Background
John Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was one of two children of research physicist Sebastian Jacob Mauchly and Rachel Scheidemantel, both of German ancestry.
John Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was one of two children of research physicist Sebastian Jacob Mauchly and Rachel Scheidemantel, both of German ancestry.
Mauchly attended high school in Chevy Chase, Md. , while his father was a department head at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D. C. He entered Johns Hopkins University in 1925 to study engineering and was permitted to begin graduate study in physics in 1927 without receiving an undergraduate degree. He received his doctorate in 1932, writing a dissertation on the molecular spectroscopy of carbon monoxide.
Mauchly taught physics at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa. , from 1933 to 1941. He became interested in statistical analysis and weather prediction, which led him to study the existing electromechanical devices for making large numerical calculations. In 1941, Mauchly joined the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He took a defense training course in electrical engineering, where he met John Presper Eckert, a twenty-two-year-old graduate instructor who had a similar interest in electronic calculations. The Moore School had contracts with the United States Army Ballistics Research Laboratory to construct electromechanical machines to calculate artillery firing tables. Mauchly wrote a seminal proposal in 1942, "The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating, " which proposed a new type of completely electronic computational device. In April 1943, the army contracted with Mauchly and Eckert to implement the proposal. Mauchly and Eckert led a fifty-person team that constructed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first digital computer. Mauchly developed the mathematical theory and specifications for the new machine; Eckert supplied the engineering expertise, constructing ENIAC out of parts of existing IBM punch-card tabulators, vacuum tubes, and switches. "Get a machine out fast with off-the-shelf parts, that was the name of the game for ENIAC, " was how Eckert described their work. Construction of ENIAC was completed in December 1945. It weighed thirty tons, used nearly 18, 000 vacuum tubes, and cost $486, 000, but it performed numerical calculations one thousand times faster than previous electromechanical calculators. The army moved it to Aberdeen (Md. ) Proving Ground in 1947 and used it for nearly ten years to design wind tunnels, study cosmic rays, and make other calculations before retiring it in 1955. While completing work on ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly also began work on another computer for the army, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator (EDVAC). After completion by others at the Moore School in 1952, EDVAC used only 2, 000 vacuum tubes but was several times faster than ENIAC. Mauchly and Eckert had filed patent applications for their computer technology in 1944. In early 1946 the University of Pennsylvania adopted a patent policy that required faculty to relinquish all patent rights or leave the university. Mauchly and Eckert resigned from the faculty on March 22, 1946. The pair founded the world's first commercial computer-manufacturing firm, the Electronic Control Company, setting up business in an office over a clothing store in Philadelphia. Eckert's family of Philadelphia real estate developers provided the initial funding, and other relatives and friends invested several hundred thousand dollars. The pair changed the company's name to the Eckert Mauchly Corporation in 1947. Eckert and Mauchly marketed a proposed Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), which would contain fully stored programs with software subroutines and use magnetic-tape input and output. They obtained contracts with the Bureau of the Census, Prudential Insurance Company, and the A. C. Nielsen Company. Designing and constructing the new computer took much longer than expected, however, and the two underestimated the amount of money necessary to finance their company's initial years of operation. The company also contracted with the Northrop Corporation in 1947 to construct a small experimental computer for the guided missile program, the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). This was really two computers working in tandem, each one checking on the other, which created a "fail-safe" system using internal stored programs. During this period, Mauchly also influenced the field of computer software by developing one of the first high-level computer languages, short code. This allowed computer programs to be written in mnemonic symbols of alphanumeric text rather than in the binary code of machine language. Cost overruns, delays in payments, and other development problems caused difficulties for the new company. These came to a head when the company's major investor died in a plane crash in 1949. The following year Mauchly and Eckert sold their company to the Remington Rand Corporation, receiving a payment for their patent rights and salaried positions of $18, 000 for the next eight years. Their company, now a division of Remington Rand, completed work on UNIVAC I in March 1951 and delivered the first UNIVAC to the Bureau of the Census in June 1951. The computer had only 5, 000 vacuum tubes, but it was twenty-five times faster than ENIAC. It gained nationwide prominence when the Columbia Broadcasting System used it for a televised prediction of the winner of the 1952 presidential election. A total of forty-six UNIVACs were built by Remington Rand, which became Sperry Rand in 1955 and then UNISYS Corporation in 1986. Mauchly was Sperry Rand's director of UNIVAC applications research until the late 1950's, when he lost his security clearance because of attendance at left-wing meetings while in college. Sperry Rand offered him a position in sales, but he resigned in 1959 to form his own consulting firm, Mauchly Associates. He continued to develop computers and created the critical path method (CPM) for computer scheduling. He founded Dynatrend in 1967, which offered consulting services in weather forecasting and stock market trends. Mauchly rejoined Sperry Rand as a consultant in 1973. He died undergoing heart surgery, in Abington, Pa.
John Mauchly along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Mauchly received numerous award and honors. He was a life member of the Franklin Institute, the National Academy of Engineering and the Society for Advancement of Management. He was elected a Fellow of the IRE, a predecessor society of IEEE, in 1957, and was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He received an LLD (Hon) degree from the University of Pennsylvania and aDSc(Hon) degree from Ursinus College. He was a recipient of the Philadelphia Award, the Scott Medal, the Goode Medal of AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies), the Pennsylvania Award, the Emanual R. Piore Award, the Howard N. Potts Medal, and numerous other awards. In 1979 the Association of Computing Machinery chose to name its prestigious Eckert-Mauchly Award in their honor.
Although unsuccessful as entrepreneurs, Mauchly and Eckert achieved fame as the inventors of the world's first electronic digital computer. Mauchly's later years were marred by litigation concerning the patent rights to ENIAC. In 1973 a federal judge ruled that patent rights held by Mauchly and Eckert were invalid because their innovations appeared to be based on earlier work by Iowa State University professor John Vincent Atanasoff. Many members of the computer science community criticized the judge's conclusions and continued to regard Eckert and Mauchly as the fathers of the electronic computer.
In 1948, Mauchly married his second wife, Kathleen McNulty, a mathematician who had been a programmer on the ENIAC project. His first wife, Mary Walzl, whom he had married on December 30, 1930, had died in a drowning accident in Atlantic City, N. J. , in 1946.
