Name/Title
1946/04- Popular Science **Tags
ENIACDescription
SOME day, travelers may step out of a plane in San Francisco 10 minutes, by local clocks, before they left New York. That day has been brought closer by the work of two brilliant young engineers at the Moore Electrical Engineering School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr, have designed and built, with an assist from Army Ordnance, the world’s first all-electronic computer. The speed and scope of this digital wizard will revolutionize methods of modern industrial design. It is expected to put mathematics back into industry as an economical, rapid tool, saving months of figure work and accomplishing part of the presently impossible
The plane, rocket, or wing, in which a passenger may travel well over 1,000 miles per hour is now just a ghost on a blueprint. Engineers at Republic Aviation Corporation say it is hidden somewhere under a huge mass of highly complicated mathematical equations. The engineers believe that those equations must be completely analyzed before any promises can be made about supersonic speeds. The Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) has made complete mathematical analysis of that kind feasible for the first time.
Such computations involve the handling of many numbers as large as or larger than 2,156,789,463. With pencil and paper, the average man can multiply that number by 1,987,437,846 and get 4,286,485,004,620,216,698 in five minutes. He might even be able to turn out 10 such answers in an hour. Working 24 hours a day for 229 years, he might finish 20,000,000 similar multiplications, covering 10,000,000 square feet of paper. He then would have completed only the multiplication involved in solving an equation that engineers say is a “basic” aerodynamic problem. It relates directly to the design of shells. It has never been solved.