Andrew D. Booth – Britain’s Other “Fourth Man” - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 28

of space at Birkbeck the calculator was built at the British Rubber Producers Research
Association in Welwyn Garden City where he had been briefly employed between
Birmingham University and Birkbeck.
In 1946 Bernal obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for Andrew
Booth to visit US researchers working on computers. Andrew Booth reported that
only von Neumann (a friend of Bernal) at Princeton gave him any time. In 1947 An-
drew Booth undertook a 6 month US tour, again funded by the Rockefeller Founda-
tion, based at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton with John von Neumann
and accompanied by his research assistant, Kathleen H V Britten, who was soon to
become his wife.
3 Building a Memory
One major result of the 1947 visit was the redesign of the original ARC to give it a
“von Neumann” architecture (the resulting design being usually referred to as ARC2).
Andrew and Kathleen Booth set out the technological options for each of the compo-
nents of a computer using a “von Neumann” architecture in a paper which circulated
among the growing community of computer pioneers. Such was the interest, they pro-
duced a second edition [3].
The heart of the “von Neumann” architecture was the memory. In the paper they
evaluated all of the physical properties including heat, light, sound and magnetism
and concluded that magnetism offered the best prospects because of its persistence.
Andrew Booth was interested in building a low cost computer and so needed low
cost components. On his trip around the USA he had seen a simple recording device
sold for use in commercial offices which allowed managers to record letters on to
magnetic oxide coated paper discs for typing by their secretarial staff. However, in
order to achieve the performance needed to act as the memory of a computer he had
to rotate the paper disc much faster than for simple voice recording. At this higher
speeds it proved impossible to keep the disc flat and so he had to abandon this first
attempt at a floppy disc.
Andrew Booth's next attempt used a metal drum. The first drum was mounted
horizontally and about the size of a cotton reel, being 2 inches in diameter with a
modest packing density of just 10 bits per inch. The drum was made of brass with a
nickel coating. Thus it was that Andrew Booth built the world's first rotating elec-
tronic storage device albeit a drum rather than the now ubiquitous disc. This drum,
shown in Figure 2, is now on display in the Science Museum, London.
The drums were built by his father and together they created a small company
called Wharf Engineering Ltd which manufactured small discs and other computer
peripherals.
During the 1947 visit Andrew Booth met Warren Weaver, Natural Sciences Divi-
sion Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, who had funded the trip. Andrew Booth
asked if the Foundation would fund a computer for London University. Weaver said
that the Foundation could not fund a computer for mathematical calculations but that
he had begun to think about using a computer to carry out natural language translation
and that the Foundation probably could fund a computer for research in that area.