A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer - Georgina Ferry

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lengthy report on their visit they would be presenting to the Lyons board.

      The first three sections of the report disposed of their visits to office machine companies and other businesses, concluding that Lyons’s methods were already so advanced that they had little to learn in this sphere. But Section D, headed ‘Electronic Machines in the Office’, stands as a prophetic document, showing both a firm grasp of the capabilities and limitations of the technology then developing, and a vision of where it all might lead. It was never published at the time, circulating only within Lyons, but in Britain at least no comparable account of the subject had ever been written.

      Thompson and Standingford were unequivocal about their own enthusiasm for an electronic calculating machine. ‘Our object,’ they wrote, ‘in inquiring into the nature and possibilities of this machine was to find out whether it, or any adaptation of it, was capable of being put to use in commercial offices, and if this was not the case, to try to stimulate the development of such a machine.’ They went on to list the functions a computer might be capable of performing: storing data and instructions, performing sequences of calculations on stored material automatically, comparing words or figures in its memory and reacting to differences, and printing out results. They emphasised the astonishing speed at which these functions could be carried out, but showed how it posed a problem whose solution would later become the first priority in the development of the Lyons computer. ‘It is obviously wasteful to have a machine that is capable of working at these superhuman speeds,’ they wrote, ‘unless the information it is to work upon can be made available to it at relatively comparable speeds. The feeding clearly cannot be directly by clerks but mechanical and electrical means have been developed that are satisfactory.’

      Thompson and Standingford recognised that what might be ‘satisfactory’ for a computer working on mathematical problems that might require minutes or hours of computation would not do in an office, ‘where the problem is to carry out a large number of simple operations’. This note of realism continued in an account of the importance of punching every input tape twice, using a device that compared the first and second versions to eliminate errors. The authors had clearly absorbed the philosophy that time on the computer was valuable, and everything possible had to be done to make sure that it was used efficiently.

      After giving a short summary of the memory devices then under development, and an account of how a computer actually worked, Thompson and Standingford went on to suggest three examples of its applications in the office: sales invoicing, the typing of form letters and payroll. In each case, they explained, permanent information such as customers’ code numbers and addresses or employees’ names and rates of pay could be stored on magnetic wire or teleprinter tape and used again and again, while each week another input tape or wire would be prepared, giving hours worked, bonuses and so on. These two, together with an ‘instruction wire’ containing the program, would be played into the computer’s memory, the necessary calculation performed, and the computer would then print automatically the invoices, letters or payslips required.

      Although almost all of their informants had been preoccupied with computers as mathematical tools, Thompson and Standingford were able to use their own background in systems research at Lyons to see how clerical tasks with rather little mathematical content, such as word processing and payroll management, could be recast as ‘calculations’ for the computer. It was a lateral step that hardly anyone, with the possible exceptions of Eckert and Mauchly and Edmund C. Berkeley at Prudential Insurance, had yet taken. All that now remained was to convince Simmons and the Lyons board that this was the way they should go in the future.

       3 Made in Britain

      It was predictable that Simmons and his colleagues should look to the United States for advances in technology, including computers. Its vast markets, coupled with a native enthusiasm for innovation, provided a fertile breeding ground for ideas and their commercial development. They did not know at that stage that the history of computing also owed much to British pioneers.

      Charles Babbage (1792–1871), a showman as much as a thinker, had been in the forefront of the enthusiasm for scientific discovery and technological invention that ignited elements of London society in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Although he had held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for a number of years, he had spent very little time there. He was interested in everything, but his greatest concern was to subject the problems of society to scientific and preferably numerical analysis. He developed a passionate interest in factory management, and the studies he carried out predated by almost a century the ‘time and motion’ craze of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, in his 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures he published figures on the numbers of men, women and children needed to make pins, the time taken for each part of the process and the cost of each pin, taking into account labour and materials.

      Writing of his search for laws and principles governing factory work, he commented: ‘Having been inclined during the last ten years to visit a considerable number of workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of making myself acquainted with the various resources of the mechanical art, I was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalisation to which my other pursuits had naturally given rise.’ From his observations he developed a poor opinion of the ability of the human species to undertake any repetitive work reliably. ‘One of the great advantages which we may derive from machinery,’ he said, ‘is from the check which it affords against the inattention of, the idleness or the dishonesty of human agents.’

      The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Machines spun and wove in factories at speeds unmatched by traditional cottage industry. Babbage the mathematician began to wonder if a machine could be made to do calculations. The best approach, he soon realised, was to reduce the calculation to a series of simpler stages, so that all the machine had to do was add and subtract. He owed this insight to the French mathematician Gaspard Riche de Prony, who had been charged with finding a feasible way to calculate all the new mathematical tables that would be needed following the introduction of the metric system by the French revolutionary government. De Prony’s solution was to organise a hierarchy of mathematical workers, beginning with a few professional mathematicians at the top and ending with a large team, who could add and subtract according to a formula worked out by those higher up the ladder. (The lowest tier was composed of redundant hairdressers, whose former customers had either lost their hair along with their heads, or prudently adopted a style of suitably radical simplicity.)

      Babbage was convinced that anything a roomful of hairdressers could do, a machine could do better. He drew up designs for what he called his Difference Engine, and eventually persuaded the government to part with funds for its development. He got as far as producing a demonstration model that he displayed to wondering visitors in his London drawing room. It consisted of dozens of interconnected brass cogs with complex gears between them, which would perform predetermined (and apparently ‘miraculous’) procedures as he cranked a handle. The money ran out before he could produce a full-scale version. His design was vindicated when in 1991 curators at the Science Museum in London used his notes and drawings to produce his improved Difference Engine No. 2. Doron Swade, who led the project, tells the whole story in his book The Cogwheel Brain.

      Money was not the only problem. Babbage had sidetracked himself by thinking up an even better machine: the Analytical Engine. Rather than setting up a calculation by positioning various cogs by hand, Babbage proposed to feed the Analytical Engine both program and data on punched cards such as those the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed to automate the weaving of damask patterns into cloth. The machine never progressed beyond the design stage (although the design notes filled thirty volumes). But it encompassed much of the thinking behind the design of modern electronic computers: it had inputs, in the form of punched cards, a store or memory, a processing unit (which Babbage called the ‘mill’), and a variety of different outputs, including printed results or more card-punching.

      The Analytical Engine also inspired a historic document, all the more remarkable in

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