Chicago, June 1950: the hunters of the last number pause for the summer, the money arrives at last, and the author stages the most successful demonstration in the corporation's history, starring a machine that could not yet multiply. Every figure it published that morning was correct; the reader is advised to keep one eye on the curtain. —Ed.
After the winter the reader has just been put through, some relief was owed all parties, and the trade obliged: Fuchs jailed, my mile still dressed as a birthday, and into the quiet came the money. Remington Rand had bought Eckert and Mauchly outright, and every board of directors between the oceans had read that arithmetic was about to be electrified;1 the weeklies had discovered the electronic brain all over again, and would that spring have certified a waffle iron as a thinking machine, provided the lights blinked and the maker bought lunch. Sennett's wire found West Adams Street the last week of May: HARTFORD INSURANCE PARTY JUNE 15. CATALOGUE HOUSE ALSO WARM. MODEL TWO WILL BE SEEN COMPUTING. SELL FIRST BUILD AFTER.
The Model Two was the difficulty. It existed as eleven handsome gray cabinets, a teleprinter, and a delivery schedule; the memory tanks sat in a strike at the vendor's, the arithmetic unit on Zaremba's bench in several hundred pieces. I asked him for a date and got it straight: eight weeks, ten if I kept asking. Kessler heard the wire read out and went the color of the cabinets. "We will demonstrate what? There is no multiplier. There is no memory. There are crates and a printing telegraph." "There is a corporation," I said, "and on the fifteenth of June it computes." He said something in German that needed no translating, and I sat with my feet on the desk feeling better than I had since August. A man who has spent a season being investigated wants exercise, and here at last was work in my own line: nothing to build, everything to arrange.
Miss Dunn had beaten the first machine in a fair race two years before, in front of the government, and had been apologized to by history ever since.2 I put it to her at her comptometer after closing: a curtain, a spare keyboard, her arithmetic coming out of the Model Two's printer, nobody the wiser. She finished the column she was running before she looked up. "You want me to be the machine." "I want you to assist the machine." "The machine will be assisting me," she said. "I've seen its multiplication. What does the machine pay?" We settled on a figure that would have made Sennett wire twice, and then she said the terrible thing: "I'll want it in writing." I had not signed my name against working paper since 1943; it was a religion with me, and I looked at that composed young woman and apostatized on the spot. She read the slip, folded it into her handbag, and gave me the smile of a bank receiving a deposit. "Whenever you're ready, Mr. Klipspringer, the machine will see you."
Zaremba wired the tap under protest, a keyboard behind a gray service curtain at the end of the cabinet row, jumpered to the teleprinter, with a relay flasher so the monitor lamps would have something to say.3 "I want it minuted," he said, "that I wired a lie." "You wired a printer. The lie is my department; you haven't the training." We rehearsed Wednesday night, the blowers covering the comptometer's clatter handsomely, and found our flaw at once: she was too fast. Her first answer came back before I had finished repeating the question, and I stood in an empty demonstration room instructing the quickest arithmetic in Illinois to dawdle, for realism. The drill: I repeat every figure aloud in the voice of a man laying a cornerstone, the repetition being for the curtain; Miss Dunn works, the patter covers her, and on the words "the machine will now publish," she sends. For the opening set piece she precomputed a page of Meridian's own rate book across two evenings, and took the actuarial tables in besides, a whole library in a hatbox, as close as the Model Two came that spring to owning a memory.
They arrived Thursday the fifteenth at ten, off the overnight trains: Mr. Cordry of the Meridian Life of Hartford, a vice-president in a summer suit with a laugh he spent freely; his consulting engineer, a dry stick named Twiss, hired to keep him from being dazzled; and Mr. Hobbs, comptroller of a catalogue house I won't name, whose book reaches every farm kitchen in the Republic. Half the sale was done at the handshake, the hero of the atomic desert being worth a point of consideration to any board. Cordry picked the eagle-stamped gyroscope off my desk and turned it in the light. "Part of the machine?" "Part of the memory section. I keep it where I can watch it." We seated Dr. Ottley where his deafness would do the most good, posted Kessler on the fuse box, near the exits of his profession, Zaremba at the switchboard; and behind the last cabinet, behind the curtain that matched the paint, the arithmetic of the Marquette Computing Machines Corporation sat down, took off her gloves, and squared her tables.
The rate-book run opened the show. Four minutes of hum and blinking monitor lamps, and the printer delivered a page that Meridian's own girls would want a week for, every figure agreeing with the book in Cordry's lap. "A week's work," Cordry kept saying. "A week's work in four minutes." Strictly true, and the week had been Miss Dunn's, the Tuesday and Wednesday previous, but a demonstration is no place for pedantry. What Cordry wanted was in any case not arithmetic but absolution, his trade being the sale of certainty about death to people who would rather not check the figures; a rate rise goes down sweeter when no living man signed it and the widow is left to argue with electricity. He was half bought before lunch. Twiss was not; Twiss had a pocketful of envelopes.
"With permission," Twiss said, "my own figures." He dictated two seven-figure numbers off an envelope, and I repeated each to the room like a toastmaster, for reasons the reader now holds. Zaremba set switches with the gravity of a bishop. Then, as the hum came up, Twiss said, "One moment. The second number. Make the last figure a nine." A change at the buzzer, the oldest trick against a canned show, and I gave him my best smile and repeated the correction twice, once for the room, once for the curtain. "The machine must be re-instructed; you have cost the company eleven seconds, Mr. Twiss," and I got my laugh while a comptometer six feet away tore up one product and began another. The printer published; Twiss did three minutes of long division against our forty seconds, and grunted, which from a consulting engineer is a brass band.
He had his second problem out, the present value of a dollar a year for thirty years at three and a half per cent, and the switches set and the hum climbing, when the main fuse let go. June heat, borrowed racks, Kessler's blowers; something surrendered, every monitor lamp died, the hum ran down the scale and stopped, and the room stood in plain window daylight, a silent warehouse of gray furniture. And in that silence the teleprinter, which Zaremba had wired to the lighting circuit, chattered calmly on and delivered the answer to twelve places.4 "Your machine," Twiss said, "has stopped." "The calculating section has stopped. The memory is publishing what it had already concluded. Mercury, Mr. Twiss; the figures stand in the mercury the way a note stands in a bell." I said it looking him in the eye with my shirt going through at the back, and Cordry saved my life by clapping. "It finished thinking before the lights went!" "It thinks faster than it publishes," I said. "The rest is clerical." At the fuse box Kessler stood with his mouth open, learning things about his own machine no engineer should have to hear.
Twiss walked to the cabinets. "Open them." Zaremba opened the two nearest the window, stocked with genuine racks against exactly this call, and Twiss counted tubes like a customs man while the room shuffled behind him. "And the rest?" "Memory," I said. "Sealed. The tanks are poisoned by dust; I would sooner open a patient." He put a hand toward the last cabinet, the one wearing the curtain, and behind the curtain, six feet from his fingers, Miss Dunn sneezed. A small sneeze, a church sneeze, but with the blowers dead it carried like a shot, and I had begun some sentence about ventilation when Hobbs, the catalogue man, said "God bless you" to the cabinet, automatically, out of forty years of good manners, and heard himself say it. The room went up. Cordry whooped like a man eight hundred miles from his directors; Ottley beamed and bowed, hearing applause somewhere on his good side; even Twiss's mouth bent. "Gentlemen," I said, "she is sensitive to June. You will want the air-conditioned model." On the far wall the lamps came back and the hum climbed to pitch, Kessler having found a fuse at the bottom of his soul, and I said, "The machine will now resume," as though I had ordered the whole intermission from a menu.
And here, free of charge as ever, is the whole art of the demonstration: you cannot fool a room, and you need not, because the room fools itself. It has told its directors it is modern, it has come eight hundred miles to be amazed, and it will defend that amazement against fuses, sneezes, and consulting engineers the way a mother defends a plain child; your single duty is to see that nobody interrupts the work. Twiss interrupted twice more and was twice shushed, not by me, by his own clients, and when he began a third sentence about the sealed cabinets Cordry said, "Oh, sit down, Twiss. It sneezed. It's alive." By noon there was a letter of intent on my blotter, signed beside the gyroscope, delivery in eighteen months; and Hobbs, who had watched an insurance company buy the future in front of him, took an option behind Meridian's place sooner than tell his board he had touched the future and let Hartford have it.
"Eighteen months," Zaremba said, when the taxis had gone. "You sold them a machine that does not exist." "That does not exist yet. You have eighteen months; build me an honest one, and nobody will ever have been lied to." He looked at me the way he looked at a bad solder joint. "That is not how time works," he said, and went back to his bench, and I am bound to report that he built it.
Sennett's wire came Saturday: HARTFORD ORDER SEEN WASHINGTON. CATALOGUE OPTION NOTED. WHAT DOES MODEL TWO USE FOR MEMORY. I wired back a single word, MERCURY, and burned his in the ashtray, the true answer being a lady in a flowered dress and no business of Washington's. Kessler came around in a week, in his own key: "Twenty years an engineer, and my best circuit this season is a curtain." I wrote the board of one its two true sentences, we have sold the new machine and Chicago is dusty, and Tuesday's three lines came back: the lake was warm, the Averys had bought a television set, and Daddy said a man who buys machinery he has not seen run deserves the rates he gets. There was no fourth line, and I chose to read that as applause.
One caller that week was not a buyer. A young man in a good hat asked the front office, very politely, whether Mr. Klipspringer was often in town in the autumn, and left no card; and my nose, which had lain quiet all that lovely larcenous month, gave a small twitch, the twitch of a dog dreaming. I fed it a cigar. Whatever paper that hat was measuring me for belongs to the next number, and he could not have picked a worse week to frighten me: the corporation was fat, I was selling, and I would not have traded my mood for a clean conscience and a Cadillac.
Miss Dunn came in Friday evening for her envelope and stood counting it, which I admired; never trust a payee who doesn't count. "You told that room," she said, "that the machine never sleeps, never strikes, and never asks for a raise." "I did." "Two of those are still true," she said. "The machine is asking." I looked at the handbag that held the only signature I had given anybody in seven years, counted out the raise, and threw in the roses off the front-office desk, being by that June a great believer in flowers for ladies with long memories.5 She took both, and paused at the door with the hatbox on her hip. "And Mr. Klipspringer. The next time your machine sneezes, it will want a five-dollar handkerchief."
The commercial situation is as the author gives it. In the winter of 1950 Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation of Philadelphia, whose UNIVAC, then building for the Census Bureau, had been sold years ahead of its completion; the Prudential Insurance Company and the A. C. Nielsen Company held contracts for machines that did not yet exist, and the first UNIVAC was not accepted until March 1951. Selling first and building after was not the author's invention but the industry's ordinary practice; a computing machine bought in 1950 was in every case a promise with cabinets around it. His corporation differed from its competitors that June chiefly in the location of the arithmetic. —Ed.
The comptometer was a Chicago article, made by Felt & Tarrant and operated throughout commerce almost entirely by women trained at the company's own schools; a first-class operator was the fastest arithmetic money could hire, and races between operators and electronic machines were a standard turn at demonstrations of the period, which the operator, once the machine's setup time was honestly counted, quite often won. The race the author reports losing in 1948 is minuted in the corporation's records (No. 12). The reader who doubts what this number asks of Miss Dunn is referred to the contest results of the era; the editor consulted them and stopped doubting. —Ed.
The stage management was likewise standard. The ENIAC's press debut of February 1946 ran on problems selected and rehearsed in advance, and its builders, wanting the machine seen to think, cut ping-pong balls in half, numbered them, and set them over the panel lamps so the newsreel cameras would have something to photograph. Rehearsed problems and cosmetic lighting were, in short, the trade's ordinary hygiene. The innovation recorded in this number lies elsewhere. —Ed.
The corporation's records survive, and the editor sets three of them side by side. The engineering log shows the Model Two's arithmetic unit performing its first multiplication on 3 November 1950, the memory tanks arriving in December. The works power log for 15 June shows the main fuse open from 11:37 to 11:44. The teleprinter roll for the demonstration, preserved with the minute-book, carries a correct twelve-digit product printed within that interval, by a machine drawing no current of any kind. The Meridian party's own minute records that the Model Two "computed throughout the visit without error," and that minute is accurate too. The reader may complete the wiring diagram for himself. —Ed.
The payroll book raises Miss Dunn's salary in the week of 19 June 1950, the increase entered under "maintenance, memory section," where it recurs in every year she remained with the corporation. Among her papers, which she kept as carefully as she computed, survives the only specimen of the author's handwriting in the whole corporate record, a slip reading "One quarter of one per cent of the Hartford order, for services to the memory section. J.K." The machine delivered to Hartford, some months late, in the spring of 1952 multiplied honestly, ran nine years, and was reordered; the buyer, it should in fairness be said, got full value, though not on the fifteenth of June, and not from the cabinets. —Ed.