On May 17, 1943, the U.S. Army signed a contract to develop its Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), an all-electronic computing system. Designed by University of Pennsylvania’s J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, it was the first system to utilize vacuum tubes instead of electromagnetic switches.
Dubbed the “giant brain,” the computer had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanic machines. Designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the Army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory, it could calculate a trajectory (one requiring 20 hours of human brain-power) in 30 seconds—a 2,400x increase in speed.
Interestingly, mathematicians working on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos learned of the computer during its development; ENIAC’s first test computations were therefore for the hydrogen bomb—not artillery tables for which it was designed.
By the end of its operation in 1955, the 27-ton, $500,000 machine contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It consumed 150 kW of electricity, leading to the popular rumor that the lights in Philadelphia dimmed whenever it was switched on.
Currently, over a dozen institutions hold pieces of ENIAC, including University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Smithsonian, London’s Science Museum, and the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Filed Under: Capacitors, M2M (machine to machine)
