By Mark Ollig
On this date, 61 years ago this evening, CBS newscaster
Walter Cronkite announced the winner of the 1952 presidential election.
This was the first coast-to-coast televised broadcast
of a presidential election night, and the CBS television network was featuring
a computer’s computational analysis proficiency in determining the outcome of a
presidential election.
The revolutionary computer CBS showcased that night was
called the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC).
The UNIVAC, a large mainframe computer manufactured by
the Remington Rand company, was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
It was the world’s first commercially manufactured, electronic digital
computer.
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly are the same people
who created a computational device called an Electronic Numerical Integrator
And Computer, or ENIAC, which became operational in 1946.
For more about the ENIAC, check out the column yours
truly wrote Sept. 30 at: http://tinyurl.com/bytes-09302013.
The UNIVAC used in 1952 took up a lot of physical space.
Its equipment cabinets were approximately 25 by 50 feet in length.
A supervisory typewriter (made by Remington Rand) was
connected directly to the UNIVAC.
Around 5,200 vacuum tubes (acting as logic-gates) were
wired inside the UNIVAC system.
It also included large-capacity, magnetic-metallic tape
drives used for long-term data storage inside a “UNITAPE” machine cabinet.
A “UNIPRINTER” machine for printing paper copy was also
attached.
The UNIVAC used a high-speed “mercury-delay-line
storage” memory which transmitted ultrasonic wave pulses through liquid mercury
tubes; data was stored in binary-coded form.
The UNIVAC weighed 29,000 pounds, and could process
about 1,905 operations per second using a 2.25 MHz clock. It consumed 125 kW of
power.
I watched a video which showed, CBS newscaster Walter
Cronkite seated at his anchor desk on the evening of Nov. 4, 1952. Nearby, a
teletype machine was set up to send information back and forth from the UNIVAC.
Cronkite introduced fellow CBS newscaster Charles Collingwood,
who was seated near the UNIVAC computer operator’s console located in
Philadelphia.
Collingwood described the UNIVAC to the nation by
saying; “This is the face of a UNIVAC. A UNIVAC is a fabulous electronic
machine which we have borrowed to help us predict this election from the basis
of the early returns as they come in.”
You can watch the video at:
http://tinyurl.com/bytes-univac1.
A photo of how the UNIVAC looked in 1952 can be seen
here: http://tinyurl.com/bytes-univac4.
Around 8:30 p.m. EST, the UNIVAC determined through its
computing analysis programming, the winner of the 1952 presidential election
would be Dwight Eisenhower – even though only a small number of the votes had
been counted.
The CBS network, which Cronkite was working for, was
hesitant on sharing UNIVAC’s prediction with a national audience because public
opinion showed Adlai Stevenson to be ahead.
The UNIVAC had calculated 100-1 odds in favor of
Eisenhower winning the election.
Those odds didn’t sit well with the folks at CBS; some
were speculating the “electronic-brained” UNIVAC was going to turn out to be a
failure.
UNIVAC’s first set of electoral vote numbers predicted
Eisenhower with 438, and Stevenson with 93.
The actual electoral vote tally ended up with
Eisenhower receiving 442, and Stevenson taking 89.
The UNIVAC had a less than 1 percent error – an amazing
prediction result.
On the popular vote totals, the UNIVAC projected
32,915,000 votes for Eisenhower; the official total was 33,936,252 which put
the UNIVAC projection at around 3 percentage points in the accuracy rating
category.
“We saw it as an added feature to our coverage that
could be very interesting in the future, and there was a great deal of pride
that we had this exclusively. But I don’t think that we felt the computer would
become predominant in our coverage in any way,” Cronkite said about using the
UNIVAC.
A photo of Walter Cronkite and J. Presper Eckert
standing near the UNIVAC computer console can be seen at: http://tinyurl.com/bytes-univac3.
During the 1952 election night coverage, CBS competitor
NBC was using a tabulating computing machine called the Monrobot, built by the
Monroe Calculating Company. It was considerably smaller than the UNIVAC and
less powerful, but it did tabulate votes in favor of Eisenhower.
A picture of the Monrobot can be seen here:
http://tinyurl.com/bytes-monrobot1.
During the 1956 presidential election, all three major
television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, were reporting the presidential
election results using computerized analysis.
The original UNIVAC can be seen in the Smithsonian
Institution.
A personal note: As a youngster, and after seeing a
Saturday morning cartoon showing Wile E. Coyote building a “do-it-yourself
UNIVAC Electronic Brain,” I recall finding a cardboard box and cutting out a
slotted opening on the front of it. I then colored several round “computing
lights” on the box using red, green, yellow, and blue crayons.
I neatly placed sheets of paper and a sharpened pencil
next to the box.
On a piece of paper, I wrote the following and taped it
to the side of the box: “Write your question on paper, and insert in slot with
a dime for the answer.”
I printed along the top of the box in large letters,
using a black crayon: “UNIVAC.”
My family, especially my dad, got a kick out of it.
