Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

TECHNOLOGICAL VS. BASIC RESEARCH 453
new field of electronic miniaturization for which the Bureau was to provide
useful engineering data.74
Problems submitted to the Bureau by the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics
included devising reasonably stable and long-lived electronic components
capable of withstanding rapid changes in temperatures, and design of minia-
turized amplifiers with printed circuits. Within a year the Bureau produced
a radar-type amplifier with the same electrical performance but one-quarter
the usual size, and a miniature battery-powered radio transceiver, for use
as an air-sea rescue device. A miniature radio range receiver, a navigation
aid for the Navy, which fitted into a sealed envelope 6 by 5 by 13/4 inches, had
the range and power of a conventional 12-tube unit. These amplifiers and
receivers were made possible in part by a Bureau-built rotary printer that
applied printed circuits on either flat or cylindrical surfaces.75 A printed
resistor, applied by a silk-screen process (later replaced by an adhesive-tape
resistor), and a tiny ceramic capacitor, the latter devised at the request of the
Signal Corps, contributed to still more rugged and efficient miniaturization.76
Much of the work on electronic tubes, printed circuits, and minia-
turization saw its most important application in the automatic electronic
computing machine project set up at the Bureau for Army Ordnance early
in 1946. Two decades earlier, about 1925, the present era of mechanical
computation began when Dr. Vannevar Bush and associates at MIT con-
structed a large-scale computer run by electric motors. This and an im-
proved model completed in 1942, both requiring hand computations as an
adjunct to the machines, were extensively used during the war in the com-
putation of artillery firing tables. The modern electronic computer had its
genesis in the work of Dr. John W. Mauchly, physicist at the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. In 1942, convinced that
the mechanical calculation of firing tables could be speeded up by the applica-
tion of electronics, he began the study of such a machine. Four years later,
with J. Presper Eckert, Jr., as designer, the Electronic Numerical Integrater
and Automatic Computer (ENIAC) was completed, performing 5,000 addi-
tions a second, where mechanical calculators handled 10 a second.77
C468, "Printed circuit techniques" (Bruneui and Curtis, 1947); M192, "New ad.
vances in printed circuits" (1948), a symposium discussing their application to radio,
radar, TV, guided missiles, airborne electronic equipment, computers, and industrial
control equipment.
"NBS Annual Report 1949, pp. 49, 59, 61; Annual Report 1951, pp. 69—70.
'°
NBS Annual Report 1951, pp. 2, 71; C530, "Printed circuit techniques: an adhesivetape
resistor system" (B. L. Davis, 1952).
Eckert, Mauchly, et al., "Description of ENIAC," Applied Mathematics Panel Report
171.2R (NDRC, November 1945); Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine: Computers—Past,
Present and Future (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 50, 54—55.