John Mauchly, Ph.D
Mauchly was a Physics professor at nearby Ursinus College. He attended <check
facts> and was hired by the Moore School. One of Mauchly's driving interests
was the statistical study of weather. He felt that if sufficient computing
were appled, then weather could be forcast many days into the future. Toward
this end, he was always looking for ways of doing massive computing tasks
faster than with a hand calculator.
And so, by 1943, we find Mauchly at the Moore School, were they were running
a Differential Analyzer for the Army. Mauchly had visited Atanasoff, and
had seen how fast vacuum tubes could calculate. Travis had shown that by
combining many calculators together, he could solve a very large problem.
Mauchly realized that a general-purpose electronic (vacuum tube) version
of Travis' "ganged calculators" could solve (1) trajectory problems
for the Army--faster than the Differential Analyzer, and (2) his own weather
equations. He proposed the ENIAC to the Army, and with the help of H. Goldstein,
received funding to build the ENIAC.
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