From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media 1940 to 1945 Timeline

Claude Shannon writes Communication in the Presence of Noise.

Because of World War II censorship the report was not published until 1949.

"The sampling theorem was implied by the work of Harry Nyquist in 1928 ('Certain topics in telegraph transmission theory'), in which he showed that up to 2B independent pulse samples could be sent through a system of bandwidth B; but he did not explicitly consider the problem of sampling and reconstruction of continuous signals. About the same time, Karl Küpfmüller showed a similar result, and discussed the sinc-function impulse response of a band-limiting filter, via its integral, the step response Integralsinus; this bandlimiting and reconstruction filter that is so central to the sampling theorem is sometimes referred to as a Küpfmüller filter (but seldom so in English).

"The sampling theorem, essentially a dual of Nyquist's result, was proved by Claude E. Shannon in 1949 ('Communication in the presence of noise'). V. A. Kotelnikov published similar results in 1933 ('On the transmission capacity of the 'ether' and of cables in electrical communications', translation from the Russian), as did the mathematician E. T. Whittaker in 1915 ('Expansions of the Interpolation-Theory', 'Theorie der Kardinalfunktionen'), J. M. Whittaker in 1935 ('Interpolatory function theory'), and Gabor in 1946 ('Theory of communication')" (Wikipedia article on Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem, accessed 01-04-2010).

Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil invent “frequency-hopping” transmission, now called spread-spectrum.

In 1941 Lamarr patented "frequency-hopping" under her married name of H. K. Markey, and assigned the patent to the U.S. Government.

This early version of frequency hopping used a piano-roll to change between 88 frequencies, and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

Max Newman and his team at Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing, create the top-secret Heath Robinson cryptographic computer, named after the cartoonist-designer of fantastic machines.

This special-purpose relay computer successfully decoded messages encrypted by Enigma, the Nazis' first-generation enciphering machine.

The Bell Labs Complex Number Calculator is operational.

Vannevar Bush writes a memorandum entitled “Arithmetical Machine.”

This memorandum shows that the Rapid Arithmetical Machine Project begun in 1936 was already well-advanced conceptually. Bush continued to focus most of his computational energy on building the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a 100 ton machine  that included 2000 vacuum tubes and 150 electric motors.

American chemist, anthropologist and linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf publishes "Science and Linguistics," M.I.T.'s Technological Review, 42: no. 6 (April, 1940) 229-231, 247-248, in which he develops controversial ideas concerning linguistic relativity— the hypothesis that language influences thought.

France signs an armistice with Germany, followed by an armistice with Italy, which entered the war on June 10. The Vichy government is established.

John Atanasoff writes a thirty-five-page memorandum describing the design and principles of the ABC machine.

This may be the earliest extant document describing the principles of an electronic digital computer. It remained unpublished until 1973.

George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator, an electromechanical relay machine located in New York, is demonstrated via a remote teletype terminal at the American Mathematical Association Meeting in Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly spent a lot of time experimenting with the system. This was the first demonstration of remote computing.

Inspired by the September 11, 1940 demonstration of remote computing using George Stibitz's electromechanical Complex Number Calculator, Norbert Wiener sends a letter to Vannevar Bush enclosing a “Memorandum on the Mechanical Solution of Partial Differential Equations.” This outlined a machine that had all the features of an electronic digital computer except for a stored program.

The memorandum was not published until it appeared in Wiener’s Collected Works (1976-84). (See Reading 7.3.)

John Mauchly meets John Atanasoff at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

After corresponding with Atanasoff about electronic calculating, Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Iowa and read the 35-page memorandum on the ABC machine that Atanasoff had written in August.

Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman at Bletchley Park design an improved Bombe cryptanalysis machine for deciphering Enigma messages.

Helmut Schreyer, Konrad Zuse’s associate, receives his doctorate in telecommunications engineering with a dissertation on the use of vacuum-tube relays in switching circuits.

Schreyer converted Zuse’s logical designs into electronic circuits, building a simple prototype of an electronic computer, which achieved a switching frequency of 10,000 Hz.

IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring proportional spacing.

By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page.

Argentine writer and library Jorge Luis Borges publishes the short story La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel) in his collection of stories entitled El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths). That entire book was, in turn, included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944). In 1962 two different English-language translations of The Library of Babel appeared: one by James E. Irby in a collection of Borges's works entitled Labyrinths and the other by Anthony Kerrigan as part of a collaborative translation of the Ficciones. A new translation by Andrew Hurley appeared in 1998 as part of a translation of the Collected Fictions. Hurley's translation of The Library of Babel was republished separately in 2000 by David R. Godine with reproductions of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières illustrating Borges' text.

Borges' story of a universe in the form of a library, or an imaginary universal library has been viewed as a fictional or or philosophical predictor of characteristics and criticisms of the Internet.

"Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

"Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the 'Crimson Hexagon', containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God" (Wikipedia article on The Library of Babel, accessed 05-25-2009).

At the suggestion of Wallace J. Eckert of Columbia University, physical chemist Linus Pauling and associates at Caltech use IBM electric punch card tabulating equipment to speed up the Fourier calculations in crystal structure analysis. The first paper resulting from these applications was David E. Hughes, "The Crystal Structure of Melamine," J.Amer. Chem. Soc. 63 (1941) 1737-52. 

Prior to this Leslie J. Comrie had attempted to introduce IBM Hollerith electric punched card tabulating to speed up Fourier calculations in crystal structure analysis in England, but the method did not gain acceptance.

Applications of IBM equipment in crystallographic research continued at Caltech but the method was not published until 1946:

Shaffer, Philip. A., Jr.; Schomaker, Verner; and Pauling, Linus  The use of punched cards in molecular structure determinations. I. Crystal structure calculations [II. Electron diffraction calculations], Journal of Chemical Physics 14 (1946) 648–658, 659–664.  The offprint version of the first paper contained a 10-page supplement with 5 full-age diagrams.

"Shaffer, Schomaker, and Pauling developed methods of carrying out Fourier calculations on IBM punched-card machines, using a Type 11 electric keypunch, a Type 80 electric sorting machine, and a Type 405 alphabetic direct-subtraction tabulating machine. This paper cites work as early as 1941 performed on the structure of various less-complex organic crystals using electric tabulation methods.

The supplement to Part I of this paper, which was included only in the offprint version, provided additional information on card design, plugboard wiring and operating procedures. 'The time factor is in all cases greatly in favor of the punched-card method relative to summation procedures used in the past. Fourier projections which by the Beevers-Lipson method required several days of calculation can now be made in 5 to 7 hours. At the same time the density of calculated points is much greater and the accuracy of the computation is assured. The machine steps in the least-squares calculations require only a few hours, as compared to one or two days with use of an adding machine, and again the accuracy of the work is assured. With the use of parameter cards and the structure-factor files the calculation of structure factors can be accomplished in about one-eighth of the time previously required.' (p. 658). Most of the detail in the technique of data processing, including information on card design, plugboard wiring, and operating procedures appears in the supplement" (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] no. 879).

Cranswick, "Busting out of crystallography’s Sisyphean prison: from pencil and paper to structure solving at the press of a button: past, present and future of crystallographic software development, maintenance and distribution," Acta Crystallographica Section A Foundations of Crystallography A64 (2008) 65-87. (Accessed 04-20-2010).

In the German bombing attack on Belgrade 4000 people were killed, and more than 8000 buildings were destroyed, including the National Library of Serbia. 

"This building was built in 1832 and was the only national library attacked on purpose and destroyed in WWII. The entire fund, of 350,000 books, including invaluable medieval manuscripts, was destroyed. The library also housed collections of Ottoman manuscripts, more than 200 old printed books dating from 15th to 17th centuries, old maps, engravings, works of arts and newspapers, including all the books printed in Serbia and neighbouring countries from 1832 on. The fate of Serbia, i.e. the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, had been decided upon with a putsch and protests of 27 March 1941 against the Trilateral Pact, signed by the then government two days before. The protests infuriated Hitler, who, on the same day, decided that, besides Greece, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia should also be destroyed as a state" (Radio Srbija: http://glassrbije.org/E/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10494&Itemid=32 , accessed 04-06-2010).

Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 machine—the world’s first fully functional Turing-complete electromechanical digital computer--with twenty-four hundred relays.

The Z3 ran programs punched into rolls of discarded movie film. In 1944 it was destroyed in bombing raids.

Because no one outside of Germany had any knowledge of the Z3, Zuse's design had no influence on the development of computing in the the United States or England during or after World War II.

J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly meet at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, and begin discussions on electronic computing.

Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company in Boston, writes a report on the possible application of George Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator for insurance-company calculations.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor causes the United States to declare war on Japan. Within days Germany and Italy declare war on the United States.

John Atanasoff’s special-purpose ABC machine is nearly operational when work on it is abandoned because of World War II.

Having collaborated with Julian Bigelow, an engineer, Norbert Wiener publishes, as a classified document, The Extrapolation, Interpretation and Smoothing of Stationery Time Series.

According to Claude Shannon , this work contained “the first clear-cut formulation of communication theory as a statistical problem, the study of operations on time series.”

Konrad Zuse starts work on the Z4 electromechanical computer.

Vannevar Bush completes the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer II, a monstrous machine more accurate and faster than the first Differential Analyzer. It contained two thousand vacuum tubes and weighed about one hundred thousand pounds. For security reasons its existence was not publicized until October 1945.

The Library of Congress publishes in 167 volumes reproductions of its printed card catalogue as A Catalog of Books Represented by Library of Congress Printed Cards, issued to July 31, 1942. (Ann Arbor: Edwards Bros., 1942-46).

In 1948 LC published a 42 volume supplement  and in 1953 a 23 volume supplement.

Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 163.

Raymond L. Lindeman publishes "The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology" in the journal Ecology XXIII, 399-418.  This work was characterized by Robert McIntosh as the "birth of ecosytem ecology". Lindeman described energy flow in ecosystems in a form amenable to productive abstract analysis.

J. Norman (ed.) Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed. (1991) No. 145.67.

John Mauchly writes a privately circulated confidential memorandum on “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating”

Alan Turing consults with Claude Shannon and Harry Nyquist at Bell Labs in New York concerning the encipherment of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill.

IBM develops the Vacuum Tube Multiplier.

This experimental machine was the first complete machine to perform arithmetic electronically. By substituting vacuum tubes for electro-mechanical relays it could process information thousands of times faster than electro-mechanical calculators.

Project Whirlwind starts as an analog flight simulator project at MIT.

Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the ideas Imminent in Nervous Activity,” describing the McCulloch - Pitts neuron, the first mathematical model of a neural network.

Building on ideas in  Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers”, McCulloch and Pitts's paper provided a way to describe brain functions in abstract terms, and showed that simple elements connected in a neural network can have immense computational power. The paper received little attention until its ideas were applied by John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and others. (See Reading 7.4.)

Logician and cognitive psychologist Walter Pitts, an autodidact without a high school or college diploma, accepts a position at MIT to work with Norbert Wiener.

Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation (MTAC), the world’s first computing journal, begins publication.

At this time mathematical tables prepared by human computers were the primary calculating aid. The journal reported on the new electromechanical and electronic “aids to computation” as they were developed.

Howard Aiken’s electromechanical Harvard Mark I operates at IBM Endicott Labs in New York under wartime security.

This was one of the first two programmed computers built by Americans.

With the goal of speeding up the calculation of artillery firing tables, Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School of Electric Engineering submit a proposal to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It was entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. The name tried to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army was using and the new electronic digital machine that would be developed. The proposal was submitted to army ordnance in May.

When the first contracts were signed between the United States Army and the Moore School, the name of the machine was changed to Electronic Numerical Integrator. Because Mauchly stressed that the machine could be used for more general problems, the device was called an “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).” Eckert was appointed laboratory supervisor and chief engineer on the project. Mauchly, along with Eckert, was put in charge of engineering and testing.

Construction of the ENIAC starts at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The actual contract between the Moore School and the army did not go into effect until July 1. For security reasons, the understandable rumor that the project was a “white elephant” was promoted rather than denied.

The Bell Labs Relay Interpolator (later called the Model II) operates for the first time.

Using programs from punched tape, this was possibly the first computer to run programs in the United States.

Helmut Schreyer’s small prototype of an electronic computer is damaged in an air raid on Germany. The machine was lost soon thereafter.

Erwin Schrödinger publishes What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, a popularization of ideas about the physical basis of biological phenomena developed by Max Delbrück and N. V. Timofeev-Ressovsky in a paper published in 1935. Schrrodinger's work influenced  James D. Watson and others.

In his autobiography Sydney Brenner pointed out a fundamental mistake in Schrödinger’s understanding of how genes would operate:

“Anyway, the key point is that Schrödinger says that the chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and the means to execute it. I have come to call this ‘Schrödinger’s fundamental error.’ In describing the structure of the chromosome fibre as a code script he states that. ‘The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are code law and executive power, or to use another simile, they are the architect’s plan and the builder’s craft in one.’ [Schrödinger, p. 20,]. What Schrödinger is saying here is that the chromosomes not only contain a description of the future organism, but also the means to implement the description, or program, as we might call it. And that is wrong! The chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and a description of the means to implement this, but not the means themselves. This logical difference was made crystal clear to me when I read the von Neumann article [Hixon Symposium] because he very clearly distinguishes between the things that read the program and the program itself. In other words, the program has to build the machinery to execute itself” (Brenner, My Life, 33-34).

Mathematician, physicist, and economist John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern publish The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

Quantitative mathematical models for games such as poker or bridge at one time appeared impossible, since games like these involve free choices by the players at each move, and each move reacts to the moves of other players. However, in the 1920s John von Neumann single-handedly invented game theory, introducing the general mathematical concept of "strategy" in a paper on games of chance (Mathematische Annalen 100 [1928] 295-320). This contained the proof of his "minimax" theorem that says "a strategy exists that guarantees, for each player, a maximum payoff assuming that the adversary acts so as to minimize that payoff." The "minimax" principle, a key component of the game-playing computer programs developed in the 1950s and 1960s by Arthur Samuel, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and others was more fully articulated and explored in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, co-authored by von Neumann and Morgenstern.

Game theory, which draws upon mathematical logic, set theory and functional analysis, attempts to describe in mathematical terms the decision-making strategies used in games and other competitive situations. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern theory assumes (1) that people's preferences will remain fixed throughout; (2) that they will have wide knowledge of all available options; (3) that they will be able to calculate their own best interests intelligently; and (4) that they will always act to maximize these interests. Attempts to apply the theory in real-world situations have been problematical, and the theory has been criticized by many, including AI pioneer Herbert Simon, as failing to model the actual decision-making process, which typically takes place in circumstances of relative ignorance where only a limited number of options can be explored.

Von Neumann revolutionized mathematical economics. Had he not suffered an early death from cancer in 1957, most probably he would have received the first Nobel Prize in economics. (The first Nobel prize in economics was awarded in 1969; it cannot be awarded posthumously.) Several mathematical economists influenced by von Neumann's ideas later received the Nobel Prize in economics. 

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 953.

Librarian and writer Fremont Rider publishes The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library.

In this book Rider detailed the increasing shortage of space in research libraries and described how his invention of the microcard, an opaque microform, would help to solve this problem. He also claimed that American research libraries were doubling in size every sixteen years--an assertion later proved incorrect.

Pres Eckert submits a report entitled Disclosure of Magnetic Calculating Machine, which briefly describes means for storing data on magnetic disks and also the storing of programs on disks. It does not enunciate the principles of the stored-program computer.

The top-secret Colossus programmable cryptanalysis machine designed by Tommy Flowers and his team is completed at Bletchley Park to crack the higher level encryption of the Nazi Lorenz SZ40 machine.

Colossus employed vacuum tubes and was between one hundred and one thousand times faster than Heath Robinson. The Colossus machines have been called the first operational programmable electronic digital computers; however, they were special purpose rather than general purpose machines.

Howard Aiken’s Mark I (ASCC) moves from IBM Endicott Labs to Harvard University where it is officially operational.

The electromechanical machine solved addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds. Grace Hopper wrote some of its first programs, which ran on punched tape.

The first improved Colossus Mark 2 is operational at Bletchley Park just in time for the Normandy Landings.

By the end of the war there were ten Colossus computers operating. They enabled the decryption of 63,000,000 characters of high-grade German messages. Even though these machines incorporated features of special purpose electronic digital computers, and had incalculable influence on the outcome of WWII, they had little influence, in the conventional sense, on the development of computing technology because they remained top secret until about 1970.

"The Colossus computers were used to help decipher teleprinter messages which had been encrypted using the Lorenz SZ40/42 machine — British codebreakers referred to encrypted German teleprinter traffic as "Fish" and called the SZ40/42 machine and its traffic as 'Tunny'. Colossus compared two data streams, counting each match based on a programmable Boolean function. The encrypted message was read at high speed from a paper tape. The other stream was generated internally, and was an electronic simulation of the Lorenz machine at various trial settings. If the match count for a setting was above a certain threshold, it would be sent as output to an electric typewriter" (Wikipedia article on Colossus computer, accessed 11-23-2008).

Pres Eckert has two accumulators of the ENIAC operational.

Faced with mathematical computations regarding the Atomic bomb that are too time-consuming for human computers, John von Neumann visits the ENIAC two-accumulator system for the first time, and becomes deeply interested in the project.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly state that their conception of the ENIAC is complete.

Eckert wrote a letter to other members of the project asking them to state written claims to inventions on the project. None was received.

The United States Army extends the ENIAC contract to cover research on the planned EDVAC stored-program computer.

During the Warsaw Uprising the German army destroys the Załuski Library, the first Polish public library, and the largest library in Poland. "Only 1800 manuscripts and 30,000 printed materials survived."

The Zaluski Library was built in from 1747 to 1795 by bishops Józef Andrzej Załuski and his brother, Andrzej Stanisław Załuski. After the Kościuszko Uprising, the Russian troops acting on orders from Czarina Catherine II looted the library and dispatched them to St. Petersburg, where it became a nucleus of the Imperial Public Library.

"Parts of the collections were damaged or destroyed during the plunder of the library and the subsequent transport. According to the historian Joachim Lelewel, the Zaluskis' books, 'could be bought at Grodno by the basket'."

"The collection was subsequently dispersed among several Russian libraries. Some parts of the Zaluski collection came back to Poland on three separate dates: 1842, 1863.In the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Polish-Soviet War and the Treaty of Riga the Soviet Union government returned around 50,000 items from the collection to Poland" (Wikipedia article on the Zaluski Library, accessed 12-02-2008).

IBM produces the Pluggable Sequence Relay Calculator (PSRC) for the United States Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground. This special-purpose punched-card calculator, developed for calculating artillery firing trajectories, was capable of performing a sequence of up to fifty arithmetic steps.

For the rest of the war these punched-card calculators, programmed with plug boards, remained the fastest digital calculators in the United States.

“These are the fastest relay calculators in operation; they perform six multiplications a second together with a great deal of addition, subtraction, reading, writing and consulting tables. They are not as elaborate as the Sequence Calculator at Harvard in that they have less storage capacity and less sequencing facilities; however, they are about twenty times as fast. Consequently, for those problems which can be handled in this way, they will do in one day what the Sequence Calculator will do in twenty days” (W.J. Eckert, 1947).

Because the ENIAC did not become operational until 1945, and stored-program computers following the EDVAC design were a later development, the PSRC has sometimes been called "the missing link between punched card equipment and stored program computers."

"As late as 1947, the Aberdeen machines still had the fastest calculating unit in existence. Their basic operations included addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, and column shift. These were the first punched-card machines to support division and square root. There were 36 storage and computing registers, and certain parallel processing capabilities, including the ability to read and process four input card streams simultaneously."