The Wizard Electrician

The Wizard Electrician

J. Presper Eckert Jr. OPC ’37

At Penn Charter, J. Presper Eckert Jr. was known by many as Pres and recognized by nearly all as “the wizard electrician.” The tag was both apt and prophetic.

J. Presper Eckert

Within five years of graduating from Penn Charter, Eckert became one of the wizards behind the creation of the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer, better known as ENIAC.

In his new book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson recognizes Eckert as one of “a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks” who created the modern computer and digital age.

At the time he got involved in the ENIAC project, Eckert was only 22 and a graduate student in electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. But, he soon became chief engineer of the top-secret project, building a behemoth of a machine that filled a whole floor at Penn’s Moore School of Engineering. ENIAC was 100-feet long and eight-feet high, weighed close to 30 tons and had 17,468 vacuum tubes. When fully operational in 1945, it could perform 5,000 additions and subtractions in one second.

Other “computers” pre-dated ENIAC, but as Isaacson notes, it was the first fully electronic computer that could be programmed to do different tasks. It is the true predecessor of the computers we use today.

Like all innovations, ENIAC involved collaboration. Eckert’s principal partner was John Mauchly, a physicist – first at Ursinus College and later at Penn – who developed the theoretical basis of ENIAC. Isaacson writes that the two men got along well, with Mauchly’s dreamy, affable ways a perfect counterpart to Eckert’s intensity.

Eckert did have his quirks. As Isaacson notes, Eckert was “filled with nervous energy, he would pace the room, bite his nails, leap around and occasionally stand atop a desk when he was thinking.” He was so wrapped up in his work, at night he would sleep on a cot next to the machine.

Eckert, a member of the Blue team, was a member of the Instrumental, Dramatic, Glee and Camera clubs and, shown here in the 1937 yearbook (seated, second from left), the Science Club.

The only child of a wealthy real estate developer, Pres was driven from his home in Germantown to Penn Charter by the family chauffeur, Isaacson writes. The school archives show his first year at PC was 1927 and that, by his graduation in 1937, he was firmly established as an engineering whiz. The Class Record for 1937 notes that his ambition was “to be like Edison.” His destiny, the editors predicted, was “to be greater than Edison.”

When it came to electronics, Eckert was a prodigy. At age 12, he won a citywide science fair by building a guidance system for model boats using magnets and rheostats. At 14, he found a way to use household electrical current to operate the intercom system at one of his father’s apartment buildings, eliminating the need for bulky and unreliable batteries. In high school, Eckert dazzled his classmates with his inventions, but also made money selling them radios, speaker systems and amplifiers he made. The yearbook notes that at the Annual Entertainment, a grand event held in Center City and attended by hundreds of people with no connection to Penn Charter, Eckert “presented three interesting and instructive experiments. These were: Electro-Magnetism, Talking Over a Light Beam, and Cataphoresis.”

Upon graduating from Penn Charter, he was accepted at MIT. His parents, unwilling to let him go, pretended to have suffered financial setbacks in the Depression and urged him to attend Penn instead, and live at home.

Eckert dutifully enrolled at Penn but refused his family’s wish for him to be a business major. He majored instead in electrical engineering. He met Mauchly when he worked as the older man’s graduate assistant.

ENIAC (the initials stand for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was a war-time project financed by the Army Ordinance Department, which was tasked with coming up with booklets of firing-angle settings for artillery. To be accurate, the guns required tables that factored in such conditions as temperature, humidity, wind speeds and altitude.

A unit at MIT, using a machine called Differential Analysers (think of a complicated mechanical adding machine), was doing the calculations. But the work was going slowly, despite the fact that the unit had 170 people – who were known as “computers” – to input the data the machine needed to do the equations. The Army wanted a faster machine, and Mauchly and Eckert delivered, though not until 1945, just as World War II was ending.

Following the war, after a dispute with Penn over the patents for ENIAC, the two men left and created their own company, which went on to produce the advanced UNIVAC computer. Later, they sold their firm to the Remington Rand Corp. (which became the company we know today as Unisys) and Eckert spent the rest of his career there. He died in 1995 at his home in Bryn Mawr. He was 76.

In 1991, the Penn Charter Alumni Society honored Eckert with the Alumni Award of Merit, given “to a graduate of the William Penn Charter School whose character and outstanding achievement have reflected lasting credit upon this old school.”