John William Mauchly, a physicist and computer engineer, is widely credited with co-inventing two of the most important early computers. With J. Presper Eckert, Mauchly invented the first general-purpose digital electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). Also with Eckert, Mauchly developed the first commercial digital electronic computer, the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). Their work together effectively began the commercial computer revolution in America and throughout the world.
Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Sebastian J. Mauchly and Rachel Scheidemantel Mauchly. His father was an electrical engineer who, in 1915, moved the family east to accept a position as head of the Section of Terrestrial Electricity and Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. Mauchly attended the Johns Hopkins University from 1925 to 1927, when he was admitted to the graduate school there without an undergraduate degree. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins in 1932. He spent another year there as a research assistant, and then in 1933 he was appointed head of the physics department at Ursinus College, near Philadelphia.
Mauchly had a strong early interest in meteorology, but he found studying the weather to be particularly difficult because it took so much time to coordinate all the data. Computations could only be done by hand or with the primitive calculating machines then available. Interested in using statistics to prove the effect of sun flares on the weather, he began trying to develop a better machine for calculating. During the late 1930s, Mauchly began to experiment with vacuum tubes in place of the slower gears and wheels used in mechanical computing devices.
Mauchly did not publish anything on his experiments until December of 1940, when he gave a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science on using computing machines to solve meteorology problems. After presenting his paper, he was approached by John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, who told him he was building an electronic computer. In June of 1941, Mauchly went to Iowa State to see Atanasoff's computer--a visit which was later used against his patent claim that he and Eckert had invented the first computer. Atanasoff said later that Mauchly had been fascinated by it; Mauchly said that seeing the computer had been of little value. It had run slowly and had only done simple arithmetic functions.
When the United States entered World War II, Mauchly agreed to study electrical engineering at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in order to further the war effort. It was there he met Eckert and they began their famous collaboration. The Moore School had already developed one of the most advanced electro-mechanical computational devices in the world, the differential analyzer. At the beginning of the war, the United States Army had awarded the school a contract to compute the tables of trajectories for artillery shells. Both Mauchly and Eckert became deeply involved in this project.
Mauchly and Eckert were both fascinated with the idea of using vacuum tubes to create an electronic digital computer. They used vacuum tubes, photoelectric cells, and other devices to make the existing mechanical computer at the Moore School work ten times faster. In August of 1942, Mauchly wrote a five-page memo to an administrator at the school, John Grist Brainerd. The memo, "The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating," outlined how vacuum tubes could be used to add, subtract, multiply, and divide much more rapidly than mechanical calculators. Brainerd, Herman H. Goldstine, and Oswald Veblen saw the potential for an electronic computer, and in April of 1943 the Moore School got permission from the army to go ahead with what is now called the ENIAC.
Eckert and Mauchly designed and built the ENIAC with a team of fifty other people at the Moore School, overcoming a number of technical and logistical obstacles. Unfortunately for the war effort, the ENIAC did not run its first full-scale test until December of 1945, several months after World War II had ended. After the war, ENIAC was used to solve trajectory problems and compute ballistics tables at the army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. Later, it performed calculations for the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Mauchly and Eckert applied for a patent on the ENIAC in 1947. By then, they had resigned from the Moore Engineering School and had begun their own corporation, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Corporation. They assigned their patent to their corporation, where they developed the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC. Eckert took care of the engineering functions, and Mauchly ran the business. Neither Mauchly nor Eckert, however, was a good businessman. Mauchly was very easy going and jovial, but he was also unconventional. When he and Eckert visited IBM and its famous president, Thomas Watson, Sr., Mauchly flopped down on the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. Eckert and Mauchly eventually ran into financial troubles, and in 1950 they sold their company along with their computer patents to Remington Rand. Sperry Rand later bought out Remington. Mauchly worked for Remington and Sperry until 1959, when he left to form his own consulting corporation, Mauchly Associates. In 1968, he founded a second computer consulting corporation, which he called Dynatrend.
In February 1964, after seventeen years, the ENIAC patent was finally issued to one of Sperry Rand's subsidiaries, Illinois Scientific Developments. The patent, however, was very broad and vaguely written. When Sperry Rand sued the Honeywell Corporation in 1967 for infringing the ENIAC patent, Honeywell countersued. Honeywell claimed, among other things, that the patent was a fraud and that Eckert and Mauchly did not invent the first general-purpose digital electronic computer. Honeywell's suit claimed that Atanasoff was the real inventor. There was a lengthy trial, and each side presented thousands of pages of documents to support its arguments. In October, 1973, Judge Earl Larson of Minneapolis issued his judgment, which made Honeywell the winner. Judge Larson's decision to invalidate the patent was based primarily on the facts that the patent on the ENIAC was filed after the computer had been in use for over a year and that information about the ENIAC had already been published, making the technology "prior art" and thus unpatentable.
In his decision, the judge also held that Atanasoff was the real inventor of the electronic digital computer. This last reason especially bothered Mauchly. Atanasoff had never considered himself the originator of the electronic digital computer until an IBM lawyer mentioned the idea to him in 1954. Atanasoff never even built a working electronic computer; he attempted a prototype but he could not get all the parts to work together before he abandoned it. His computer was also highly specialized and could only compute linear equations, whereas the ENIAC could add, subtract, multiply, divide, extract square roots, compare quantities, and perform other functions. Many people who have studied the case believe that Mauchly and Eckert were wronged by Judge Larson's decision. Mauchly himself believed he had been wronged, and the patent decision left him bitter. Even though he won many awards for his accomplishments, including the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1949, the John Scott Award in 1961, and the Harry Goode Award in 1966, Mauchly never ceased to feel he had been denied full credit for his role in the development of the computer.
Mauchly had married Mary Augusta Walzl in 1930. They had two sons. But in September of 1946, while they were swimming in the Atlantic, his wife was swept out to sea and drowned. On February 7, 1948, Mauchly married Kathleen R. McNulty, who had been one of the programmers on the ENIAC. He had five more children with her, four daughters and a son. Mauchly suffered all his life from a hereditary genetic disease called hemorrhagic telangiectasia, which caused bloody noses and internal bleeding, among other symptoms. In his later life he had to carry around oxygen to breathe properly. He died on January 8, 1980, of complications from an infection.
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