George Stibitz
George Stibitz was a research mathematician, specializing in in mathematical physics, who worked at Bell Laboratories, starting in 1930. He played a key role in creating the Bell Telephone Laboratories relay computing devices, starting in the late 1930's. (They were a series of electro-mechanical computing devices, which made Bell Labs a major player in early computing device work in the US.) He did not merely point out a theoretical possibility; he created actual working devices, which saw extensive productive use.
He was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where he first learned binary arithmetic (from an algebra textbook which his mother, who had taught algebra, had given him). He attended Denison University and Union College, ending with a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1930. While in college he worked at General Electric's research laboratory in Schenectady; after finishing his Ph.D, he joined Bell Labs in New York City.
One of his first tasks at Bell Labs was supervising a group of human 'computers' (the meaning of the term, before the rise of electronic ones), whose work involved doing computations with complex numbers (much used in mathematical models of analog circuits), using electro-mechanical desk calculators. Doing those calculations in that manner was laborious, slow, and error prone; Stibitz realized that a computing device which could perform those calculations would result in an improvement on all those axes.
His familiarity with binary, allied to his then-newly-acquired knowledge of relays (then widely-used in the Bell system), allowed him to see (along with other Bell engineers), that an electro-mechanical computing device, built using relays, and directed to doing the lengthy calculations required by complex number arithmetic, was feasible. Bell Labs agreed to fund the development, and design work on the first of the Bell Labs' relay computing devices, the Complex Number Computer, started in November, 1938. Construction began in April, 1939, and was completed in October; it remained in daily use at Bell Labs until 1949.
Others, to which programmability was added, soon followed, in which he was heavily involved. During World War Two he was associated with the National Defense Research Committee; after the war he moved to New England. From 1964 he was a professor of physiology at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Further reading
- George Stibitz, Computer, in Brian Randell (editor), The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1973, 1982 (3rd edition)
- O. Cesareo, The Relay Interpolator, in Brian Randell (editor), The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers
- George Stibitz, Early Computers, in Nicholas Metropolis, Jack Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota (editors), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, New York, 1980
- David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human, Princeton University, Princeton, 2007
- Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008
External links
- E. G. Andrews, Telephone Switching and the Early Bell Laboratories Computers, BSTJ Vol. 42(2), 341, 1963 - contains much contet about Stibitz' work
- Chapter 4: Number, Please - Computers at Bell Labs, in Paul E. Ceruzzi, Reckoners: The Prehistory of The Digital Computer, From Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935-1945, Greenwood, Westport, 1983
- Paul E. Ceruzzi, Chapter Six: Relay Calculators, in William Aspray (editor), Computing Before Computers, Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1990
