George Stibitz
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Model K, the Bell Labs relay computers
- Nationality
- American
The mathematician who built a binary adder on his kitchen table out of scrapped telephone relays and a tobacco tin, and thereby started Bell Labs' computing programme.
Stibitz was a mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where relays were effectively unlimited because the entire switching network was made of them. One evening in November 1937 he took a couple of discarded relays home, cut conductors from a tin tobacco can, wired in flashlight bulbs and produced a circuit that added two binary digits. His wife Dorothea named it the Model K after the kitchen table it sat on, and the name stuck.
Management saw the point. The result was the Complex Number Computer, running in January 1940, and during the war a series of increasingly program-controlled relay machines — Models II through VI — for ballistics and anti-aircraft fire control. Relays were slow but dependable, and Bell Labs stayed with them while the Moore School bet on vacuum tubes.
Stibitz is also usually credited with the word digital in its computing sense, which he proposed in a 1942 report to the NDRC for what had until then been called pulse systems. He left Bell Labs in 1945, worked as a consultant and ended up a professor at Dartmouth, spending his last decades on biomedical applications.