7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Philadelphia (B.S., 1941; M.S., 1943), where he and his

professor, Mauchly, made several valuable improvements

in computing equipment. In 1946 the pair fulfilled a

government contract to build a digital computer, which

they called ENIAC. In primitive form, ENIAC contained

virtually all the circuitry used in present-day high-speed

digital computers. It was used by the U.S. Army for military

calculations.

In 1948 Eckert and Mauchly established a computer-

manufacturing firm; a year later, they introduced BINAC,

which stored information on magnetic tape rather than

on punched cards. Designed to handle business data,

UNIVAC I, Eckert and Mauchly’s third model, found

many uses in commerce and may be said to have started

the computer boom. Between 1948 and 1966 Eckert

received 85 patents, mostly for electronic inventions.

Eckert remained in executive positions at his company

when it was acquired by Remington Rand, Inc., in 1950

and when that firm was, in 1955, merged into the Sperry

Rand Corp. (later Unisys Corp.). Eckert was elected to the

National Academy of Engineering in 1967 and was awarded

the National Medal of Science in 1969.

Edward Teller

(b. Jan. 15, 1908, Budapest, Hung., Austria-Hung.—d. Sept. 9, 2003,

Stanford, Calif., U.S.)

E

dward Teller was a Hungarian-born American nuclear

physicist who participated in the production of the first

atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the

world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb.

Teller, born Ede Teller, was from a family of prosperous

Hungarian Jews. After attending schools in Budapest, he

earned a degree in chemical engineering at the Institute of