Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday January 16, 2011
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THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE COMPUTER: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer
Jane Smiley
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385527132
246 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Simon Garfinkel
Americans have a romanticized idea about the nature of invention. We see invention as a flash of insight -- a Eureka! moment -- that strikes after years of careful, deliberate work. We enshrine this vision in our histories, popular culture and even the U.S. Constitution, which offers patents to inventors as an incentive to share their creations with the public. We celebrate our inventors, teaching our children about the inventor of the light bulb, the airplane, the radio, the polio vaccine and other transformative developments of the modern era. And yet most Americans have no idea who invented the electronic digital computer -- arguably the most transformative leap of all.
Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, argues in this work of nonfiction that computers owe their existence to a combination of wartime necessity and intellectual curiosity. It's widely acknowledged that the need to crack codes, compute artillery tables and even crunch the numbers for the first atomic bomb provided governments in England and the United States with the incentive to marshal the manpower and the financial resources necessary to build the first computers -- massive machines that filled a room and required the same amount of power to run as did a hundred households. She tells the story of the secret efforts in England to build Colossus code-cracking computers and of work at the University of Pennsylvania to build the ENIAC, a massive machine designed to compute artillery tables. Colossus was a success, but most of the machines were destroyed after the war, and its existence was kept a secret for decades. ENIAC, on the other hand, was widely toted as the world's first "electronic brian." Its two inventors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, went on to create the world's first computer company.
But the real heart of Smiley's volume is her portrayal of the lives of two scientists who worked on much smaller machines that they designed by themselves and built with limited means, after which the scientists were largely forgotten: Konrad Zuse, who built the world's first functioning digital computer in Nazi Germany using discarded relays; and John Atanasoff, a physics professor at Iowa State College, who built a tube-based electronic digital machine the size of a desk for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations.
Smiley, herself an alumna and former faculty member of the same institution, now Iowa State University, spends roughly half of her book following all four computer projects, as well as Atanasoff's post-computer contributions to World War II and the Cold War. Atanasoff had his Eureka! moment after a 200-mile drive in December 1937. He had been working for years on machines to help physicists perform the laborious calculations required by quantum physics. Suddenly the entire design came to him while he was having dinner at a restaurant. He sketched his idea on a napkin, spent two years designing the machine, obtained a $650 grant in 1939 to build a prototype, hired a graduate student named Clifford Berry, and spent the next two years building the contraption itself.
Iowa State College never really understood the value of what Atanasoff was building and never bothered to file a patent application.
But Mauchly did. After a chance meeting with Atanasoff, the two corresponded and in 1941 Mauchly drove from Philadelphia to Iowa to spend five days with Atanasoff, where he immersed himself in the design and operation of what is now called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Mauchly went back to Philadelphia, built ENIAC, filed for patents with his partner Eckert, and started a company that eventually became Sperry Rand, a leader of the computer industry in the 1950s and '60s.
The second half of Smiley's book follows the 20-year fight over these patents. Smiley describes the dirty underbelly of invention, showing how prototypes are destroyed, how inventors move on to new projects, and how major patent disputes are sometimes decided by an old letter found in a box of papers. Indeed, it was only after Berry's suspicious death in a hotel room in 1965 -- he was found with a plastic bag over his head -- that Atanasoff, now a wealthy man, devoted himself to using the historical record of the machine he had built with Berry to invalidate the Mauchly patents. His aim, Smiley writes, was to secure a place in history for Berry.
A federal judge overturned those patents because Mauchly had not disclosed Atanasoff's prior work, but Smiley fails to make her case that Atanasoff invented what we think of as the modern digital computer. She can't, because Atanasoff's machine was not programmable -- it was a single-purpose machine. Most readers will miss this critical detail because Smiley doesn't focus on such technical stuff.
To be fair, her history of the digital pioneers is one of the most approachable volumes that has been written about this crucial invention. She convincingly shows that the digital revolution resulted from the efforts of many pioneers, in effect disproving her thesis, but also proving the value of her book.
Simson Garfinkel is the author of 14 books, including "Architects of the Information Society: Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CROSSING THE HEART OF AFRICA: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure
Julian Smith
HarperPerennial
ISBN 978-0061873478
328 pages
$14.99
Reviewed by Ken Ringle
Julian Smith is a gifted travel writer and author of guidebooks to El Salvador, Ecuador and similar places. He is drawn to adventures in the back-of-beyond, and he had a great idea: Why not bring back to public attention the astounding feat of Ewart Scott Grogan, a largely forgotten Victorian explorer who at the age of 24 hiked and hacked his way up the length of Africa from Capetown to Cairo for the woman he loved?
This was a worthy task, for Grogan, though little remembered today, was a household name in the English-speaking world when he finished his legendary trek in 1899. In the best tradition of an H. Rider Haggard romance, he had fallen in love almost on sight with the elegant and beautiful sister of a Cambridge University classmate. She returned his affections and agreed to marry him. But Gertrude Watt was rich and he was not, and her stuffy stepfather considered Grogan little more than a jobless vagrant. Though Grogan came from a respectable family, he had been expelled from both boarding school and university and then had done little of note other than climb mountains (he was almost lost during a fall into an Alpine crevasse) and get into scrapes. He had done some soldiering in Rhodesia for Cecil Rhodes and had killed a man in a bar fight in Zanzibar -- not what you might call obvious husband material. At Cambridge he once screwed shut the door of a student he disliked, trapping the boy so securely he had to be fed for a time through the mail slot.
So what to do? Grogan decided he needed to become famous to win his woman. Africa was the great testing ground for Victorian Englishmen. Rhodes had talked with him of a Capetown-to-Cairo telegraph and railroad, but much of the proposed route was still unexplored. Grogan proposed to be the first man to make the journey. Gertrude's stepfather agreed that would be a suitable test of his character and seriousness.
The trip took Grogan two years -- years during which he was stalked by lions, hippos and crocodiles, pursued by headhunters and cannibals, plagued by parasites and fevers and never far from various other forms of unpleasant extinction. At one point after the journey, doctors drained an abscess on his liver the size of a coconut. But he returned as the sensation of Britain.
He was made a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, met Queen Victoria and, in four months of incredible effort, turned his notes into a 377-page volume, "From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North." Billed as "The Greatest Book on African Travel and Sport Ever Published," it was a huge best-seller. He married Gertrude, toured the globe with her, settled in Kenya and lived happily, with more adventures, to age 92.
So far, so good. Smith evokes Grogan, his adventures and his world with both insight and panache. So what's the problem? Well, like so many of his self-absorbed generation, Smith can't get out of his own way. His gimmick (and you can almost hear him making the pitch to his agent and publisher) is to DO THE SAME THING!!! See, Smith has this girlfriend, they've been thinking of getting married, but he's not sure he can make the commitment. So he will duplicate Grogan's journey as much as possible to convince himself this is the right thing to do, and they'll get married when he gets back. Get it? And his book will tell his story and Grogan's story in alternate chapters! Two love stories! The same journey! The same romance, right?
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! In the first place, Grogan had a genuine obstacle in the way of his marriage. Smith has none. He and his lady love, Laura, have been living together for several years in three cities. And Laura, though (he assures us) as admirable as Grogan's Gertrude in every way, is no unattainable princess. She's pushing the marriage, has set the date, and is bombarding him with wedding details whenever he can phone home en route, something as far from Grogan's reality as a cold drink and a hot bath. In the third place, Grogan's route today, as Smith describes it, is no wilderness of hostile tribes and savage animals, but a depressing Third World sink of fly-blown grog shops, verminous hotels, bacterial contagion and crowded mini-buses overflowing with incontinent children. And while a number of the Africans he meets are wistfully charming, Smith's "expedition" isn't really much more than hiring rides on potholed roads aboard motorcycles, bicycles and other forms of gypsy conveyance, all the while whining tediously about his conflicted feelings toward the marriage waiting back home. Oh, Julian, just stop it and man up!
So while Grogan is rascally charming and even heroic in a Kiplingesque sort of way (respecting Africans, in general, he was a moderating voice against the abuses of imperialism and an early cautionary voice for wildlife conservation), Smith emerges as something of an intrusive bore. His whole journey seems senseless and irrelevant, we don't care about him and his rather adolescent anxieties, and in the end it's hard to forgive him for repeatedly putting himself in the way of Grogan's story, which Smith otherwise tells with both undisguised admiration and matchless skill.
Ken Ringle is a Washington writer and former Washington Post reporter.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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