J. Presper Eckert

Eckert was born in Philadelphia to Ethel M. Hallowell, who came from an old Philadelphia Quaker family, and John Eckert, a wealthy real estate developer of Swiss German and Alsatian descent. He was raised in a large house in Philadelphia's Germantown section. During elementary school, he was driven by chauffeur to William Penn Charter School, and in high school joined the Engineer's Club of Philadelphia and spent afternoons at the electronics laboratory of television inventor Philo Farnsworth in Chestnut Hill. He placed second in the country on the math portion of the College Board examination.

Eckert initially enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to study business at the encouragement of his parents, but in 1937 transferred to Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. In 1940, at age 21, Eckert applied for his first patent, "Light Modulating Method and Apparatus". At the Moore School, Eckert participated in research on radar timing, made improvements to the speed and precision of the Moore School's differential analyzer, and in 1941 assisted in teaching a summer course in electronics under the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) offered through the Moore School by the United States Department of War.

Entrepreneurship

Both Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School in March 1946 over a dispute involving assignment of claims on intellectual property developed at the university. In that year, the University of Pennsylvania adopted a new patent policy to protect the intellectual purity of the research it sponsored, which would have required Eckert and Mauchly to assign all their patents to the university had they stayed beyond March.

Eckert and Mauchly's agreement with the University of Pennsylvania was that Eckert and Mauchly retained the patent rights to the ENIAC but the university could license it to the government and non-profit organizations. The university wanted to change the agreement so that they would also have commercial rights to the patent.

In the following months, Eckert and Mauchly started up the Electronic Control Company which built the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). One of the major advances of this machine, which was used from August 1950, was that data was stored on magnetic tape. The Electronic Control Company soon became the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and it received an order from the National Bureau of Standards to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). Eckert was awarded the Howard N. Potts Medal in 1949. In 1950, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation ran into financial troubles and was acquired by Remington Rand Corporation. The UNIVAC I was finished on December 21, 1950.

In 1968, "For pioneering and continuing contributions in creating, developing, and improving the high-speed electronic digital computer", Eckert was awarded the National Medal of Science.