A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer

2 The Electronic Brain

John Simmons was a hard man to convince. Here in his office were two of his most trusted lieutenants, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, babbling excitedly about an ‘electronic brain’ and asking his permission to visit a military research laboratory in the United States to find out what was going on in the field of electronic, digital computing in the aftermath of the Second World War. They seemed to think an electronic calculator might be relevant to their mission to increase clerical efficiency. Yes, he conceded, like them he had always dreamed of automating routine office work. But in 1946, with an exhausted economy and severe currency restrictions in force, it was absurd to think of buying an expensive American machine, even if such a machine existed.

Not that Simmons was opposed to the American trip itself; it had been his idea to send the two men across the Atlantic as soon as possible after the war was over to find out about the latest developments in office machines and office methods. The American office technology industry had virtually no counterpart in the United Kingdom, apart from its own licensed offshoots, and Simmons had long been used to monitoring American innovations as he developed his own approach to office management. He had made his own first visit to the United States, as a young trainee in 1925, to find out how big companies there managed their operations.

One of the companies Simmons had visited on that occasion was International Business Machines. IBM traced its origins to the invention of punched card calculators by a young New York engineer named Herman Hollerith at the end of the previous century. While working for the Bureau of the Census in Washington DC, Hollerith had invented a range of machines that could process the data from census returns by means of holes punched in cards. Hollerith’s innovation was so much faster than manual methods that it seemed little short of miraculous at the time. It received its first trial in the analysis of the 1890 US census. Clerks entered each citizen’s details on a single card, about the size of an elongated postcard, which was printed with a 40-column grid of numbers. By hitting a key on a keyboard corresponding to a particular position on the grid, the operator punched a hole in the card: the positions of the holes represented the citizen’s age, sex, employment category and so on. The stacks of cards were then fed into a ‘tabulating machine’. The machine sensed the positions of the holes through a matching matrix of spring-loaded pins, each of which completed an electrical circuit if it passed through a hole and thereby added one digit to the running total in one of the forty counters operating concurrently in the machine. Another type of machine called a sorter could arrange the cards in alphabetical or numerical order. With dozens of machines operating at once, Hollerith had a rough population count ready within six weeks, and detailed analysis of the results in just over two years. By contrast, the 1880 census, analysed with pencil and paper by almost 1,500 clerks, had taken seven years to complete.

Hollerith quickly saw the commercial possibilities of his machines, and after forming his Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 he successfully sold a number of installations to factories, insurance companies, telephone companies and other large businesses. In failing health, in 1911 he finally agreed to sell his company to a wealthy investor, Charles Ranlegh Flint, for $2.3 million. Flint merged the company with the Computing Scale Company, which made scales for shopkeepers, and the International Time Recording Company, which made the clocks that employees punched as they arrived and left their workplaces each day. The new company was called C-T-R (the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) and Flint appointed Thomas J. Watson Sr as general manager.

Watson had developed his consummate skills as a salesman in the aggressive culture of the National Cash Register Company (NCR). He quickly rose to the position of sales manager there, but was summarily fired in 1911 by the company’s eccentric founder John H. Patterson. On his arrival at C-T-R he immediately implemented many of the marketing and sales strategies he had learned at NCR, rapidly transforming it into a key player in the office machines business in the first decades of the twentieth century. Under Watson it was the company’s practice to lease its machines rather than selling them outright, ensuring a continuing income even in times when new customers were hard to find. It also held a monopoly on the supply of the cards. By 1924 the company had subsidiaries operating across four continents and in that year, to reflect its increasingly global impact, Watson changed its name to International Business Machines – IBM.

The following year, when John Simmons arrived from Lyons to pay a visit, the young Englishman had not found it difficult to resist the hard sell. To hire the machines and buy the specially made cards was expensive, and for the purposes of Lyons, the time and labour needed to punch the cards and feed them through the machine was not much less than that needed to do the work manually. Simmons judged the application of this technology to be of little relevance to the clerical administration of Lyons’s food manufacturing and distribution business. At that time he was more interested in extending his company’s use of manual adding and accounting machines, and in introducing the kind of office organisation extolled by American authors such as Leffingwell.

According to Oliver Standingford’s own account, when he and Thompson went to the United States in 1947 it was he who proposed that their research should include an enquiry into electronic computers. Standingford had joined Lyons straight from school in 1930 as a management trainee in the Stock Department. By that time, Simmons’s reforms had included a new system of cost accounting that included setting rigorous standards for every step in the food production chain. Everything was specified, from the value of the energy needed to bake a loaf of bread to the thickness of the jam spread on the Swiss rolls. Much of the clerical work in the Stock Department involved checking actual performance against these standards. It was a task that produced useful information for management but was short on job-satisfaction for most of the clerks who had to carry it out. Standingford had found himself supervising a section of ‘seventy calculator operators doing nothing but multiplying, adding, subtracting and writing down the answers by hand’.

Although he was no engineer, Standingford had looked at the technology around him and had begun to think about how it might be used to automate the work of the Stock Department clerks. Towards the end of the 1930s, he had come up with a scheme for ‘a device composed of the existing multiplying accounting machine and an arrangement of automatic telephone equipment and magnetic records … It would have stored information and recovered it automatically.’ Eager for the endorsement of a more technically minded supporter, he had shown his plans to Jack Edwards, Lyons’s chief electrical engineer. The most Edwards had been prepared to concede was that the idea was ‘not mad’.

With war in Europe becoming inevitable, there was no opportunity to take it further. Both Standingford and Edwards had signed up for war service and would not return to Lyons until 1945. As soon as the war was over, Edwards had sought out Standingford, having never forgotten the eager young manager’s questions. In the course of his war service as an engineer, Edwards had discovered that the military boffins had developed electronic devices to improve the aim of the anti-aircraft gunners who had successfully defended British skies. Electronics, he suggested, would be the technology of the future for office machines, much faster than the electromechanical machines then in use.

The field of electronics was launched almost a century ago with the invention of the thermionic valve (or vacuum tube as it is known in the United States). First invented by the British scientist John Ambrose Fleming in 1904, a valve looks like a small light bulb. It consists of a glass tube from which all the air has been removed, sealed to maintain the vacuum inside. Held upright, side by side within the tube, is a small number of metal wires, or electrodes. Fleming’s original invention had just two electrodes and so was known as a diode; later models incorporated up to five electrodes. Just as the valve in a plumbing system holds back water until someone opens it by turning a tap, thermionic valves allow current to flow in one direction only. They had revolutionised radio engineering during the 1920s, valve-based receivers replacing the crystal sets that had first been used to capture broadcasts. Edwards explained to Standingford that a calculating device made of valves would be thousands of times faster than any mechanical design as it would have no moving parts: all of its operations would be carried out by the movement of electrons in wires.

Standingford had hardly digested this information when he saw an article reporting that American engineers at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had developed just such a machine, which the article described as an ‘electronic brain’. He was immensely excited at this development, and determined to investigate further.

In the post-war reorganisation of Lyons, John Simmons had been appointed comptroller. This somewhat archaic title referred in Lyons to the head of management accounting – the person responsible for presenting the company’s figures to the board in such a way that managers could identify areas for action and improvement. The Comptroller’s Department gradually assumed overall responsibility for the management of clerical work in the other departments. Standingford was promoted to become one of the assistant comptrollers. It was in this capacity that Simmons proposed to send him to the United States, in May 1947, to study advances in office methods. Accompanying him on the trip would be Simmons’s chief protégé, Raymond Thompson. Sensing that he would have an able advocate in Thompson, Standingford sounded him out before the two of them approached Simmons to ask permission to visit the Moore School while they were in the United States. He was more successful that he could have hoped – Simmons later insisted to an interviewer that it was Thompson’s idea to investigate computers.

Thomas Raymond Thompson had been recruited by Simmons to further his ideas for Lyons. In May 1931 he had written to Simmons on his own initiative. ‘Being up in Town for a few days, I am venturing to call and see you on Tuesday,’ he began. ‘I am looking for a position as Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Accountant or Statistician of a progressive business and I thought it possible that you might have some such position to offer me.’ Simmons’s reputation had evidently travelled far; for the previous two years Thompson had been working as acting secretary to a Liverpool department store, Owen Owen. Born in 1907 into a relatively humble family – his father ran a grocer’s shop – he won a scholarship to Cambridge where, like Simmons, he proved to be one of the ablest mathematicians of his generation and graduated with first-class honours.

There the similarity between the two men ended. While Simmons was soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous, Thompson was excitable, choleric and arrogant. Where Simmons spoke and wrote with thoughtful elegance, choosing his phrases carefully and striving for clarity, Thompson’s enthusiasm at times ran ahead of his powers of expression, so that the words tumbled out with little sense of whether his listeners were keeping up. He was given to explosions of temper if he believed that subordinates were slacking, or if crossed in argument, and was universally known (behind his back) by his initials TRT, no doubt for their resemblance to the explosive TNT. He grasped new ideas with great rapidity and was full of what one of his acquaintances described as ‘intellectual joy’, a quality that could be appealing as long as you were not on the receiving end of one of his wrathful outbursts. Simmons, for whom the younger man had enormous respect, was able to channel Thompson’s enthusiasm and harness his undoubted ability. In 1947 Thompson had just been appointed chief assistant comptroller, and so was the more senior of the two men making the trip to the United States.

At the time the post-war shortage of labour had to some extent lessened the burden of clerical work at Lyons. The company had shared the indomitable spirit of wartime London, serving tea in its surviving teashops (70 were destroyed by bombs) throughout the Blitz and entertaining soldiers on leave with the gaiety of its Corner Houses. Part of Cadby Hall, which survived unbombed, became a depot where volunteers packed boxes of rations to be dispatched to serving soldiers. Many Lyons staff at all levels either joined the services or took up war-related work elsewhere. One group of Lyons managers even ran a munitions factory at Elstree. With exemplary efficiency, the factory had turned out millions of bombs by the time the war was over.

The vast majority of Lyons staff who had been on active service returned to their old jobs in 1945. The post-war picture was subtly altered, however. One symptom of the harsher climate was that the Nippies had disappeared from the teashops. Labour shortages in wartime had forced Lyons to convert the shops to self-service cafeterias, and when the war ended, rising costs obliged the company to keep the same system. No waitresses in the teashops meant no Checking Department – the job for which John Simmons had dreamed of using a miraculous automatic machine had simply ceased to exist. But his vision had fired the imagination of his younger colleagues: ‘the idea,’ as Simmons later put it to an interviewer, ‘was in our blood’.

Yet Simmons himself was at first surprisingly lukewarm about Standingford’s plan to look at computers in the United States. Being unaware of any moves towards electronic computing in the United Kingdom, he assumed that the only way to acquire a machine of the ‘electronic brain’ variety would be to buy it from an American supplier, and it was virtually impossible for British firms to spend such large sums of money overseas at the time. But before he finally came to a decision he consulted his mentor, the ageing company secretary George Booth. Booth expressed the indulgent view that ‘youth should be given its head, even if that head contains unusual ideas’. (At the time Standingford was thirty-seven and Thompson forty, but such things are relative: Booth was seventy-eight.)

So Simmons wrote to Dr Herman Goldstine, a researcher then at the maths and science hothouse, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, asking if Thompson and Standingford might come and see him. During the war Goldstine had been the US army liaison officer attached to the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia, where the ‘electronic brain’ – or to give it its proper name, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC – had been developed for the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. He replied that the two men would be welcome to visit him. In the spring of 1947 (a spring all the more welcome in that it followed one of the worst British winters in living memory), Thompson and Standingford boarded a ship for the five-day crossing of the Atlantic.

It brought them to a land of plenty, even of excess: abundant food, central heating, large, gas-guzzling automobiles, all in stark contrast to the privations of bombed-out, rationed Britain. But they were far from dazzled by much of what they saw. In the course of a whirlwind programme of visits to office equipment suppliers and large organisations, they found nothing to match the systems that had been put in place at Lyons by Simmons and his team. They were astonished at the readiness of American managers to have their problems diagnosed by office machinery salesmen, whose remedies inevitably involved buying more of their equipment. Few seemed to have paid more than lip-service to the ideal of scientific management, apparently happy to believe that efficiency could be bought off the shelf from whichever salesman produced the most convincing argument or dazzling demonstration. For example, most companies were using IBM’s punched-card installations, but few had seriously evaluated their cost-effectiveness.

Even in the layout of office buildings, Thompson and Standingford felt that the new Lyons administrative building at Cadby Hall, Elms House, meticulously designed under John Simmons’s direction according to the principles of scientific management, was superior to any American organisation’s offices. While they were in Washington DC they took in the War Department’s Pentagon office building, completed only three years before at a cost of $80 million. Their guide reeled off the statistics: 30,000 workers, more than 6.5 million square feet of floor space on five floors, and 17½ miles of corridors. The two men left, laughing and shaking their heads incredulously at the time that would be wasted in getting from one part of the building to another.

At last they headed for Princeton and their meeting with Herman Goldstine – a meeting that made the whole trip worthwhile.

ENIAC

Herman Goldstine was the godfather of ENIAC, the ‘electronic brain’ that had caused such a fever of press excitement and had stimulated Raymond Thompson and Oliver Standingford to explore the possibilities of electronic computing. Having gained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Goldstine joined the army when the United States entered the war. In 1942 he found himself assigned to the army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, with the rank of lieutenant. In his crisp uniform he looked every inch the military man, but he never truly left academic life behind; always hungry for ideas, when he found a good one he would do everything possible to make sure it had a chance to flourish.

One of his tasks was to liaise with the Moore School of Engineering, not far away in Philadelphia. Here, teams of women – ‘human computors’ – were being trained to calculate firing tables for artillery using mechanical desk calculators. With ordnance capable of firing along parabolic trajectories over a range of up to a mile, it was impossible for heavy gunners to take accurate aim by eye. The tables told the gunners how high to aim their weapons given a target at a certain range, calculated on the basis of the weight of the shell, its velocity on leaving the muzzle, and other variables such as the wind speed and direction, and the air temperature and density. A typical trajectory required 750 multiplications, and a typical firing table about 3,000 trajectories. Goldstine was desperate for an alternative to these human computers, whose work was time-consuming and vulnerable to error.

He found what he was looking for in a proposal to build an ‘electronic computor’ (sic) containing 5,000 valves, put forward in 1942 by John Mauchly, a physicist trained for war-related work in electronics at the Moore School. The army refused to take the proposal seriously until Goldstine took up Mauchly’s cause in the spring of 1943 and, through careful diplomacy and a persuasive manner, won from his superiors funding for an even larger revised version. Mauchly was not a great salesman for his own ideas, but was one of very few people in the world at that time who grasped the potential of electronics in computing. Before the war he had worked on the design of a (non-electronic) machine to automate numerical methods of weather forecasting. Through giving a talk on this work he had met John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State College, who invited him to see his own prototype computer. It was an electronic adder – properly a calculator rather than a computer – with a modest 300 valves, which Atanasoff had built with his graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942.

Mauchly had spent five days discussing it, although he later denied that he had learned anything from Atanasoff. The work had received virtually no recognition at the time, and never advanced beyond a working prototype. But the priority of the little Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was established years later in a successful bid to deny patents on aspects of the ENIAC design to the Moore School team. The question ‘who invented the computer?’ still rages on internet sites and in a succession of publications, and probably does not have a clear answer. Credit for being the first to build a valve-based prototype calculating machine should probably be shared between Atanasoff and Berry, and Konrad Zuse and Helmut Schreyer, who built an electronic demonstration model at the Technical University in Berlin in 1938.

Whatever it owed to his encounter with John Atanasoff, John Mauchly’s proposal exceeded anything previously seen in its scope and ambition. ENIAC, conceived by Mauchly but brought to life by teams of engineers working sixteen-hour days under the direction of the gifted Moore School engineer Presper Eckert, was a monster. As eventually completed in 1945, it was 2.5 metres high and nearly 50 metres long, its racks of valves, cables and other components arranged in a U-shape around the walls of a large room. It weighed over 30 tons, incorporated almost 18,000 valves, and cost the army $800,000. When it was working, ENIAC could perform 14 10-digit multiplications a second – 500 times faster than the best of the female ‘computors’ with their mechanical machines.

Its reliability, however, was in inverse proportion to its size: the only certain thing about its performance was that it would break down at least once a day. Valves, like light bulbs, have a limited life, and losing just one out of the 18,000 could ruin a calculation. More serious shortcomings were built into its design. Its builders could have cut the number of valves by over a third if they had considered representing the data in the machine in binary code.

Human calculators, having ten fingers, find it easiest to do arithmetic using decimal numbers. For computers, however, it makes much more sense to use the binary system. Binary code resembles Morse code in that it has only two symbols, usually written as o and 1. Any number can be converted into its unique binary equivalent – a string of os and 1S in which the value of each place is twice the value of its right-hand neighbour, rather than ten times as much as in the decimal system: