Note: For details about the books mentioned in these anecdotes, see the book list given in the 'Selected Bibliography' section of this website (also under the 'OTHER' option).

001. Did you know that following WWII, the Allies forbade German firms to construct certain electronic devices, so that although some German universities (like those of Göttingen where the Max Planck Institute was located, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Munich Institue of Technology) designed and even built experimental computing machines, no commercial models were built until well after 1955 when the ban was lifted. (Standard Elektrik Lorenz, in collaboration with Siemens and Konrad Zuse eventually produced the first commercial computer in 1959.) [see Kenneth Flamm, Creating the Computer]

002. Did you know that ENIAC was considerably faster than its predecessor computing machines and could perform 5,000 operations per second; and that its inventors liked to point out that ENIAC could calculate the trajectory of a speeding shell faster than the shell could fly! [see Campbell-Kelly & Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine]

003. In many monasteries of medieval times, prayers were recited even at night-time, and before mechanical clocks were invented (in the 14^th century), various methods were used for keeping time (such as sundials, waterclocks, sandglasses, and notched candles and graduated ol vessels). Did you know, however, that some monasteries even turned to the stars by appointing junior brothers to note the changing positions of the stars relative to the monastery buildings! One such example states that… ‘On Christmas Day, when you see the Twins lying, as it were, on the dormitory, and Orion over the chapel of All Saints, prepare to ring the bell. And on January 1^st, when the bright star [Arcturus] in the knee of Artophilax [Bootes] is level with the space between the first and second window of the dormitory and lying as it were on the summit of the roof, then go and light the lamps.’ [see H. C. King, The Background of Astronomy]

004. Throughout the years following WWII, Atanasoff received several indications from individuals and industry that the builders of the ENIAC had patents on elements of computer design that originated with Atanasoff and the ABC. Two events are said to have motivated JVA’s interest and involvement in the patent issues surrounding the ENIAC: 1) Clifford Berry’s suspicous death in 1963; and 2) The publication of R. K. Richard’s book Electronic Digital Systems in 1966 in which a serious assertion of origination was made in favour of the ABC as the first electronic digital computer. JVA spent the next several years cooperating with Honeywell Corporation in challenging the ENIAC patents, now held by Sperry Rand Corporation.

The suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand was filed 26 May 1967 in the U.S. District Courthouse in Minneapolis, MN. The trial began 1 June 1971. The decision, handed down officially on 19 October 1973, held that “Mauchly’s basic ENIAC ideas were derived from Atanasoff, and the invention claimed in ENIAC was derived from Atanasoff.”

[from: https://jva.cs.iastate.edu/jvabio.php]

See also my introduction to the computing section of my website (where it mentions J. V. Atanasoff).

005. In spite of his genius, Isaac Newton wasn’t always correct in his interpretation of science. For example, Newton thought “that any attempt to combine different kinds of glass to make a compound lens to overcome chromatic aberration, the false colour fringes seen in a microscope or in a lens (refracting) telescope, would never be successful. In the late 1750s [years after Newton had died] Newton was to be proved wrong on this last point, but in the meantime it remained unchallenged, and its very error turned out to be actually an advantage because it stimulated Newton to devise the first practical reflecting telescope (a telescope where the front lens is replaced by a curved mirror at the rear end of the tube)”. [see Colin A Ronan, The Cambridge Illustrated History of the World’s Science]

Note: The reflecting telescope is not Newton’s invention since some years earlier the Scots mathematician James Gregory had already designed a mirror (reflecting) telescope. See the ‘Telescopes and Observatories’ section of this website.

006. Following Chernobyl’s disaster in 1986, Germany’s Green Party became increasingly popular with supporters vigorously opposing the construction of nuclear power reactors. Yet, it was not until 2011 that Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stepped up the country’s decommissioning plans for shutting down the country’s nuclear plants by 2022. By that year only three were still operating and the closure of a number of nuclear power plants had at least two implications. Since its provision of renewable sources weren’t significantly improved, the country was forced to begin burning more coal again, in spite of the country initially moving away from the use of fossil fuels. The second implication was political. As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border in late 2021 and early 2022, Germany’s hesitation in standing squarely behind the US and European allies in condemning Moscow’s act of aggression was believed in part to have been motivated by Germany’s need for Russian natural gas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coincided with the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, constructed by Russia’s majority state-owned Gazprom and intended to provide millions of German homes and businesses with Russian natural gas. [See Ian Fitzerald, Chernobyl]

007. The discovery of stellar proper motions is rightly attributed to the great astronomer Edmond Halley in 1718 after comparing his contemporary star charts with ancient ones. However, the astronomy historian John North interestingly notes that when the Chinese monk I-Hsing began recording ecliptic coordinates of the stars around the year 725 AD and found that many of these differed from those in old star lists, the likely reason for this discrepancy lay not only with instrumental errors and precession but was likely also the result of the stars own (‘proper’) motion. Thus, I-Hsing may have discovered stellar proper motions without actually knowing it. [See John North, The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology]

008. “… it was only with the coming of the railways that the need for standardizing time-systems became apparent. Even over a country as small as England, there is a definite difference in local time between, say, London and Bristol: in the days of stage-coaches it was customary for the driver to use an adjustable watch, running fast on the eastbound London journey and slow on the westbound Bristol journey, but from 1825, when the first passenger train service came into operation, things were less easy. There was a classic case of confusion in July 1858, during a court case in the town of Dorchester. The case was timed to start at 10 am, but the defendant was not present and in his absence the verdict went against him. He duly turned up some minutes later—because he had been reckoning by one time-system and the court by another.” [from Patrick Moore, The Sky At Night] [See also Emily Akkermans, “A time before Greenwich Mean Time”, Royal Museums Greenwich. https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/time/time-greenwich-mean-time-confusing-case-travellers-watch]
Note: The difference in time between Dorchester and London would have been about 9 minutes, and in those days, before the official establishment of the Greenwich meridian in October 1884, it was customary for different cities to keep their own, local, time.

009. “His [Douglas Engelbart] most famous invention, first described in 1967, was the “mouse”, which exhaustive tests showed was more efficient and effective than the light pen (used in the SAGE), the joystick, or other input devices. Engelbart recalled that he was inspired by a device called a planimeter, which an engineer slid over a graph to calculate the area under the curve. Among many engineers this compact device was a[s] common as a slide rule; it is now found only among antique dealers and museums.” [from Paul E Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing]

Note: SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) was a sophisticated system of powerful networked computers that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce an image of the airspace over a wide area.

010. “… When she [Lisa Meitner] was an x ray technician with the Austro-Hungarian forces on the eastern front in the 1914-1918 war, she would time her leave so as to get back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at the same time as Professor Otto Hahn (then a German poison gas officer on the western front). Their idea of a wartime holiday was to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute together.

Meisner was about as much a Jew as Johnny [John von Neumann] was. Her parents had been baptized into Christianity during the Austro-Hangarian empire. Until 1938 she was designated by the Hitler regime as a foreign (i.e., Austrian) Jewess and was therefore allowed to continue with her useful work. Absurdly the 1938 Anschluss of Austria with Germany made her officially a German Jewess. Although she was doing some spooky scientific research in Berlin, bombarding uranium with neutrons, the Gestapo intended to arrest her. Otto Hahn and some others, with courage, helped her illegally to escape via the Netherlands to Denmark, where Bohr had arranged for her to have a rather unsuitable job in Sweden.

… On the evening of January 6, 1939, [Otto] Frisch took their conclusions [of a paper he and others published regarding the bombardment of uranium with neutrons] to Bohr, who was leaving for the United States the next morning to spend the term at the IAS, which Johnny had helped arrange the summer before.

Bohr asked for a blackboard to be put in his cabin on the Swedish-American liner Drottningholm. He worked at it with another scientist on the journey over, despite being fearfully seasick the while. As the Drottningholm drew into New York harbor on January 16, 1939, the new immigrants Enrico and Laura Fermi awaited them on dockside.” [from Norman Macrae, John von Neumann]

011. “Meteorology in 1942-45 was a subject about which theoretical physicists had terrifyingly optimistic dreams, while practical meteorologists (as in the chaos school now?) were too pessimistic. At Los Alamos [Stanislaw] Ulam and others had mused on the possibility of attacking hurricanes with A-bombs. The violent energy of hurricanes lies on top of a mass of air (the weather) that itself moves only gently and slowly. Perhaps one could place nuclear explosions in hurricanes’ paths, so as to push them to somewhere less expensive than Florida? It is fun to contemplate what today’s environmentalists would say about that. Even 1946’s underdeveloped environmentalists did not like it much. RCA’s [Vladimir] Zworykin also wanted to change the world’s bad weather. He said in an interview to the New York Times in January 1946 that Johnny’s [John von Neumann’s] new electronic computers might lead toward that. Although Johnny had tried to stop this interview, Eckert at Philadelphia was furious about it; he interpreted it as Johnny’s opening bid to grab public relations credit away from Eckert-Mauchley machines. Mauchly was crosser still; he had ideas about using computers to predict the weather from sunspot cycles, a project that set Johnny snorting.” [from Norman Macrae, John von Neumann]

012. Fermat announced this unique property of 26 to the mathematical community, and then challenged them to prove that this was the case. He openly admitted that he himself had a proof; the question was, however, did others have the ingenuity to match it? Despite the simplicity of the claim the proof is fiendishly complicated, and Fermat took particular delight in taunting the English mathematicians [John] Wallis and [Kenelm] Digby, who eventually had to admit defeat. Ultimately Fermat’s greatest claim to fame would turn out to be another challenge to the rest of the world. However, it would be an accidental riddle that was never intended for public discussion. [from Simon Singh, Fermat’s Enigma]

Notes: 1) Of course Pierre de Fermat’s great mathematical challenge mentioned here is his Last Theorem (so called because it was the last unproven mathematical statement from a list of his mathematical claims). Fermat lived in the 17^th century (he was born in 1601), and it took some 350 years for Fermat’s Last Theorem (that xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no integer solutions for n>2) to be finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1993.

2) The number 26’s unique property is that it is sandwiched between 25 which is a square number (5x5) and 27 which is a cube number (3x3x3).