New York, the night of November 4, 1952: television rents an electronic brain for the election, the machine calls the landslide at half past eight on three per cent of the vote, and the men in charge decline, on the air, to believe it. The author sits all night beside the wooden one; what is fitted to him before morning he wears for the rest of the century. —Ed.
The reader left me on the Capitol Limited, acquitted of nothing and wanted by television, and I take him straight into the boom, because the boom is what carried me there. Remington Rand had bought Eckert and Mauchly outright; their first UNIVAC had gone to the Census in the spring of '51, sold years before it existed, after the trade's honest custom1; and our own Model Two went up to Hartford at last, honest as delivered, Zaremba having built by '52 what I had sold in '50. The buyers stopped asking whether the machine could think and began asking the freight, and Kessler, reading the order book like a flood gauge, said the frightening thing: "They believe everything now. God help us all."
Sennett's wires had been courting the air since winter. TELEVISION ASKING AFTER ARITHMETIC, the reader has seen; by September it was ELECTION NIGHT. CBS RENTING PHILADELPHIA MACHINE. NETWORK WANTS FACE NOT FIRM. YOU ARE FACE. NEW YORK THURSDAY. The logic I had in a corner office on Madison Avenue, from a network man I'll call Dolan. "Here's our trouble," he said. "We've rented an electronic brain for the biggest night in four years. If it performs, we've made history; if it lays an egg, we're standing next to an egg. Either way I want a man in the shot the audience already trusts. You're decorated, you're the developer, and you photograph reassuring."
"Reassuring how?"
"Like a man who has seen worse. If that machine says something lunatic at nine o'clock, somebody has to smile at forty million people while we fix it."
The sponsor's agency sat in on the christening, in the person of a crisp gray man who had sold the country cigarettes by way of its doctors and was that autumn selling it a general by way of its living rooms, the work being identical and the rates better. He turned my credentials over like swatches. "Developer won't do on a card. Developer is real estate. And Legal won't clear inventor; inventors get sued." He looked at me the way his trade looks at a jar it is about to label. "Father. Father of the computer age. Nobody sues a father." A girl typed it onto a card while we watched, and I sat quiet under the fitting, having been issued my own father much the same way, by a stranger with a newspaper; the two documents are of equal authority.
They sent me down to Philadelphia at the end of October to be briefed, the network holding the reasonable view that its reassuring face should know which end of the machine ate the tape. It lived in a room a tenth the size of the old one, gray steel and cool, spinning its tape reels like a man drumming his fingers, and Eckert ran the floor now, thirty-three and still strung like a racing rig. "I remember you," he said, not warmly. "The minutes man. Chicago money. I've followed your career in the captions." He walked me down the racks at dictation speed regardless. "It moves nothing without checking a parity count on it. Two arithmetic circuits work every problem and compare before it prints. Follow me, because nobody up there will: it is electrically harder for this machine to publish a wrong number than a right one. We built it that way. It wasn't cheap."
Cronkite came through the same afternoon for the publicity pictures, square-built, brisk, my age near enough, courteous to everybody and impressed by nothing. "I'll be straight with you gentlemen," he said, posed at the console with a finger on a switch he had been begged not to throw. "We're treating it as a novelty act. If it's right, it's news; if it's wrong, it's a feature."2 I stood in at the edge of the frame, where standing pays; the crop kept the anchorman and lost my elbow, and for once I didn't mind, a better camera coming.
It was Eckert, walking me out past the loading dock, who spoiled the surprise. "You've seen the New York set? No. Then have it from me: there is no machine in New York, only a console front out of a scene shop with a bank of lamps wired to a flasher. The machine is here; the answers go up by teleprinter; the plywood takes the bows." He held the door, and there was nothing in his face you could have taken to court. "And of all the men in America they might have hired to sit beside the plywood, they found you. Somebody at that network understands this trade down to the ground."
There is no answer to that in my line of work, so I thanked him for the tour.
Election night I was in Studio 41, over Grand Central, from six, in the blue suit, made up like an actress and sweating through the powder under lights you could have baked by. The place was a stock exchange dressed as a parlor: tally boards, sixty telephones, cable like mangrove roots, and along one wall the sponsor's refrigerators, white, cold, and the only occupants not perspiring. Collingwood kept the machine desk, a smooth, amused man in a bow tie who presented the plywood the way a maître d' presents a lobster, while the true answers came up on a teleprinter behind him from Philadelphia, where the professor of statistics was feeding the machine early precincts against the returns of '44 and '48. A stagehand, taking me for machine staff, asked me to see to a dead lamp in the console; I sent him to the electrician, fatherhood conferring no duty to wire lamps. When the red light first came on I heard my own voice arrive half a beat late, and my eyes fixed themselves on the refrigerator at the set's edge, of which I could draw you the hinges tonight. Then the fright burned off, as it does with me the instant running is impossible, and I did four minutes on the hired brain, tireless, incorruptible, cheaper by the hour than a senator, which got its laugh.
At half past eight the teleprinter bell went, and a boy carried the flimsy into the control room like a live grenade. I read it over Dolan's shoulder. Odds on Eisenhower, 00 to 1, the print wheel owning two digits only, which the professor on the loop translated as better than a hundred to one; electoral votes, four hundred thirty-eight to ninety-three. Three million ballots were counted, of sixty-odd million coming, and every poll in America had spent the autumn calling it a squeaker, the pollsters having elected Dewey once and learned nothing from it but caution.3 Dolan read the flimsy twice and said no. "I am not going into forty million parlors with a hundred to one on three per cent of the vote. Something's off in the arithmetic. Run it again." The loop said the arithmetic ran on two circuits and had agreed with itself, that being the entire design of the machine. "Then adjust it till it behaves," Dolan said, and they did; they went at the factors the way you go at a witness, and toward ten the plywood announced, in Collingwood's best after-dinner voice, that the odds stood at eight to seven for the general. Eight to seven was caution manufactured to order, the network having reflected that the viewer is not the customer but the goods, and you do not startle goods; you keep them cool and you move them.
I stood off camera admiring the only swindle in the room I hadn't built, and knew it to its bones, because it was mine. West Adams, June of 1950: honest arithmetic behind a gray curtain, a presentable front out where the audience sat. The parts had merely been recast at the national scale. The machine was Miss Dunn now, working true and unseen; and I had been promoted, before the whole country, to curtain.
After that the night did the work. Connecticut came in early and wrong for the polls; then Virginia went over, and Florida, and Texas, the Solid South cracking like spring ice. By eleven the squeaker was a rout, the tally boys up ladders erasing the careful numbers of an hour before, and past midnight the general had it beyond argument, the count shaping on the boards within a whisker of the flimsy in the control-room wastebasket. I watched Dolan work out the arithmetic of his own position: the machine had called it at half past eight and been overruled, and sixty reporters were in the building. Television is faster than shame. "Get the eight-thirty run back," he said. "We'll confess. Confession is a hell of a show."
So toward midnight Collingwood told the country, handsomely, that the machine had known at half past eight and the men had not believed it, and the Remington Rand man came on and said it straight: they should have had nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place.4 The audience ate it with a spoon, as Dolan had known they would; there is no act in show business like honesty arriving late.
Then the card was read. They cut to me for the redemption beat, Collingwood turning with the smile: "With us tonight, a man who was present at some beginnings: the hero of the atomic desert, the man they are calling the father of the computer age. Mr. Jay Klipspringer." They, at that hour, was a card in his hand, typed by a girl on Madison Avenue eleven days before; but forty million citizens heard it said over my face, and a title so witnessed comes off with no solvent known to science. He asked whether the men or the machine had been right that night, and I gave them the sentence I had built in the taxi: "The machine, Mr. Collingwood. A machine doesn't care who wins. You can't hire that from a man at any price." It went down the wires whole, and it was true besides; my best material generally is.
My second gift was always standing next to the right man at the right moment; 1948 amended it to the right machine, and 1952 furnished forty million witnesses. And my nose lay quiet the whole night, as a nose like mine is entitled to do at a crowning: it reports bills coming due, not bills already paid.
On the loop, when the wrap came, Eckert's voice came up the wire a last time, level as a meter. "The men who buried the eight-thirty run will be lecturing by Friday on how they trusted the machine from the start. Tell Chicago that."
Wednesday's papers did the rest. The wire story ran the card's phrase under my photograph, and by the weekend it was simply what I was called, the way a street gets a name5; within the month Univac meant any computing machine in any American mouth, and our floor took orders for Univacs all winter and filled them with Model Twos, no complaints received. Sennett wired: CAPTION NATIONAL. TITLE HOLDS. DO NOTHING. ORDERS FOLLOW. A Tribune feature man came out to West Adams and captioned the eagle-stamped gyroscope on my desk "an early Klipspringer instrument," promoting it above its owner; the gyroscope at least was built by somebody. And Bunny's Tuesday letter came, three lines: the lake was gray, they had watched at the Averys', and Daddy said machinery that gets called right in the papers sells itself, so mind the margins. Then, under the signature, a fourth line, and she was never prodigal with them: The Averys saw too, darling. Now everyone knows what you do. I read it four times over two whiskeys and never touched bottom, and have not since.
I'll end with the counsel, free as ever, one rogue to another. When the men upstairs bury a true answer, do not dig it up and do not help them bury it; stand where it was last seen and wait for morning. Answers have a habit of coming out right after midnight, and a vindicated answer wants a face beside it for the photographs, and it cannot testify to whose. That is the whole of what I did on the most celebrated night of my life, and it has kept me in honorary doctorates for fifty years. The title was settled law, the orders followed, and the crown, I am bound to report, fit. Only the cost was on no bill the network ever paid. The fitting had been bought a year before, with a name, and not mine either; I have been walking past that entry since 1951 the way you walk past a door with a light under it. Next number I open the door. That November I slept excellently, and the reader may keep the fact by him. It will do its work.
The machine was the Universal Automatic Computer, UNIVAC, built at the Eckert-Mauchly division of Remington Rand in Philadelphia and accepted by the Census Bureau on March 31, 1951, the first electronic computer manufactured for sale in the United States; like every machine of the period it was sold years before it was finished (No. 15, note 1). It checked itself as the engineer describes: parity counts on every transfer, duplicated arithmetic circuits compared at every step, so that of all the parties to this number the machine alone was constructed to be incapable of quiet misstatement. —Ed.
The broadcast of November 4, 1952 went out from CBS Studio 41, above Grand Central Terminal, Walter Cronkite anchoring his first election night, Charles Collingwood assigned to the machine. The UNIVAC never left Philadelphia; what stood beside Collingwood in New York was a console mocked up for the camera, its lamps wired to blink, the machine's answers arriving by teleprinter. Cronkite recalled long afterward that the network had taken the machine on as "a gimmick," insurance against a dull evening. The rehearsal photographs of the anchorman at the real console survive; none shows the author, who is welcome to his elbow. —Ed.
At 8:30 in the evening, with about three million of some sixty-one million ballots counted, UNIVAC put the odds of an Eisenhower victory at 00 to 1, the print wheel carrying two digits, meaning at least 100 to 1, and gave him 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93, against published polls that had called the race close all autumn, the polling trade having sworn off boldness after 1948. The men in charge declined to broadcast the prediction and had the statistical factors revised until the machine returned odds of 8 to 7, which is what the audience received toward ten o'clock; restored to its own settings, the machine went back to the landslide and stayed there. The final count was 442 to 89. The suppressed eight-thirty prediction had erred by four electoral votes in five hundred and thirty-one. —Ed.
The admission is in the record of the night: Collingwood told the audience that UNIVAC had predicted the landslide hours earlier and that the prediction had been withheld, and Arthur F. Draper of Remington Rand, brought before the cameras to explain, said, "We should have had nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place." The lesson was general by morning. Within a few years "Univac" served the American language as the common word for a computer, as "Frigidaire" had for the icebox, and by the election of 1956 all three networks rented machines of their own. —Ed.
"Father of the computer age" first appears in print on November 5, 1952, in a wire-service account of the broadcast, attached to the author, and no document in the record ever detached it (No. 12, note 5). The reader has watched the title made: composed by an advertising man over a legal objection to "inventor," typed onto a card by a girl nobody named, read over the air at the hour the machine was vindicated. The engineer who built the machine stood beside it in Philadelphia all night, off camera; the machine itself, which was right at half past eight and said so, was represented to the country by a wooden front with lamps. The title went to the man beside the plywood, who had touched neither the machine nor the truth. The editor records the fit as excellent. —Ed.