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ENIAC was one of the first computers to use electronic circuits, which made for lightning-fast calculations.  Former chairman of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., at first saw no use for it.  He said, ‘I reacted to ENIAC the way some people probably reacted to the Wright brothers’ airplane.  It didn’t move me at all…I couldn’t see this gigantic, costly, unreliable device as a piece of business equipment.’ A few weeks later, he and his father wandered into a research office at IBM and saw an engineer with a high-speed punch-card machine hooked up to a black box.  When asked what (read more…)

Grace Hopper seemed born with a desire to discover how things worked.  Aged seven, her curiosity led her to dismantle every clock in her home!  She eventually completed a doctorate in mathematics from Yale University.  During World War II, Grace joined the Navy and was assigned to the Navy’s computation project at Harvard University.   She met ‘Harvard Mark I’, the first fully functional digital computing machine.  Once again, Grace set about to learn how its 750,000 parts and 500 miles of wire worked!  While most experts believed computers were too complicated and expensive for anyone but highly trained scientists (read more…)

Harry Houdini, who won fame as an escape artist early in the twentieth century, issued a challenge wherever he went.  He claimed he could be locked in any jail cell in the country and set himself free within minutes.  He had a long track record of doing just that! One time, however, something seemed to go wrong.  Houdini entered a jail cell in his street clothes.  The heavy metal doors clanged shut behind him, and he took from his belt a concealed piece of strong and flexible metal.  He set to work on the lock to his cell, but something (read more…)