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Jackson's support for Newman's project was valuable but stopped short of provid-
ing him with the engineering expertise he required to actually construct a computer.
Newman was not the only person looking for a top-flight engineer; the National
Physical Laboratory(NPL), were also planning to build a computer and “Good cir-
cuit” men, as Newman wrote to von Neumann, were “both rare and not procurable
when found” [7]
F.C. (Freddie) Williams found himself at the end of the war in the fortunate posi-
tion of being a man greatly in demand. Williams had been a lecturer at Manchester
before the war and had spent the war years working at the Telecommunications Re-
search Establishment helping develop Radar and leading a small trouble-shooting
team. By the end of hostilities Williams was widely recognised as one of the best
electrical engineers around and he was actively courted by NPL and by Newman. In
the end Williams choice was relatively easy to make. NPL's proposal was that Wil-
liams should work on Turing's ACE design and not only afforded Williams less free-
dom to develop his own ideas than he wanted but also compelled him to work with
Turing -a prospect Williams did not relish. Newman and Manchester were able to
offer Williams the prospect of a chair in Electro-Technics On his appointment, Wil-
liams brought with him, Tom Kilburn, newly re-cast as a Ph.D. student funded by
TRE. Having secured the support of the university, obtained funding from the Royal
Society and assembled a first-rate team of mathematicians and engineers, all the ele-
ments of Newman's computer-building plan were in place. Adopting the same ap-
proach as he had used at Bletchley Park, Newman set his people loose on the detailed
work while he concentrated on orchestrating the endeavour. The result was, once
again, success beyond all expectation. By the middle of 1948 the Manchester Baby
was up and running and although it was little more than a proof of concept it was still
the world's first working digital electronic stored program computer. Through the
agency of Patrick Blackett, Sir Ben Lockspeiser was shown the Baby and government
support for the manufacture by Ferranti of a production version of the machine was
quickly secured.
7 Contested History
The account which I have given of the development of the Manchester Baby and the
role played in it by Newman represents a very radical departure from the conventional
history of the project. It is appropriate now to consider in some detail the principal
ways in which the dominant narrative differs from the interpretation which I have
presented.
The earliest history of the development of the Baby was written by S.H. (Simon)
Lavington according to whom there were, in fact, two distinct and separate Manches-
ter projects to build a stored program digital computer, one led by Williams and the
other by Newman. On this account Williams' project is presented as a triumph from
which the engineers emerge as heroes whereas, by contrast, Newman's project is
characterized as a failure and the mathematicians, in so far as they are mentioned at
all, are portrayed as marginal figures.
This “two project” account has very general currency and forms part of a wider pro-
fessional mythology within which the engineering or practical perspective is privileged
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