The Univac, or Universal Automatic Computer, was the next-gen version of the pioneering Eniac built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in 1950 and sold the first Univac to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951.

The eight-ton, walk-in computer was the size of a one-car garage and accessed by hinged metal doors. Univacs cost about $1 million apiece, the equivalent of more than $8 million in today’s money. The computer had thousands of vacuum tubes, which processed a then-astounding 10,000 operations per second. (Today’s top supercomputers are measured in petaflops, or quadrillions of of operations per second.)

Remington Rand (now Unisys) approached CBS News in the summer of 1952 with the idea of using Univac to project the election returns. News chief Sig Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite were skeptical, but thought it might speed up the analysis somewhat and at least be entertaining to use an “electronic brain.”

Eckert and John Mauchly enlisted their former Penn colleague, mathematician Max Woodbury, to assist. Mauchly and Woodbury gathered data and wrote a program that would compare the 1952 returns to previous elections and figure which way the wind was blowing. The duo worked at Mauchly’s home because he’d been blacklisted as pro-Communist and wasn’t allowed to work at the company anymore.

The Univac in Philadelphia was connected to a teletype machine at the CBS studios in New York City. As the first precincts reported on election night, technicians used Unityper machines to encode the data onto paper tape to feed into Univac.

Pre-election polls had predicted anything from a Democratic landslide to a tight race with the Demo candidate, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, slightly ahead of the Republican, five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II.

So it was a surprise at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time when Univac predicted Eisenhower would pile up 438 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 93. The odds of Eisenhower garnering at least 266 electoral votes — the minimum needed to win — were 100-1 in his favor.

In New York, news boss Mickelson scoffed at putting the improbable prediction on air. In Philadelphia, Woodbury added new data to the mix. At 9 p.m. correspondent Charles Collingwood announced to the audience that Univac was predicting 8-7 odds for an Eisenhower win.

But wait! Back in Philly, Woodbury discovered that he’d mistakenly added a zero to Stevenson’s totals from New York state. When he entered the correct data and ran it through Univac, he got the same prediction as before: Ike 438, Adlai 93, again with 100-1 chances of an Eisenhower victory.

As the evening wore on, an Eisenhower landslide gathered momentum. The final vote was 442 to 89. Univac was less than 1 percent off.

Late at night, Collingwood made an embarrassing confession to millions of viewers: Univac had made an accurate prediction hours before, but CBS hadn’t aired it.

The public was now sold on this computer stuff. By the 1956 presidential election, all three networks (yes, there were just three) were using computer analysis of the results. It was here to stay.

Source: CNN, USA Today

Photo: Remington Rand’s Univac computer was big and expensive. But it built its reputation quickly as a predictor of presidential elections.
Photo: U.S. Army

This article first appeared on Wired.com Nov. 4, 2008.

See Also:

• For TV Networks, Election Is an Orgy of Gee-Whiz 3-D Tech
• May 2, 1952: First Commercial Jet Flies From London to Johannesburg
• May 7, 1952: The Integrated Circuit … What a Concept!
• May 18, 1952: Carbon-14 Sets Stonehenge Date at 1848 B.C., More or Less
• June 10, 1952: Marketing Mylar With a Film About a Film
• July 22, 1952: Genuine Crop-Circle Maker Patented
• Sept. 20, 1952: Kitchen Blender Pegs DNA as Stuff of Life
• Dec. 1, 1952: Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty
• Nov. 4, 1879: Ka-Ching! The World's First Cash Register

Authors: Randy Alfred

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