Clifford Edward Berry | Biography

Clifford Edward Berry was, along with John Vincent Atanasoff, the inventor of the first electronic computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, produced between 1939 and 1942 at the Iowa State University.

Clifford Edward Berry was born in Gladbrook, Iowa, in 1918, where his father ran the town electrical shop. The shop was to provide a massive impact on the young Clifford as it soon became the first place in the area with a radio. The shop radio had been built by Clifford's father, Frederick, and it proved to be very popular among the local townsfolk. By the age of 11 Clifford had built his own ham radio. Clifford excelled at school and was moved ahead to provide him with an intellectual challenge. A temporary move to Marengo ended in disaster when Frederick Berry was shot to death by a disgruntled employee. The family remained in Marengo until Clifford was ready to attend Iowa State College, at which point they all moved to the college town of Ames. Here Clifford was to realise a life long ambition when he studied Electrical Engineering, receiving a B.S. in 1939 at the age of 21.

His professor of Electrical Engineering, Harold Anderson, was impressed by the skill of the young Berry, and, when John Vincent Atanasoff asked for a promising student, Anderson had no hesitations about recommending Berry to work on Atanasoff's electrical computer project. By December 1939 the prototype electronic digital computer was completed and worked well enough to secure a grant to construct a full-size, fully functioning model for solving systems of equations. The 1939 prototype was the first computer to make use of electricity, capacitors, vacuum tubes, and a binary number system of notation. The capacitors were held on an electrically charged rotating drum that acted as the memory of the machine.

To protect their intellectual rights, a copy of a 35-page document entitled Computing Machines for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations was sent to the Iowa State College lawyer who patented all of the relevant ideas. The Atanasoff-Berry machine had many features that were innovative at the time but are now regarded as basic systems--these include a separation of memory and computing functions, parallel processing, binary arithmetic, and regenerative memory. The machine, which was finally completed in 1942, weighed over 700 pounds, was the size of a large desk, had 300 vacuum tubes, and over a mile of electrical cable. It was housed in the basement of the physics department at Iowa State College where it performed one operation every 15 seconds. This figure is dwarfed by modern computers, but at the time it was regarded as incredible.

Upon completion of Berry's M.S. in Physics in 1942 (at Iowa) he married Martha Jean Reed. Then, in 1942, with America entering World War II, they both followed in Atanasoff's footsteps and worked in the defence industry. Berry moved to Pasadena, California, where he started working for the Consolidated Engineering Corporation. It was while employed there that Berry completed his Ph.D. in 1948. The Ph.D. award was from Iowa State College under a special arrangement allowing Berry to work towards his higher degree at a site removed from the college. Staying with the Consolidated Engineering Corporation Berry became Chief Physicist in 1949, Assistant Director of Research in 1952, and Director of Engineering of the Analytical and Control Division in 1959. In 1963 he moved to New York to take up the post of Manager of Advanced Development at the Vacuum Electronics Corporation. Unfortunately he was in this position for less than a month before dying suddenly in October 1963.

In 1973 John Presper Eckert Jr. and John W. Mauchly patented a digital computer, but a law suit successfully showed that they had infringed many of the patents produced by Atanasoff and Berry between 1939 and 1942.

Throughout his life Berry had 43 separate patents, the majority relating directly to vacuum tubes and early computer technology (the remainder were in mass spectrometry, which had been the core of his doctoral thesis). Clifford Berry was a member of many learned societies but his work was never recognised by the granting of awards--his early death at 45 is probably the only reason he did not gain a list of awards as long as his list of patents. The original Atanasoff-Berry computer was destined for greater things, but the outbreak of the Second World War halted research, and eventually it was dismantled when the physics department needed extra storage space. Berry's most lasting contribution will always be the co-invention of the world's first electronic digital computer while he was still a graduate student.