acoustic wave patterns in mercury and measured the intervals between pulses. He once again later in his career returned to this idea.
Eckert worked with the Moore School’s specialized piece of equipment, differential analyzer that was employed to compute differential equations solutions. The Moore School Dean convinced the military to get one for the school and the staff of his school was cooperating in computing firing tables with Ballistics Research Laboratory, the U.S. Army, even before Pearl Harbor.
Eckert joined a group working with analyzer and started trying to improve with electronic components its performance. The team added photocells, with his assistance and it had more than four hundred vacuum tubes, server motors and generators, that improved dramatically the speed and the performance, both of the analyzer.
The requirements grew faster for more computations and the staff pursued other innovations. Mauchly, in August 1942, dictated an electronic computer (sic) a memorandum that will be precisely accurate than differential analyzer and is also faster than it and also faster than the hand calculating desktop calculators. This was continued with Eckert as ongoing discussion about components and electronic circuits. Mauchly submitted to the Moore School Dean the memorandum, but they did not find it impressive and failed to act on it.
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.
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). 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.
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.