Chapter 3
Lift Off
Technological Innovations
HARDWARE
ENIAC
OVERVIEW
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was built between 1943 and 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania by engineers John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly. It was created to calculate artillery tables, specifically the projectile trajectories of explosive shells, for the U.S. Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. Comprising approximately 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 1,500 relays, it was easily the most complex electronic system ever built at that time. ENIAC ran continuously — in part to extend tube life — generating 174 kilowatts of heat and requiring its own dedicated air conditioning system. It could execute up to 5,000 additions per second, several orders of magnitude faster than its electromechanical predecessors. Completed in February 1946 at a cost of approximately $400,000 — equivalent to roughly $5.9 million in 2023 — ENIAC was initially intended to aid in the war effort. It was the first large-scale computer to run at full electronic speed without being slowed by any mechanical parts, a distinction that fundamentally set it apart from everything that came before it and established it as a landmark achievement in the history of technology.
INFLUENCES
Several intellectual and technological currents converged to make ENIAC possible. Though ENIAC embodied many original features, it was strongly influenced by prior mechanical desk calculators, and its general-purpose character was derived historically from an analog mechanical computer known as the differential analyzer. John Mauchly, the primary conceptual force behind ENIAC, was aware of the earlier Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), conceived by John Atanasoff, though the design of ENIAC itself owed nothing directly to the ABC. Work began formally in early 1943 under contract to the Army and under the direction of Herman Goldstine, and in 1944 the celebrated mathematician John von Neumann began frequent consultations with the engineering group, bringing significant theoretical rigor to the project. Von Neumann joined as a consultant in 1944, contributing his expertise to this groundbreaking academic-military collaboration based at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. Parallel computing efforts of the era — including the British Colossus at Bletchley Park and Konrad Zuse's Z3 in Berlin — were effectively independent creations that nonetheless reflected a global momentum toward electronic computation, each contributing to the intellectual climate in which ENIAC emerged as the most ambitious and complete realization of that vision.
IMPACT
Completed just as the war ended, ENIAC's first major task pivoted from ballistics to performing calculations for the construction of a hydrogen bomb, demonstrating its adaptability to the highest-stakes scientific problems of the era. Its work investigating the distance neutrons would travel through various materials helped popularize Monte Carlo methods of calculation, a statistical technique still widely used in science and finance today. It was estimated that ENIAC alone did more computation during its roughly ten years of operation than the entire human race had done up to the time of its invention — a staggering testament to its transformative power. ENIAC served to convince military scientists and technical experts of the value and practicability of electronic computation, and the resulting enthusiasm, compounded by the Cold War, laid the foundations for the subsequent computing and information processing industry. Mauchly and Eckert moved quickly to build on the stored-program concepts emerging from von Neumann's work, delivering EDVAC to the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory in 1949. The advent of transistors in the late 1950s then led to minicomputers in the 1960s and personal computers in the 1970s — an evolution that traces its lineage directly back to the pioneering work done on ENIAC. Power to ENIAC was finally disconnected at 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, after roughly ten years of continuous service.
SOFTWARE
FORTRAN
OVERVIEW
FORTRAN, short for FORmula TRANslating system, is recognized as the first high-level computer language to gain widespread acceptance, developed by John Backus and his team at IBM in April 1957. Previous programming was written in machine (first-generation) language or assembly (second-generation) language, which required the programmer to write instructions in binary or hexadecimal arithmetic. Frustration with the arduous nature of such programming led Backus to search for a simpler, more accessible way to communicate with computers. During the three-year development stage, Backus led an eclectic team of ten IBM employees to create a language that combined a form of English shorthand with algebraic equations. Backus described the previous process as "hand-to-hand combat with the machine," noting that the cost of programmers was usually at least as great as the cost of the computers, and that programmers spent up to half their time debugging. FORTRAN confounded the skeptics who insisted that a program compiled from a high-level language could never be as efficient as one handcrafted directly in numerical codes — Backus's team implemented the first optimizing compiler, which translated FORTRAN programs into the IBM 704's numerical codes and produced results that ran nearly as fast as anything crafted by hand.
INFLUENCES
FORTRAN did not emerge in isolation but was shaped by a constellation of earlier efforts to escape the tyranny of machine code. Among the most influential precursors was Speedcoding, defined in 1953 by John Backus himself for the IBM 701, which built up libraries of subroutines for handling commonly encountered scientific calculations requiring floating-point arithmetic and array indexing. Grace Hopper had also developed early compiler tools, including her A-0 system in 1952, to generate code from more English-like instructions, and the Laning and Zierler system at MIT in 1952 allowed programmers to write algebraic expressions that a computer could evaluate. Parallel independent efforts included high-level language work by Heinz Rutishauser for the Zuse 4 computer, and the Mark 1 Autocode project in Britain, though Backus and his team were largely unaware of most of these contemporaneous developments. A decisive institutional step came when Backus lobbied successfully for direct hardware implementation of floating-point and indexing operations on IBM's new scientific computer, the 704, then started the Programming Research Group at IBM specifically to develop a compiler that would allow programs to be written in a more mathematical language rather than a machine-oriented one. A draft specification for the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System was completed by November 1954, with the first manual appearing in October 1956.
IMPACT
FORTRAN greatly increased programmer productivity and significantly lowered costs. It also opened programming beyond a small group of experts, making it increasingly the province of anyone willing to learn a basic language. Its most immediate impact was in science and engineering, where researchers could now express complex numerical problems in something close to mathematical notation rather than wrestling with binary instructions. In demonstrating the feasibility of efficient high-level languages, FORTRAN inaugurated a great proliferation of programming languages, including ALGOL, LISP, COBOL, BASIC, PL/I, and PASCAL — the "third-generation" languages — most of which attempted to provide similar high-level programming constructs oriented toward different, non-scientific environments. After completing FORTRAN, Backus created the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), a standard notation that describes grammatical rules for high-level languages, which is used in a number of programming languages today. Because the language remained in use from the early modern computing era to the present day, its evolution developed in parallel with computing as a whole — today, FORTRAN is the language used for comparing the performance of high-end supercomputers. First introduced in the late 1950s, FORTRAN has been the lingua franca of scientific computing for over 60 years, and while many alternative languages have come and gone, it has repeatedly regained popularity for writing high-performance codes.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Automobile
OVERVIEW
The Benz Patent-Motorwagen of 1885 is considered the first practical, modern automobile and the first car to be put into series production. Carl Benz received a patent for the motorcar in 1886, the same year he first publicly drove it. Benz built a motorcar whose internal combustion engine was powered by gasoline, and his design drew inspiration from the tricycle. His three-wheeled Motorwagen could carry two passengers. Prior to building it, Benz also invented several of its key components, including the electric ignition, spark plugs, and clutch. What set Benz apart from contemporaries was a fundamental design philosophy: his car was constructed around its engine, as opposed to the approach of simply adding an engine to an existing cart or carriage. Debuting on the streets of Mannheim in July 1886, it had all the main components of today's internal combustion engines: a crankshaft, electric ignition, and water cooling. It traveled about 10 km on a liter of gasoline and reached a top speed of 16 kph. Benz began to sell the vehicle in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history.
INFLUENCES
The automobile was not born in a vacuum but emerged from more than a century of incremental mechanical innovation. The first steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation was built by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769. Inventors branched out at the start of the 19th century, creating the de Rivaz engine — one of the first internal combustion engines — and an early electric motor. Samuel Brown later tested the first industrially applied internal combustion engine in 1826. The decisive technological breakthrough came from German engineering. It was Nikolaus Otto who created the first internal combustion engine that was a viable alternative to the steam engine, improving on earlier designs by creating a four-stroke internal combustion engine in 1867, which compressed the fuel before ignition and greatly increased efficiency. In 1885, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach made major contributions to combustion engine development, installing a gasoline engine on a bicycle to create the Reitwagen, the first two-wheeled motorized vehicle. Benz drew inspiration from his personal passion for cycling as well: based on his experience with and fondness for bicycles, he used similar technology when he created an automobile, featuring wire wheels and a four-stroke engine of his own design, with power transmitted by a belt to a counter-shaft with a differential.
IMPACT
The automobile's earliest commercial life was modest — Benz struggled to find buyers, and it was his wife Bertha who provided the pivotal marketing moment. In August 1888, Bertha Benz drove their two teenage sons 120 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back in a Benz Model 3, stirring up public interest and demonstrating the vehicle's practical utility in a way no advertisement could. The transformative leap from curiosity to mass phenomenon came through Henry Ford's manufacturing revolution. What took workers 12.5 hours to assemble was reduced to just 93 minutes with Ford's moving assembly line. In 1908, the Model T was priced at $850, but by 1914 it sold for $490, and by 1924 the price had dropped to $260. The Model T brought mobility and prosperity on an undreamed-of scale through manufacturing efficiencies at a price that anyone could afford. The moving assembly line created the mass-production process, which influenced the entire "machine age." The social consequences were equally vast — the automobile reshaped cities, gave rise to suburbs, created the oil industry as a global force, and fundamentally altered patterns of work and daily life. The automobile's subsequent innovations have cascaded across more than a century, from automatic transmissions, safety glass, and seat belts, to fuel injection, catalytic converters, and hybrid powertrains, culminating in the electric vehicles and autonomous driving systems now redefining personal transportation for the twenty-first century.
Arts & Culture
Television
OVERVIEW
Television was not the invention of a single person but the product of decades of parallel experimentation across multiple countries. The first true television systems emerged in the 1920s, building on earlier experiments in transmitting images via radio waves. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird is widely credited with demonstrating the first working television system, achieving live mechanical image transmission in 1925, using a Nipkow disk — a rotating disk with spiral holes that scanned images pixel by pixel — to produce grainy but visionary moving silhouettes. Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth had been working on his own television system. Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, reportedly came up with his big idea — a vacuum tube that could dissect images into lines, transmit those lines, and turn them back into images — while still a teenager in chemistry class. Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on September 7, 1927, designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who had been working on it since 1920. His all-electronic approach, free of mechanical moving parts, produced clearer images and ultimately superseded Baird's mechanical system, establishing the fundamental architecture that all subsequent television technology would build upon.
INFLUENCES
Television drew from a rich lineage of nineteenth-century physics and electrical engineering. Two key technological developments in the late 1800s played a vital role in the evolution of television: the cathode ray tube and the scanning disk. The cathode ray tube, invented by German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1897, was the forerunner of the television picture tube — it had a fluorescent screen that emitted visible light when struck by a beam of electrons. The scanning disk, invented by German inventor Paul Nipkow, was a large, flat metal disk that served as the foundation for experiments on the transmission of visual images for several decades. In 1907, Russian scientist Boris Rosing used both the CRT and the mechanical scanner system in an experimental television system, using focused electron beams to display crude geometrical patterns on a screen. Television was also a combination of the two dominant forms of mass media in the early 20th century — radio broadcasting and cinema — which it successfully combined into one. David Sarnoff, named president of RCA in 1930, was among the earliest to recognize that television, like radio, had enormous potential as a medium for entertainment as well as communication, and he hired Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin to develop and improve television technology. Zworykin's iconoscope camera tube advanced broadcast quality and, alongside Farnsworth's image dissector, accelerated the transition from mechanical to fully electronic television by the end of the 1930s.
IMPACT
Although early televisions were demonstrated in the 1920s and 1930s, TV sets only became widely used after the conclusion of World War II. From the 1940s, televisions became increasingly popular until nearly every household in America owned at least one. The medium's power to unite mass audiences around shared moments was demonstrated repeatedly: on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon with anywhere from 600 to 650 million people watching the landing on television. Following World War II, the National Television System Committee worked to develop an all-electronic color system compatible with black-and-white TV sets, gaining FCC approval in 1953. A year later, NBC made the first national color broadcast when it telecasted the Tournament of Roses Parade. Satellite technology then broke the barriers of geography: AT&T launched Telstar, the first active communications satellite, on July 10, 1962, and the first transatlantic television signal transmitted that same day. This process culminated in the global telecasting of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 — the first event to be seen live on television in virtually every country simultaneously. Cable, then high-definition broadcasting, then streaming services followed in succession, each expanding what television could deliver — ultimately transforming a grainy flickering image in a London attic into the on-demand, globally connected medium that now shapes culture, politics, and daily life on every continent.