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By Root 941 0

north of Main Street. The town of Gaylord boasted barely three thousand souls, but this was enough to support a band with Teutonic uniforms and shiny instruments, and in grade school Claude played an E-flat alto horn broader than his chest. He had Erector Sets and books. He made model planes and earned money delivering telegrams for the local Western Union office. He solved cryptograms. Left on his own, he read and reread books; a story he loved was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” set on a remote southern island, featuring a peculiar William Legrand, a man with an “excitable brain” and “unusual powers of mind” but “subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy”♦—in other words, a version of his creator. Such ingenious protagonists were required by the times and duly conjured by Poe and other prescient writers, like Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells. The hero of “The Gold-Bug” finds buried treasure by deciphering a cryptograph written on parchment. Poe spells out the string of numerals and symbols (“rudely traced, in a red tint, between the death’s-head and the goat”)—53‡‡†305) )6* ;4826)4‡.)4‡) ;806* ;48†8¶60) )85;1‡( ;:‡*8†83(88) 5*‡ ;46(;88*96*?;8) *‡(;485) ;5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*–4) 8§8* ;4069285) ;)6†8)4‡‡;1 (‡9;48081 ;8:8‡1 ;48†85;4)485†528806*81 (‡9:48;(88;4 (‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188; ‡?;—and walks the reader through every twist of its construction and deconstruction. “Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles,”♦ his dark hero proclaims, thrilling a reader who might have the same bias of mind. The solution leads to the gold, but no one cares about the gold, really. The thrill is in the code: mystery and transmutation.

Claude finished Gaylord High School in three years instead of four and went on in 1932 to the University of Michigan, where he studied electrical engineering and mathematics. Just before graduating, in 1936, he saw a postcard on a bulletin board advertising a graduate-student job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Vannevar Bush, then the dean of engineering, was looking for a research assistant to run a new machine with a peculiar name: the Differential Analyzer. This was a 100-ton iron platform of rotating shafts and gears. In the newspapers it was being called a “mechanical brain” or “thinking machine”; a typical headline declared:

“Thinking Machine” Does Higher Mathematics;

Solves Equations That Take Humans Months♦

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine loomed as ancestral ghosts, but despite the echoes of nomenclature and the similarity of purpose, the Differential Analyzer owed virtually nothing to Babbage. Bush had barely heard of him. Bush, like Babbage, hated the numbing, wasteful labor of mere calculation. “A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot,” Bush wrote. “He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment.”♦

MIT in the years after World War I was one of the nation’s three focal points for the burgeoning practical science of electrical engineering, along with the Bell Telephone Laboratories and General Electric. It was also a place with a voracious need for the solving of equations—especially differential equations, and particularly differential equations of the second order. Differential equations express rates of change, as in ballistic projectiles and oscillating electric currents. Second-order differential equations concern rates of change in rates of change: from position to velocity to acceleration. They are hard to solve analytically, and they pop up everywhere. Bush designed his machine to handle this entire class of problems and thus the whole range of physical systems that generated them. Like Babbage’s machines, it was essentially mechanical, though it used electric motors to drive the weighty apparatus and, as it evolved, more and more electromechanical switches to control it.

Unlike Babbage’s machine, it did not manipulate numbers. It worked on quantities