Man Who Invented the Computer by Smiley Jane

Author:Smiley, Jane [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-18T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

By the time Atanasoff was home from Bikini Atoll and finished with his aborted computer project for the navy, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert were deep into their own patent conflicts with the University of Pennsylvania. Originally, Penn had shown little or no interest in Mauchly’s project. As of late 1944, they had accorded Mauchly and Eckert patent rights if something were to come out of ENIAC—the university itself retained only a license to build and use a computer of their own. In late 1945, though, the university was rethinking this policy, and then, in 1946, the army lifted security restrictions on the machine. Penn informed Mauchly and Eckert that, having been constructed with public funds, ENIAC and its parts could not produce private patents. Mauchly and Eckert had put together their patent application in the fall. When ENIAC was unveiled, Herman Goldstine claimed in the publicity material to be one of the three inventors, along with Mauchly and Eckert. He also put his name on the patent application, but Mauchly and Eckert removed it. Goldstine was not pleased.

Plans for EDVAC, the computer that would replace ENIAC, were even more contentious. In 1941, Mauchly had mentioned in his October letter to Atanasoff that the inventor of the earlier Moore School analyzer, Irven Travis, had left to join the navy. Travis returned in 1946, and he was determined that the university would not relinquish any rights to any future machines. He stated point blank that “all people who wish to continue as employees of the university must turn over their patents to the university.” In an interview in 1977, Travis said, “Well, the record is clear. I’m the one who precipitated the blowup.” Travis felt that the fact that the research was being done under the sponsorship of the military and the university meant that individual researchers did not have property rights in the research. He also felt that the ENIAC patents as they were eventually submitted did not give sufficient credit to other members of the research team, especially Arthur Burks—whom Travis considered “brilliant.” In his interview with Nancy Stern, for the Charles Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota, he also suggested that the president of Penn, an English professor, had given in to coercion on the part of Mauchly and Eckert, who had threatened not to complete ENIAC if they did not gain patent rights to the machine. The patent dispute quickly escalated, driven, according to Scott McCartney, on the part of Travis and other Moore School engineers by the feeling that Mauchly was an outsider (having not gotten his degrees at the Moore School), while Eckert was volatile and difficult to get along with (by this time nearly twenty-seven years old and having earned only a bachelor’s degree). Travis later said that there were researchers at the Moore School who were doing patentable research on their own and profiting from it and that there was no difficulty with that. The problem had entirely to do with research done on university time and funded by public money.

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