'A Spirit of Fire and Air'

Question: What do binary adder circuits, complex calculators, memory iters, and floating decimal points have in common?

Answer: George Robert Stibitz, Dartmouth Medical School's 74-year-old physicist-mathematician-inventor who combined these elements with his potent imagination to produce a machine that has dramatically altered our society.

A soft-voiced, unassuming man, with 35 patents and 46 publications to his credit, a man whose technical papers occupy a bit over 22 feet of shelf space in Baker Library, Stibitz' work has long gone unheralded. His contributions were first acknowledged publicly in 1965 with an award for outstanding achievement from the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. Last year his anonymity vanished entirely when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers honored him with its first IBM Emanuel R. Piore Award, stating flat out that George Stibitz is "internationally recognized as the father of the modern digital computer," and lauding him for "pioneering contributions to the development of computers, utilizing binary and floating-point arithmetic, memory indexing, operation from a remote console, and program-controlled computations."

Stibitz is quick to point out that all inventors stand on the shoulders of others; but if pressed, he will admit that he took one of the first practical, effective steps into the Computer Age.

It all began over 40 years ago when he was a mathematical consultant for Bell Telephone Laboratories. Weary of calculating complex mathematical formulas by hand, he set out to find a quicker way. (One of his co-workers today says, "When George needs something, he invents it.")

Stibitz, who is acutely observant, had made note of the circuit paths through relays and of the similarity between them and binary notation for numbers. One weekend, "as a play project at home," he put these two disparate things together in a little model he made with a dry cell, flashlight bulbs, and tin strips from a tobacco can. This improbable Rube Goldberg contraption turned out to be the world's first two-digit binary adder.

Later, Stibitz figured out that binary notation, by which any number can be expressed in combinations of only two digits, 0 and 1, could be articulated by a machine in the form of electrical signals. By 1938, he had designed the first full-scale calculator for complex arithmetic, Model 1 Complex Computer, and launched a new era.

His first visit to Dartmouth was in September 1940 when he came to read a paper on his new relay computer at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society. The meeting, which turned out to be historic, was held in McNutt Hall. At the conclusion of his paper, Stibitz riveted his audience with a dramatic presentation. He had people sit at a keyboard in Hanover and make calculations on a computer in the Bell Labs in New York. This was the first public demonstration of the remote operation of a computer. It is unlikely that any of the assembled scientists envisioned a day when the concept of remote time-sharing would link thousands of computers with terminals all over this country.

Four more Stibitz-designed computers were built at Bell, each introducing features that are still in use today. S.B. Williams and E.G. Andrews (now living in Hanover) worked with Stibitz, but nobody grew rich because the company held all the patents.

During World War II, Stibitz worked for the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. He was not overjoyed by the governmental approach to science. After the war, he could find little support for further development of computers at Bell, so he departed. He moved to New England and was employed by Remington-Rand to work with its lawyers in a struggle with IBM and Bell over who owned what ideas. Four years of patent litigation were enough for the scientist. "Most of the judges," Stibitz says, "didn't understand how a doorbell works." He decided he would become a consultant in applied mathematics. Before long his clients included aircraft companies, machine tool designers, and the Educational Testing Service in Princeton.

"You're lucky if you break even on a patent," says the inventor Stibitz, who has always tried to supplement his income with inventions. His favorite invention is the Bouncing Ball Counter. ("Isn't it curious that balls bouncing against each other can be useful for counting purposes?") One artide he wrote for Scientific American describes his invention which transforms sound into heat and measures the resulting temperature with a thermometer. "Hot music," as he calls it, can raise water temperature above the boiling point.

Stibitz added the title of professor to his vita after he encountered Dr. S. Marsh Tenney '44, chairman of the Department of Physiology at Dartmouth Medical School. Marsh Tenney on George Stibitz:

I was looking for someone who could devise mathematical methods for studying physiological problems and put them in forms amenable to testing, as Helmholtz did in his studies of hearing in the 19th century. I could find no one qualified to do this. Pure mathematicians, yes. Applied mathematicians, no. Then Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation told me George Stibitz was just the man.

George came to see me bringing one of his books. Mathematics in Medicine and the LifeSciences. I noticed he had introduced each chapter with lines from Gilbert and Sullivan, such as "I understand equations, both simple and quadratical," and I sensed I was dealing with something more than the usual mathemetician.

During his 14 years at the Medical School, George, who loves problems, has developed such things as a computer display of brain-cell anatomy, a mathematical model of gasexchange in the lung, and an analysis of excitable tissue properties. I am constantly amazed by his imaginative extrapolations, his penetrating insights, and his ability to reduce complicated matters to simple terms. He is never rigid and everything he does is overlaid with his marvelous sense of humor. The world is full of bright people who can talk endlessly, but nothing happens. George doesn't talk much, but something always happens.

Confronted with such praise, Stibitz mumbles about his shortcomings. He says he is stubborn, has a temper, is often shy and overly sensitive. "I get led astray by enthusiasm and waste time. I can't handle finances - or cocktail parties - and I hate to travel." (He solved the dilemma of a $2,500 international travel grant, one part of his Piore award, by deciding he could use some of it to visit his daughter in Ontario. The trip was short but "international.")

When I made a date to interview Stibitz I said, "I'll be wearing a white dress" and he said, "I'll be wearing white hair." He turned out to be a big man with alert brown eyes, pink cheeks, and the strong physique of a much younger man. Asked how he maintains such vigor approaching age 75, he said, "Hillbilly-living perhaps. Last winter I cut and split three cords of wood for our fireplace. I always get up at 5:00 a.m. and keep going until 10:30 p.m. I like to work."

He told me he was born in York, Pennsylvania, one of four children whose father, a German Reformed minister and a professor of theology, was a strict fundamendalist ("drinking and smoking were out"). His mother, Mildred Murphy, from Philadelphia, was a spotless housekeeper and a great reader; she probably was the source of her son's boundless energy and zeal for hard work.

Young Stibitz' extraordinary talents were evident from the beginning. "I liked assembling things," he says. "I began with a Mechano set when I was a baby. I was about eight when I rewired the lights in our house so I could turn all of them off from upstairs after I put my brother and sisters to bed. Unfortunately, I used a wire that was much too small and Mother soon smelled smoke. I was strongly encouraged to forget rewiring."

He went to Moraine Park School, a John Dewey-inspired experimental school in Dayton, Ohio, started by Charles Kettering, the inventor of the self-starter. Another prominent Daytonian, Orville Wright, was one of the directors. The school, way-out in today's argot, provided an ideal climate for an energetic young inventor. He went on to Denison University on a scholarship, graduating in 1926 with a degree in applied mathematics. "Everything in college was stimulating," he recalls. "Besides physics and math I was excited by art, history, music, astronomy, piano, and the weekend parties. We had wiener roasts, things like that."

For a student of Stibitz' caliber, fellowships were plentiful. He took his M.S. at Union College in Schenectady, and got a Ph.D. in physics at Cornell in 1930. While at Cornell he met and later married Dorothea Lamson, from New London, New Hampshire. The Stibitzes have two daughters, both married, and one granddaughter.

There are those who think Dorothea Stibitz might be a saint. Nothing seems to bother her. Years ago a relative reported: "Poor Dottie never gets a chance to run her vacuum. George is always using its motor." Her neat, colonial living room accommodates the multiple parts of an electronic organ George has been designing and redesigning for four years. She finds room for his oil paintings of nudes, his unusual metal sculptures, his myriad devices to generate energy from windpower. Some people refer to her husband as a "haywire genius." She thinks he's just right.

One of the great sights of Hanover is Stibitz "mowing" his lawn. His mower is tied to a rope that is wrapped around a post in the center of his yard. He simply starts the machine, then sits back in an easy chair and watches it unwind in an Archimedean Spiral, cutting as it goes. "The only time I feel superor to a machine," he says, "is when I relax and watch my lawn mower cut my grass."

Stibitz, so gentle and kind in person, is capable of writing fiery, witty letters inveighing against pomposity, bureaucracy, muddled-headedness. Some years ago he wrote a classic to the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, questioning published figures on the projected growth of the College. Using pencil, ruler, and semi-log paper ("the 'in' media, I believe, for growth predictions"), he extrapolated the current rate of increase for administrators and discovered that by the year 2046 "each Dartmouth student and each Dartmouth faculty member will be protected and guided by his own administrator, and we shall see each student and each faculty member trustfully holding the hand of an administrator as they bravely walk into the sunset."

An ardent admirer of Lewis Carroll and Sherlock Holmes, Stibitz is devoted to accurate, concise use of the language. His collection of malapropisms, culled from official communications, include such gems as: "It's explicit that you understand this." "It was an unintentional oversight." "I cannot underemphasize the importance of what I'm saying."

Stibitz sends his prize samples of language abuse to N.B.C.'s Edwin Newman, who appreciates his perceptiveness. "Please don't stop your interventive activity," Newman wrote him. "You are resonating and impacting, and the rest of us are benefitting maximally during succeeding years."

One dictionary definition of a genius is "a man endowed with transcendent ability; one whose exalted, often supreme native endowment qualifies him for special success in a given pursuit... a spirit of fire and air."

Many would agree that this is a fair description of George Stibitz, but Stibitz, a man whose ego appears to be in balance, thinks of himself as a "tinkerer," not a genius. He identifies the three most important characteristics for mathematicians and scientists as technical training, persistence, and imagination.

"Can imagination be taught?" I asked.

"Of course," he said. "It's just a matter of learning to put things together that don't belong together."

"Such as an electrical switch and a number system?"

He smiled modestly. "Anyone can develop the habit of making unexpected connections. All you have to do is think of impossible things."

Nardi Reeder Campion's most recentbook, Ann The Word (Little, Brown), is abiography of the founder of the Shakers.Her only connection with Campion's storeis the limited joy she and her husband havederived from paying the bills of three Dartmouth sons.