J. Presper Eckert

John Adam Presper “Pres” Eckert Jr., an American electrical engineer, teamed up with John Mauchly to create the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC. Together, they also delivered the inaugural course on computing topics, known as the Moore School Lectures, and launched the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Their work led to the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the United States, which used Eckert’s own invention, the mercury delay-line memory.

Eckert grew up in Philadelphia, the son of Ethel M. Hallowell, from an old Quaker family, and John Eckert, a wealthy real estate developer with Swiss German and Alsatian roots. He lived in a large house in Germantown, was driven to William Penn Charter School by a chauffeur during elementary school, and later joined the Engineer’s Club of Philadelphia, spending afternoons at the electronics lab of television pioneer Philo Farnsworth. He placed second nationwide on the math portion of the College Board exam. At his parents’ urging, he started at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to study business, but switched to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1937. At age 21, in 1940, he filed his first patent, “Light Modulating Method and Apparatus.” While at the Moore School, he worked on radar timing, boosted the speed and precision of the school’s differential analyzer, and in 1941 helped teach a summer electronics course under the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training program.

Mauchly, then a physics department chair at Ursinus College, took that summer course and later joined the Moore School as a teacher. His idea for a vacuum-tube-based electronic digital computer—far faster and more accurate than the differential analyzer for calculating artillery ballistics tables—caught the attention of Army liaison Lieutenant Herman Goldstine. On April 9, 1943, the proposal was formally presented at Aberdeen Proving Ground to Colonel Leslie Simon, Oswald Veblen, and others. A contract was awarded for the Moore School to build the machine, named ENIAC, with Eckert as chief engineer. It was finished in late 1945 and revealed to the public in February 1946.

Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School in March 1946 after a dispute over intellectual property claims. The university had adopted a new patent policy that would have required them to assign all patents to the school if they stayed. Their existing agreement allowed them to keep ENIAC patent rights while the university could license it to the government and nonprofits, but the university wanted commercial rights as well. That year, they founded the Electronic Control Company, which built the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), a machine notable for storing data on magnetic tape starting in August 1950. The company soon became the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and received an order from the National Bureau of Standards for the UNIVAC. Eckert earned the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1949. By 1950, the company faced financial trouble and was bought by Remington Rand, with the UNIVAC I completed on December 21, 1950. In 1968, Eckert received the National Medal of Science for his pioneering work in high-speed electronic digital computers.

Eckert stayed with Remington Rand, becoming an executive, and continued through its merger with Burroughs Corporation to form Unisys in 1986. He retired from Unisys in 1989 but remained a consultant. He died of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. In 2002, he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Eckert argued that the term “von Neumann architecture” should be called the “Eckert architecture,” because the stored-program concept central to it had already been developed at the Moore School before John von Neumann arrived in 1944–1945. His claim that von Neumann improperly took credit was supported by Jean Bartik, one of the original ENIAC programmers.