Computer picks the presidential winner

© Mark Ollig

CBS began its coast-to-coast televised broadcast of the presidential election results between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower, Tuesday evening, Nov. 4, 1952.

Its coverage showcased analysis in determining the presidential election’s outcome using an electronic digital computer called UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer).

The UNIVAC, a large mainframe computer manufactured by the Remington Rand company, was designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite began reporting the presidential election results while seated at his anchor desk.

Nearby, a teletype machine transmitted information from what Cronkite called “The electronic brain UNIVAC.”

Cronkite introduced fellow CBS newscaster Charles Collingwood, seated in front of what appeared to be a computer operator console.

“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,” Collingwood said to the national television audience.

“This is not a joke or a trick,” added Collingwood. “It’s an experiment. We don’t know. We think it’ll work. We hope it will work.”

Unbeknownst to the viewers, Collingwood was seated in front of a UNIVAC console simulator with a cabinet full of randomly blinking lights.

Programmers were operating the working UNIVAC computer 100 miles away at the University of Philadelphia. A CBS remote camera crew reported from there.

The UNIVAC computer took up a lot of physical space. Its equipment cabinets were approximately 25 feet wide by 50 feet in length, and it weighed 29,000 pounds.

The computer’s 2.25 MHz clock processed 1,905 operations per second.

On Nov. 4, 1952, at 7:30 p.m. CST, with a small number of the total votes counted, the UNIVAC predicted the 1952 presidential election winner would be Dwight Eisenhower by a considerable number of votes.

The CBS network executives were hesitant to share UNIVAC’s prediction with a national television audience, because public opinion polls showed Stevenson ahead of Eisenhower.

Collingwood told the CBS audience that “the machine couldn’t make up its mind.”

Some CBS insiders speculated the electronic-brained computer would turn out to be a failure.

After the final vote tallies, CBS admitted around midnight that UNIVAC had earlier correctly predicted Eisenhower would win in a landslide over Stevenson.

In 1952, 266 out of 531 electoral votes were needed to win the presidency.

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 computer predicted 32,915,000 votes for Eisenhower; the official count was 33,778,963, placing the UNIVAC projection 3 percentage points in the accuracy rating category.

Stevenson received 27,314,992 votes.

Farrell Dobbs from Minnesota was on the 1952 presidential election ballot and received 10,306 votes.

Cronkite quoted former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen (who was in the CBS studio) saying, “It looks as if General Eisenhower will be elected with the greatest popular vote in history.”

In a somewhat related story, as a youngster growing up during the 1960s, I regularly watched Saturday morning cartoons (usually with a bowl of Captain Crunch cereal).

One cartoon featured Wile E. Coyote building a “do-it-yourself UNIVAC Electronic Brain,” hoping it would be able to think of a way to capture the elusive Road Runner.

I decided to build a UNIVAC computer of my own, which would answer questions (for a modest fee, of course).

Using a small cardboard box, I cut out a rectangular opening on the front, large enough to insert a sheet of paper, and cut a smaller space for depositing a dime.

Plenty of silver, representing a metallic cabinet, and several colorful “thinking computing lights” were crayoned on UNIVAC’s cardboard surface.

I placed sheets of paper and a few sharpened pencils next to the box.

Along the top of the box, using a black crayon, I wrote in large bold letters: “UNIVAC COMPUTER.”

“Write your question on a piece of paper. Insert paper in opening along with a dime for your answer. Thank you, UNIVAC computer,” I jotted down on a piece of paper taped to the side of the box.

I collected the questions (and dimes) and went into the family den, where the World Book Encyclopedias were located.

I placed the written answers next to the cardboard box, where the questioners retrieved them.

My family, especially my dad, got a kick out of this enterprising operation.

So, who is going to win this year’s presidential election?

I want to think the original UNIVAC (now in the Smithsonian Institution) would accurately predict the outcome.

Collingwood, describing the UNIVAC Nov. 4, 1952, can be watched at https://vimeo.com/52980654.

View a little over 31 minutes of the 1952 CBS presidential broadcast at http://tinyurl.com/CBS1952.

Stay safe out there.

First telegraph transmission across the Atlantic

© Mark Ollig

Minnesota had been a state, one day shy of three months, when the first transatlantic submarine telegraph cable communicated messages.

Test messages were sent back-and-forth among telegraph dispatchers between Ireland and North America Aug. 10, 1858.

These messages, sent as coded pulses of electricity, crossed the Atlantic Ocean through copper wire cable connecting the two landmasses.

The cable itself consisted of seven individual strands of copper wire twisted together and insulated inside three layers of a rubbery latex material obtained from gutta-percha trees.

The gutta-percha substance, fashioned into a thermoplastic material, is highly resistant to seawater.

The United Kingdom had been manufacturing telegraph wires using gutta-percha since 1845.

The thought of laying a telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean was first proposed in 1840 by Samuel Morse.

Morse, along with others, developed the telegraph during the 1830s.

In 1850, the first marine telegraph cable containing a single copper conductor insulated using gutta-percha was installed across the English Channel between England and France by two brothers – John Brett, a telegraphic engineer, and Jacob Brett.

The cable was very light. Rectangular lead weights were attached to make it sink; otherwise, it would float on the water’s surface.

Dispatchers did not understand messages sent over the cable due to electrical dispersions of the signal.

The cable, not having armor protection, was cut by an angler in a fishing boat who thought it was a new type of seaweed.

In 1851, the Brett brothers installed a new iron-wire stranded, armored-protected, four-conductor telegraph cable between Dover, England, across the English Channel, to Calais, France, 52 miles away.

The first successfully transmitted and intelligible telegraph messages were sent over the new cable between Britain and France Oct. 15, 1851.

The Brett brothers telegraph cable was in use for many years, and is the first submarine telegraph cable to connect two countries.

The transatlantic telegraph cable project began in 1854, by Frederic Gisborne, a Canadian inventor from Nova Scotia, and Cyrus W. Field, an American capitalist and financier.

Field and others originated the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, which started the transatlantic cable project.

Field contacted Morse and experts on oceanography to decide the best route for placing a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.

After taking three weeks to load the telegraph cable in large, circular coils aboard two naval ships, named USSF Niagara and HMS Agamemnon, the expedition across the Atlantic began July 17, 1858.

The first portion of each cable end (the shallow-water shore cable) originated from a land-based telegraph station building on each side of the Atlantic.

The shallow-water shore cable is heavily armored to protect it from damage caused by rocks, boat anchors, heavy ocean currents, and waves.

The two ships began the voyage to their respective destinations; the Agamemnon to Ireland, and the Niagara to Newfoundland.

Five miles out, the shore cable splices to each ship’s ocean cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

The cable lies on the ocean floor, 1.7 miles from the surface.

Mechanical machinery maintained and operated by the ship’s crew controlled the speed in which the telegraph cable was paying out into the ocean from the large cable coils contained inside each vessel.

Specific cable lengths are spliced together before being lowered into the water en route across the Atlantic.

A mixture of coal-tar pitch covered the cable and its splices.

The two ships would rendezvous July 29, 1858, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and splice their cables’ ends to complete the connection between the two land-based stations.

The 2,000-mile telegraph cable now joined Heart’s Content in Newfoundland to Telegraph Field on Valentia Island, in Ireland.

Congratulatory telegraph messages were communicated Aug. 16, 1858, over the new cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean between US President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria of England.

The Huddersfield Chronicle, dated Saturday, Aug. 28, 1858, includes both messages.

The queen’s message contained the following: “The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken a great interest. The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable, which now already connects Great Britain with the United States, will prove an additional link between the two nations.”

President Buchanan’s reply included: “The President cordially reciprocates the congratulations of her Majesty the Queen on the success of the great international enterprise accomplished by the skill, science, and indomitable energy of the two countries.”

The era of global electrical communications had begun.

Stay safe out there.

A piece of the 1858 
transatlantic cable

Map of the 1858 transatlantic cable route 

NASA’s ‘Voice of Launch Control’

© Mark Ollig

His voice will be remembered by many of us who followed the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo NASA missions.

I am speaking of Jack King, NASA’s launch control public commentator from 1965 to 1971.

His voice described the events taking place during the final minutes leading up to a rocket launch.

I mostly remember King for his balanced and calm narration during the televised launch of Apollo 11.

The Apollo 11 Saturn V (pronounced “Saturn five”) rocket would, for the first time, take humans to the surface of a celestial body outside the Earth’s atmosphere, specifically, the moon.

The Saturn V rocket was an incredible sight, standing 363 feet high, about the height of a 36-story-tall building.

By comparison, the Statue of Liberty, including its pedestal and foundation, stands 305 feet tall.

The Saturn V rocket weighed 6.2 million pounds at liftoff.

By comparison, a NASA space shuttle’s gross liftoff weight was 4.5 million pounds.

The Saturn V engines produced 7.6 million pounds of thrust (the forward or upward force), which, according to NASA, would be equivalent to the power of 85 Hoover Dams, or the combined horsepower of 543 jet fighter planes.

Watching on television, a Saturn V liftoff was a magnificent sight.

I can only imagine what it would have been like to witness a Saturn V rocket launch in person.

Let’s revisit the early morning of Wednesday, July 16, 1969.

Huddled in front of our television sets, we eagerly listened to Jack King’s confident and reassuring voice during the final minutes before Apollo 11’s liftoff from Launch Pad 39A in Florida.

Television cameras zoomed in on the mighty Saturn V rocket.

King informed us, “T minus three minutes and counting . . . T minus three; we are go with all elements of the mission at this time. We’re on an automatic sequence as the master computer supervises hundreds of events occurring over these last few minutes.”

At two minutes, five seconds before liftoff, King announced, “The target for the Apollo 11 astronauts, the moon, at liftoff will be at a distance of 218,096 miles away.”

As a youngster, I recall feeling excited and a bit nervous while listening to King’s description of the events taking place during the countdown.

It was now less than two minutes until liftoff.

The television screen switched between the Saturn V rocket on the launchpad to the busy flight controllers at their console positions inside the Mission Control room in Houston, TX.

“We’ve just passed the two-minute mark in the countdown. T minus one minute, fifty-four seconds and counting. Our status board indicates that the oxidizer tanks in the second and third stages now have pressurized,” King confirmed.

I briefly looked away from the television to glance out the living room window.

In the sky, I could see a very faint moon in the distance and felt the wonderment of the moment. “The rocket on TV with three people in it are going there,” I thought, while gazing at the moon.

“T minus 60 seconds and counting. Neil Armstrong just reported back that it’s been a real smooth countdown,” King said.

At approximately 46 seconds before launch, King relayed with confidence, “Power transfer is complete. We’re on internal power with the launch vehicle at this time.”

“Thirty-five seconds and counting, we are still go with Apollo 11,” King continued.

The following still gives me chills whenever I re-watch the launch of Apollo 11 and hear Jack King say, “T minus 15 seconds . . . guidance is internal. Twelve, 11, 10, nine . . . ignition sequence start . . . six, five, four, three, two, one, zero [huge red flames now begin billowing out of the rocket’s engines as a loud roar is heard] . . . all engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff! Thirty-two minutes past the hour ... liftoff on Apollo 11!”

Apollo 11 rose from the launchpad at 8:32 a.m. Central Standard Time July 16, 1969.

The Saturn V rocket slowly and majestically begins its ascent into the blue Florida sky, clearing the launch tower while carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins into history.

You can hear King describe the last 30 seconds before Apollo 11 thundered into the sky on the NASA website at https://go.nasa.gov/33WuGKZ.

John W. (Jack) King, the composed, confident, and reassuring “voice of launch control,” passed away June 11, 2015, at age 84.

Stay safe out there.

Jack King during the launch of Apollo 11
July 16, 1969

Picture this

© Mark Ollig

During the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, NY, a demonstration took place ahead of its time.

An AT&T Bell System telephone representative demonstrated its advanced “see-as-you-talk” Picturephone to the many curious spectators gathered around it.

The demonstration included a video camera, a television screen, a Touch-Tone push-button telephone, audio speakers, and a power supply.

The Picturephone video camera used a small, Plumbicon cathode-ray tube commonly found in commercial television broadcasting cameras of that time.

The Picturephone unit itself measures about 12 inches wide, 7 inches tall, and 13 inches deep. The television screen measured 4-inches-by-5-inches.

April 20, 1964, using a Picturephone installed at the fair in New York, and one at Disneyland in California, people located in both venues were able to see and talk with each other.

The people using it appeared to delight in seeing the person they spoke with over a futuristic video telephone usually seen on “The Jetsons” Saturday morning cartoon TV show.

In the demonstration, the real-time audio and black-and-white video quality on the Picturephone call was of high-quality.

Long lines of people were in both locations; folks wanted to get a good look at the future video telephone.

“We can’t hope to provide Picturephone service for the ordinary residence and business office in the near future, but we are hopeful of offering the service in the next few months on a market trial basis,” said Charles Maples, assistant chief engineer at AT&T.

In June 1964, AT&T installed Picturephone public calling booths in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

A person wishing to use the Picturephone calling booth needed to schedule an appointment 15 minutes in advance, as did the person they would be talking to on a Picturephone in one of the other cities.

It cost $16 to place a 3-minute Picturephone video call from New York to Washington, DC; $21 between Chicago and Washington, DC; and $27 between Chicago and New York.

Remember, folks; this was in 1964, so that $16 would be equivalent to approximately $135 in today’s economy, $27 would equal almost $225.

In 1964, the cost of placing a local phone call using a coin-operated payphone was 10 cents.

Minneapolis Star newspaper authored an article June 25, 1964, about the Picturephone, titled “See-and-Talk Phone Service Is Inaugurated.”

St. Cloud Times newspaper ran an article Oct. 9, 1964, on the Picturephone, entitled “Bell System Puts Phoners on TV.”

With the low number of people using the Picturephone, the folks at AT&T needed to come up with a way to entice more folks to utilize them.

In 1965, AT&T decided to cut the cost of placing a 3-minute Picturephone call by about 50 percent.

This new pricing strategy proved unsuccessful in attracting more Picturephone users.

The next idea was to move the outdoor Picturephone video booths inside Bell-owned buildings to see if this would increase their usage.

This action did not help. People still did not show much interest in the Picturephone.

Since using a Picturephone was restricted to just three cities, it did not acquire enough national exposure from the public to make the service a profitable venture for AT&T.

It was expensive, and the people having to make a video call from a location other than their home or business place found it too inconvenient.

Many of the Picturephone booths installed were no longer in use by 1968.

By the early 1970s, AT&T admitted the public was not showing enough interest in the Picturephone, causing its loss of appeal.

At its peak, AT&T reported there were around 500 Picturephone subscribers.

While the Picturephone technology used was state-of-the-art and demonstrated how we would communicate with each other in the future, having one installed in a business or a home proved too costly for most people.

Today, many of us working from home commonly use video conferencing applications; you could call it a Picturephone, and, of course, its cost is not a limiting factor.

Eleven years ago, over my internet dialup account via a modem, I used the Skype video conferencing program to communicate with my oldest son, attending Academia de Bella Arte in Florence, Italy.

Today, I regularly use Microsoft Teams Meeting and the Zoom video conferencing programs.

A photograph of two people using the Picturephone taken April 20, 1964, can be seen at https://bit.ly/34syIcY.

Stay safe out there.

The ‘EEN-ee-ack’ computer

© Mark Ollig

April 9, 1943, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, better known as ENIAC, began under the secret code name “Project PX.”

Its design and construction were financed by the US Army during World War II to assist with the war effort against Germany’s armed forces.

The ENIAC was a highly-advanced electronic digital computational computer developed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The principal consultant for Project PX was physicist Dr. John William Mauchly, who pronounced the name of the ENIAC as “EN-ee-ack,” unlike the standard pronunciation at the time of “EEN-ee-ack.”

Mauchly, 38, and his chief engineer, John Presper Eckert Jr., 26, built the ENIAC.

Eckert engineered the project and solved many of its technical problems, including how to get better dependability from the 10 different types of vacuum tubes by operating some at one-quarter of their standard power rating.

Mauchly worked with the hardware and electrical component configurations.

Arithmetic, memory, and control elements were part of ENIAC’s operating system.

The computer used 20 processing registers, or “accumulators,” for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square-root problem-solving.

Sub-elements of the ENIAC were binary, and its processing clock speed was 100 kHz per second.

The ENIAC computer weighed 30 tons and was U-shaped. Its 40-panel bays, some 9 feet high, filled a 30-foot-by-50-foot room.

Commercial power fed directly into the computer’s primary power input sources. ENIAC required 174 kilowatts of power to operate.

The computer used approximately 70,000 resisters, 10,000 capacitors, 18,000 vacuum tubes, and miles of wire, including 5 million hand-soldered joints to connect all the electrical components and wiring.

Two 20-horsepower fans blew cold air onto the vacuum tubes, resistors, and other components from overhead circular and rectangular sheet metal vents to prevent them from overheating.

The computer’s programming interface used 3,000 rotary switches and dozens of front patching cables plugged into sockets on the central control operating panels.

Programming the computer took place by adjusting switches and physically plugging cross-connect cables into the correct sockets to work the desired computations.

Different computations required the patch cords to be re-plugged into the correct computing registers, and the control switch positions needed to be changed.

When I saw a photo of the ENIAC’s cords patched into its main control panel, it reminded me of an old-style telephone operator switchboard.

During 1945, the Army used the ENIAC’s computing power to solve military ballistic equations and artillery firing control problems.

At the time, ballistic targeting calculations usually took 12 hours to perform, using a mechanical calculator. The ENIAC could perform these calculations in just 30 seconds.

Other uses for the computer’s processing capabilities included weather forecasting, wind-tunnel designs, atomic-energy calculations, and various scientific applications.

Maintaining a 24-hour-a-day operation of the computer required six technicians working three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week.

The six original programmers of the ENIAC were: Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence.

It’s important to note these six computing pioneers created some of the basic concepts used in modern computer programming, including subroutines and nested loops.

Calculations could be entered into ENIAC using IBM punch cards. After computing the solution, it would print the results on other punch cards, which would be fed and read through a punch card reader.

The ENIAC had no built-in electronic component arrangement to store memory, and so again, punch cards held the data.

It must have been an opportune time to have stock in companies producing punch cards.

In November 1945, the ENIAC was fully completed – two months after World War II.

The ENIAC’s final cost was $487,000, which today would equal a little over $7 million.

The computer’s existence was kept secret by the US government until 1946.

The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, dated Friday, Feb. 15, 1946, had a front-page story announcing ENIAC to the folks living in Minnesota.

“30-Ton Robot Figures Everything But Cost” was written by Minneapolis Tribune staff correspondent Martin Took.

A front-page photo of the ENIAC included Mauchly, Eckert, and some of the women programmers. The caption read: “ENIAC, the army’s electronic robot calculator.”

The article revealed how the computer performed and solved a single addition problem in 1/5,000 of a second, and how it completed “many distinct additions simultaneously.”

June 24, 1947, the US Patent Office granted John Mauchly and John Eckert Jr. patent number 3,120,606 for “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.”

On this day, 65 years ago, at 11:45 p.m., ENIAC, the first large-scale, fully electronic digital computer, was turned off.

Four of ENIAC’s original front computing panels are on display at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Stay safe out there.