Inventor of the first successful computer

“ Necessity was not the mother of invention, it was laziness and boredom: the desire to rid himself of those tedious calculations.”

The world's first successful digital computer was des­troyed by Allied bomb during a raid on Berlin in World War II. Now known as the Z3, it was designed by Konrad Zuse and built at home with the help of friends. Another Zuse computer aided the design of aircraft wings at the Henschel factory in Berlin and was the only German computer to see war service. An improved model was probably captured by the Russians when they over­ran Berlin in 1945, though Zuse doubts that they knew what to do with it.

Surprisingly, Konrad Zuse is still relatively unknown, despite being recognized as the designer and builder of the first working computer. For a long time it was thought that the Americans had designed the first computers; but then came news of the British code–breaking machines, and then Zuse's work. In fact Zuse began his first design before the war started. He did much of the work in his spare time and even during the war there was relatively little official help. After the war he set up his own com­pany and at one time he was the major continental manufacturer. His firm em­ployed about a thousand people in its heyday.

Zuse is now approaching eighty, and one might expect him to look back reflectively over his life; but not so. He is a successful artist and painting vies with computers as his first love. Whilst he appreciates the honours heaped on him, he is still an active engineer and rather wishes people would give him problems to solve instead of passing him around "like a museum piece".

He was born in Berlin on June 10, 1910, but his parents soon moved: first to Braunsberg in East Prussia and then to Hoyerswerda in Saxony, where his father was the local postmaster. It was here, about 35 miles north east of Dres­den, that his school awakened his interest in engineering at a time when his talent as an artist was also developing. This combination and rivalry between art and engineering caused him to drop out of university and is still a part of his life.

At the Technical University in Berlin – Charlottenburg he found the work stultifying¹, especially the technical draw­ing. So he quit the university, horrifying his parents in the process, and decided to become a commercial artist. He also turned to inventing, and devised a machine to develop and print colour photographs automatically.

But times were hard, economies bad, and millions were out of work. So he did the "sensible" thing and went back to university, re–emerging in 1935 with a degree in civil engineering.

The Mother of Invention

The Henschel aircraft works in Berlin offered Zuse a job as a stress analyst. The work proved boring; it involved repetitious calcula­tions for which, thought Zuse, there must be a better way – a machine, perhaps. It was not the first time he had entertained such thoughts because his degree course had exposed him to equally tedious work with a slide rule².

It was not only the calculations that bothered him but also the "traffic control": noting intermediate solutions, transferring them to other parts of the problem, and so on. His first thoughts (around 1933–34) had been to devise pre–printed forms to control and record the flow of work in a standardized way for some common problems. This was followed by ideas for punched cards and mechanical calculation. In fact, whilst still a university student, Zuse had already arrived at fundamental ideas for information control, the reduction of problems to a sequence of simple opera­tions, and the concept that a machine could be built to carry out that sequ­ence. By 1934 he was using the terms "memory unit", "seleclor" and "control device". When work at the Henschel factory reinforced his thoughts he set about building a machine in his spare time using the living room of his parents’ home in Berlin as his workshop.

Necessity was not the mother of in­vention, says Zuse, it was laziness and boredom: the desire to rid himself ³ of those tedious calculations.