Today, a eulogy for a machine. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
It sometimes feels as though
the computer came into being only yesterday. No
doubt, it has come into its own during the
lifetimes of today's college students. But serious
attempts to do complicated machine calculation were
under way well before WW-II. The most important
pre-war effort was started in the 1920s by Vannevar
Bush -- Bush who went on to be a presidential
advisor and the great technological visionary of
fifty years ago.
Bush's work culminated in 1942 with the dedication
of his huge Rockefeller Differential
Analyzer at MIT -- a one-hundred-ton machine
with 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 motors. Bush's
Analyzer was an analog computer. Analog
computers follow physical processes that obey the
equations we're trying to solve -- in this case,
mixed electrical and mechanical processes.
Digital computers break computations down
into sequences of additions and subtractions. They
solve equations by doing a whole lot of simple
arithmetic.
Bush's Analyzer quickly fell under the pall of
WW-II secrecy, but only after the head of
electrical engineering at MIT had proclaimed it
would "mark the beginning of a new era in
mechanized calculus," and MIT president Compton had
announced it would be "one of the great scientific
instruments of modern times."
When this wonderful device emerged from secrecy
after the war, it'd gone from triumph to
obsolescence in only five years. The government had
secretly been pouring huge sums of money into
developing the ENIAC digital computer to solve
artillery fire control problems. The new breed of
high-speed digital computers had simply brushed
Bush's Analyzer aside.
Historian Larry Owens looks at this fall from grace
and asks sadly, "How does one tell the story of a
machine?" Owens concludes that the real importance
of the fall is that it so clearly illustrates a
change in the character of engineering after the
war.
Bush, he says, represented a kind of engineering
still in contact with the workshop. His computer
was made of complex mechanical and electrical
elements. It thought the way prewar engineers
thought -- in physical, graphical terms. The modern
digital computer speaks in a totally different
mathematical language to the more abstract and
mathematical breed of postwar engineers.
We didn't realize it then, but the failure of
Bush's machine served notice that our work as
engineers had changed. We're only now beginning to
see that it was almost a kind of android,
incorporating those human values of physical
intuition and intimacy with process -- values we're
trying to rediscover in our work today.
The best comes back in technology. The best finds
new forms, and it resurfaces. So if Bush's Analyzer
is dead, I certainly hope that what it represents
is not.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
