204 | 20 BABy
honed in the Newmanry, was now brought to bear on the problem of designing and construct-
ing an electronic stored-program computer. He applied to the Royal Society of London for a
sizeable grant to develop such a machine (finally approved by the Treasury in May 1946),^31 and
in August 1945 he wrote to Bletchley Park, requesting that ‘the material of two complete Colossi’
be sent to Manchester. Newman said: ‘We should like the counter racks and the “bedsteads”
(tape-racks) to be in working order but the rest could be dismantled so far as is necessary to
make the circuits unrecognisable’.^32 A 6-ton lorry and trailer piled high with goodies from
Bletchley Park arrived in Manchester on 7 December 1945.^33 The first work on the Manchester
computer made use of one of the bedsteads.^34 ‘It reminds me of Adam’s rib’, said Jack Good.
By the time that Freddie Williams was interviewed for Manchester’s recently vacated
Edward Stocks Massey Chair of Electro-Technics, in 1946, Newman had already established his
Computing Machine Laboratory at the university and was on the lookout for the right engineer
to bring into the project. What he needed, he explained in his funding application to the Royal
Society, was a ‘circuit-designing engineer’ who, although ‘he would not be expected to provide
the main ideas’, would ‘need a rare combination of wide practical experience in circuit design,
with a thorough understanding of the abstract ideas involved’.^35 Newman was on the panel
that interviewed Williams,^36 and when Williams began explaining the virtues of the new form
of computer memory he was perfecting, the prospect of joining forces must have started to
look like a marriage conceived in heaven. It was ‘a very fruitful opportunity for collaboration’,
Williams said.^37 Only 35 years old, he acquired the title ‘professor’. When Williams started his
new job, Newman’s computer lab was little more than an empty room. Williams later poked fun
at the room’s ‘fine sounding’ title of Computing Machine Laboratory, recollecting that the ‘walls
were of brown glazed brick and the door was labelled “Magnetism Room” ’.^38 It was, he said with
his blunt humour, ‘lavatorial’.
At Bletchley Newman had been chief executive of a project with staff numbering over 300.
He initiated and oversaw the creation of a dazzling array of machines, all lying at the frontier of
the then-current technology.^39 Newman, himself no engineer, achieved these outstanding suc-
cesses by the skilful use of a simple principle: get the right engineers involved, explain to them
what needs to be done, and let them get on with it. As Michie wrote:^40
Once he [Newman] placed his trust in people he cut them loose to manage according to their
own judgement.
Not surprisingly, Newman followed the same method at Manchester: he educated Williams in
the fundamentals of the stored-program computer, and then (as Newman wrote) the ‘design of
the machine was naturally placed in his hands’.^41
By this time, Turing himself was already providing Williams’s assistant Tom Kilburn with a
much more extensive education in computer design.
Turing’s Adelphi lectures, 1946–47
Tom Kilburn stepped into Turing’s world at the end of 1946, when he entered a dingy London
lecture room and sat down to listen to Turing explaining how to build a computer.^42 Williams
had recently succeeded in storing a single binary digit on the face of a cathode-ray tube, prov-
ing that his memory design worked in principle, and so (as Williams said) ‘the point now had
been reached where we’d got to find out about computers’.^43 They heard that Turing was giving