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>> coming up next, book tv presents "after words," and avalon program where we invite guest host to interview authors. this week acclaimed novelist jane smiley discusses her biography of a significant contributor to the technological era, john atanasoff. in her book, the man who invented the computer, she introduces the physics professor so frustrated by performing tedious math calculations that he created a machine which would do it for him, later known as a computer. ms. smiley discusses the road traveled by the inventor, why he remained unknown for so long with "washington post" technology reporter cecilia kang. >> host: hello. i'm cecilia kang. i'm a reporter for the "washington post" and i joined here with jane smiley. very pleased to see you and to have you here.

jane has written a really interesting book that sort of at this -- "the man who invented the computer." the biography of john atanasoff. this seems like a departure, the biography. different from a lot of your work that you are better known for. why write this book? what interested you about john atanasoff? >> guest: i studied at iowa state, i spent a long time in the state of iowa. my second husband was the editor of the magazine which is a history magazine of iowa. and around the time that the first book was written about john atanasoff he wrote a little article about john atanasoff. i remember sitting across the table from him, and him telling me the principles behind the abc computer, the first computer.

and they were so crystal clear to me, he explained them clearly, and it was so interesting to me how they chilled in my mind, that they stuck in my mind. subsequently, i was asked to write a book about an american inventor, and i said to the person who is talking to me, do you know who invented the computer? this was about four years ago, and that person said no. and i thought that was really amazing that it is not generally known who invented the computer. there are lots of reasons for that. there have been books written before about this subject, and they are all about, my guy was for, no, mike i was first, no, my guy was the real guy. what i decided to do was organize read all books about all the guys and organized chronologically. to see not just who invented the computer, but how the invention of the computer came about.

and it turned out to be a much more dramatic, almost breathlessly dramatic story than i had realized. his story is very much an all-american, human, poor boy makes good story. he was incredibly energetic. is childers was actually dramatic. his father's childhood was extremely dramatic. and so that's the kind of american sort of classic american story. at iowa state we were always proud of the fact that he was a student an and a teacher at land grant universities. that meant that he had access to engineering department. people with computer ideas that much more prestigious university who didn't have access to engineering department didn't get to have hands on building of

their projects. it was much more difficult. so if for example, at his first job acceptance after got out of graduate school was to iowa state. a second job acceptance was to harvard. if things had switched, he might've gone to harvard, never invented the computer. because he is walking -- when he had the computer ideas in his mind he was walking across the campus. he ran into a guy he knew from the engineering school. he said, say, do you have a graduate student over there who could help me? and the guy said oh, yeah, i know just the one. and it was an engineering student from north of things, glad brooke, who had spent his a child childhood fixing radios in his dad greater shot. so that's the thing that eventually got me so interested in this whole story.

because there were so many things that happened that could have gone another way. one of the most interesting ones, where the stores i talk about and it is the story of colossus, which was british code breaking computer during the second world war. and engineer on colossus was a man named thomas flowers, and in september, late august, early september 1939 he happened to be in germany doing some research. and the british declared war, and he realized he had to get out of germany. he got out with two hours to spare. at the end of the war when they asked him, or later in the '70s, they asked him about impending colossus. he was really the only person who could have invented it. and he said if i hadn't gotten out of germany, it might not have been invented and the war might have gone another way.

this is an amazing story, but the story of the invention of the computer is chock full of amazing stories. that's what got me involved. >> host: it feels like that tension between that sort of american principle our idea of working hard, not mixed with a chance and luck. one section, the story of the invention of the computer is a story of how a general need met by mind. story of how it exists, or indeed not existed at all. somebody had given it some kind secular. >> guest: by the time atanasoff was a graduate student, his ph.d thesis was three or four pages long, you know, very short. the calculations for which he did by hand on a monroe county later took them months and

months and months. and so much has been learned since, say, the time of, then save the middle of the 17th century when science began to take off in europe, and a lot of things have been learned by the ability 4 petitions to calculate whether those things were true or not had fallen behind. because there was no way to do those calculations by hand. so that it was really obvious to a lot of people, and atanasoff was one of them because party had done his dissertation, partly because he was a teacher. it was obvious there was a need there. but nobody knew exactly how technology was going to meet that need. a lot of people thought maybe the charles babbage machine that it didn't end there in the 19th century, the analytical engine come on people thought that was going to be the way to go. but atanasoff saw that as the

numbers get bigger and bigger, you couldn't enlarge your slide rule, which is the paradigm of the analog secular. you couldn't enlarge your slide rule in of to make those numbers manageable. so one of his name, and i promise not to go into technical things, but one of his main insights was that if you use the binary number system rather than the decibel number system, a binary number system is all numbers are made of zero and one, that then you didn't have to have a giant slide rule. you could have something like a light bulb or a vacuum tube. this went on and off. on was one, off was there. that was one of his private insights. pretty just happen, because his mother, ida, had taught math, or taught arithmetic and math when she was a young woman, she

happen to know about binary number system so she happened to, seeing that atanasoff was interested in all sorts of things as a kid, she happen to teach him number systems. you can see her sitting in the rocking chair meeting with the children at her feet scratching their heads saying what do i do, humor, to to keep this kid occupied because he was just a voracious about every activity. and so you can see her come as a mom, i see her teaching him all kinds of numbers like base 12 and base two number systems. >> host: naturally funny. and i hope you go into more technical details because the binary system is the basis of computing. and that is the big breakthrou breakthrough. and i wonder if there's any point when you are looking into this, and yet that is a breaking

for him were you questioned maybe he really wasn't the real inventor of the computer, because that is a subject of debate, right? >> guest: it has been. there were a couple of things that happened. world war ii came along. he had invented what is now known as the abc, the atanasoff very computer. a graduate student clifford berry. they build it in the basis of the physics laboratory, any, the physics very passionate about and i was taken given a corner iin the basement. eventually walls were built around the corner and doors were put in and the course were too small for the computer to be removed. he tried to patent it, but the war came along. and once he left iowa state, it just became not important to universities to patent the

machine. but he thought he was being patented. he came to washington. he went to work as a naval flap. in the meantime, he had met a man at the university university, from the university of pennsylvania named john lockley who came out to ames and look at the computer and read all about it. and clifford their issues and how a worked to get hands-on expense of the computer. he went away, came back to philadelphia, and met another man in philadelphia, another student, or a guy who just had a ca named acord. and this is all the rage somewhere going to do, how to go to catch the things that the war effort needs? and so moxley wrote to atanasoff in october and said what we need, try building a computer. do you think that would be okay? and atanasoff was sort of a

moderately unkosher and because he still wanted his invention to be patented. in the meantime, the man who's in charge of the project that mark was working on who is associated with the army was a man named goldstein who is also a mathematician. he was walking along, another one of those coincidences. he was on a platform in philadelphia and he saw john was quite famous at the time, things as a mathematician and is also working on the atom bomb. he walked up to don norman and to s uck up to a file he said, i'm working on a computer project and bond or we just went wow, you know. so don norman got very involved. and he of course had absolutely top, top, top security close. is also extremely sociable.

he used to from time to time go over to the naval ordnance lab at nasa and by the end of the war, mauchly, and a bunch of other people have built in the act. they would talk to atanasoff about computer ideas. but when atanasoff was invited to look at eniac, this table is round, but the abc was about as big as this table. eniac was about as big as this room. and so atanasoff look at it and said okay, he must be right. they did build the computer completely on a different principle than my computer. and he was an enterprising guy, he went into business, made millions of dollars doing other things. and then starting in the early '50s, sort of wonder gone

through into the '60s and '70s, the various companies that were involved in eniac and also in other computer ideas. >> host: what were those companies? granted it was ibm, sperry rand. there was, i don't even remember anymore. consolidated engineering. a bunch of them. who had come into the computer business for different reasons. honeywell was one of them, and they got a big boost from inventing the thermostat, you know. but they all wanted to be doing computers because they realized that there was a need for this. but finally, atanasoff, they did, they approached atanasoff

and they said we think your patent, we think that these patents could be broken. what paperwork do you have? atanasoff was an incredibly organized guy and he said, i have paid for going back to 1929. so he pulled out all the paperwork, and he was able to demonstrate how, where he started, where his ideas came from, why he had them, what you meant, what he did with them, and so when they get a court case in minneapolis, concerning where the ideas originated, atanasoff just had so much paper, so much of the paper trail. and also such a perfect memory for everything that you ever thought, that he won the case. mauchly could not remember and he was told by his employers -- lawyers not to remember everything. >> host: why is that?

>> guest: well, why do lawyers do anything? you know, i think what the lawyers were thinking was if very, very, very unusual for a court to advocate a patent that has been issued. and they figure that momentum was on their side. and so they didn't understand how much information atanasoff had. there were other complications which the book goes into, which all in themselves quite interestingly. but basically mauchly had to prove a negative. he had to prove that even though he went to iowa and he did look at the computer and he did have no paperwork showing his ideas before that, that he had to prove that he wasn't influenced by atanasoff. and it's very, very hard to prove a negative. so they abdicate the patent. however, as i've the right of

going through the history of the colossus, the enigma, the history of the german computer built by conrad souza in berlin, all through the '30s, what i am saying is not that mauchly did a wrong thing. who knows? baby ben, i don't know. but that he was the guy who carried the little plant out of the greenhouse into the world he comes colossus was destroyed. tommy flowers was forbidden ever to put it on his resume. allen was forbidden ever to the colossus on their resume. on his resume because of security reasons after the second world war. so they went to losses as the originator of the modern computer.

the d'souza computer, how they got out of berlin really makes your hair stand on end. but then once they got into a stable, somewhere in austria, what were they going to do with it? so it could originate a computer either. so mauchly was essential to the building of the modern computer as atanasoff was because the abc was destroyed. the colossus was destroyed. the c-4 was sidelined. where were they going to go? they went to eniac. yes, eniac had its origins in abc, but mauchly was the only guy, he was the only guy who cared, who is able to see what the abc was all about. and could carry that idea from ames, which you know is a wonderful town but it's a little out of the way, you know, from ames to philadelphia where in

the philadelphia washington, d.c. nexus there was a network that would allow -- >> i bet that was fascinating. >> guest: and it was money. i think atanasoff verse greta brawner the computer was $650. $250 on equipment, and $500 for clifford berry. budget i could talk about this all day because it is such an interesting story. it's not one that i made of either. i don't feel like i do with the novel where, i'm saying okay, here's my knowledge, here's the story, i made this up. is pretty good. i'm saying as a spectator like anybody else, it's clear. tranny it's clear the excitement your daughter -- garner from the discovery of the history and again, this is a departure for

you. when i was reading this i couldn't help but think about the modern day examples and parallels and you see these great wars over the patents of smart phones today. between apple and google and motorola and nokia end of the greatest tons of patents right now. why are these battles interesting do you think? >> guest: i don't know about the newest but in some sense atanasoff is one of the last sort of solitary and come and he didn't want to be. he would have liked to have had university support, but he didn't get it. here he is in the basement of the physics building. he is thinking the thoughts, and clifford berry any are talking and then putting it together. got kind of the last of a certain kind of adventure that we think have. >> host: this is an inventor

driven by solving a problem? >> guest: yes. he really wanted to solve a problem but he also had a certain type of personality which was what some people call problem finding personality. you know, when he was a kid he had a fascinating childhood, and he was really well known, he learned to drive the family car when he was 12. you learn to fix it when he was 12 and a half. his dad had a full-time job but they lived on a property that was a farm, and grew vegetables and stuff like that. he ran the farm. you know, his whole life was about seeing what was necessary. and then not only producing what was necessary, but fixing what was already there. making that work better. one of the things he did in the

war, he worked for the naval ordnance lab, so one of the things he had to do was study acoustics of a certain atomic blast. and he got out there and he said, well, i don't think i have the right equipment here, but let's see, why should we do? he put it all together into the acoustics properly. so that's just the kind of guy he was. he was enterprising. he was driven. he was incredibly intellectually curious. he drove, we had three kids, the story was always that he drove the school crazy because they would call him a poor student teacher comes and they would spend five this talk about the kids, and an hour of him telling the school what they should be teaching the children in the science curriculum. so he just had this incredibly capacious and voracious mind. but yet every character in the book is unique and so on the

other hand, let's say of the specter of the practicality spectrum, we have alan turing who is the most famous person was in the book. but van norman's wife said he couldn't manage a screwdriver but he could fix a zipper. so wasn't going to be in the went to the project to have to put it all together. but it was going to be bundling and who understood the implications everything. and it was to connect. the one who met to incur the one that mauchly. the one who met atanasoff per to the one who did the atomic bomb calculations. so he is a very enigmatic and interesting character, to the end and there is turing who conceives of what a computer is. so atanasoff conceits of a

machine that works like a brain. turing conceived of a brain that works like a machine. and it just demonstrates the different ways that their minds were working. for atanasoff this is like gold. how is this person's mind working in contrast to this person. and d'souza, the german guy who truly is one of the characters of the choices you can were the ultimate characters, some the highlights. it is translated into english. and he came added to design. even as a child he remembered living in berlin and looking at the way that the bridge is crossed one another downtown and being fascinated by that. he was an artist. he liked to draw. and his first invention was,

vintage and emulate predated the computer was basically a dispensing machine where you put in a deutsche mark and get an orange. so he was interested in the mechanics of certain things. >> host: which is problem solving in itself, but with another element. >> guest: with a different element. he invited for computers, see one come as q., and z. for. he was working on the z-4 in berlin while it was being bombed by the allies. his workers were people that were not eligible for the armed services, either they were blind or they got in trouble, or they were women or whatever. and he would say i need a piece, what do i need a piece of today? i need a piece of copper wire. so couple of guys would run out and see which streetcar have been bombed and they would go to step off a piece of copper wire and bring it back. and, i'm not going to tell about

his escape from berlin because it's so eye-popping, but when he did escape, he ran into the barren at a place with are all being kept in austria. and he said, mr. von brown, or herr von brown, doctor von brown, i have invented a computer and don browne basically said that one night passionate it would never get off the ground. >> host: i just find the backdrop of the war to be cut because a good helper to try to connect the dots to modern-day and distorted by the backdrop of war provided so much more drama that the scarcity resources, the drive. if i get asked you to fast-forward to today, what are sort of the motivators to think of technology today? you mentioned we don't have an inventor that sort of -- >> guest: what mauchly did when he came, carried out

atanasoff's ideas from pennsylvania to philadelphia was he carried a solitary inventors idea to a group. and the group gathered together. i mean, they had a boss. they had a designer. they had in mind who was in charge. but the group got together and came up with various ideas for how to build eniac and then univac and add back at all those things. so that's kind of the way invention takes place. it's a group thing. where people stimulate one another's ideas, and the problem that von neumann had when he was thinking about the computer as it was, he was thinking okay,

who owns this? and von neumann decided after i suppose after his expense of the atomic bomb, he decided nobody owns this. these are ideas that would come up with by a group. we cannot assign ownership of these ideas to any one person. and they're also done on government funding, so they belonged to, unicode they belonged in, to everyone. and he set out to make sure that these ideas did go into the comment, the common knowledge and could not be patented. >> host: sort of like the internet. >> guest: yesterday i think von neumann comes out as the most nefarious character here probably because he died young. he did not leave any memoir. but he also had a very dramatic life. >> host: how did you find out

about information about him? how did you research and? >> guest: is a biology of them, and he's also come he was also famous, so a lot of, a fair amount of material about him. i understand that a new biography is being written about him. i hope some of the ministers will be sold. he was a very sociable, smart guy. and everybody who knew him just wanted to be with them. wanted to keep talking to him. at the same time he also believed that stalin was going to bomb the u.s. and he always wanted, he was an architect or, he wanted, he said, which i quote in your come he said i want those russian generals and stalin to know that if they send a bomb this way, they will be blown up within the next half hour. juno, so he's a really interesting person. being in washington remind me

that when atanasoff later after the war and he built his facility for his new company, he studied with a nuclear plume would go if washington was bombed, and he built his company outside the nuclear plume. so these is incredibly dated in weird and naïve, and yet it's really telling feature of the time, that if they didn't just -- they expected it to happen. and they planned. they planned what to do in case it happened. so at the same time there is world war ii going on, then a few pages later there's the cold war going on. and so the place where i'm typing on my apple, you know, seems so much beyond that. but this is how we came to. this is how it came to be. >> host: what characters that you are looking to, do you find

yourself wanting to understand more? >> guest: von neumann foreshore. >> host: did you lean on any families? >> guest: now. there were plenty of books written in all the books are about my guy in a the first computer, no, my got into the first computer. so i did want to necessary at only two that. i wanted to explore the whole network, the whole system that resulted not in the first invention of the computer but in the computer that, the original computer that came to be my laptop. and the principles of the clauses were different from the principles of the abc, and also different from the principles of the d'souza computer. my laptop didn't have to end up the way it did, maybe. we don't know. they did try putting a fairly

modest mathematical calculation through the colossus after the war. it took a really long time. colossus was basically a word processor. and so would they all have merged in the end and come up, come out with something like we have now? i don't know. but what i was interested in was how the system worked. but every single guy was mysterious in some way or another. but i guess, you know, maybe the most mysterious in some ways, not the most mysteries, but unknown, let's put that way, is tommy flowers, a guy who put together colossus. he never wrote anything about them so. he never said anything about himself. he was forbidden to talk about colossus and he didn't do it.

he did not talk about his collaboration with allen drury. he said a couple of things like welcome if i had a problem, turing could always figure out something. he didn't say what turing's input was that he didn't say what his own input was accept he did imply that he built the colossus. but all of the stuff about colossus is really, there's a book out in 2006 about colossus, but by 2006 a lot of the memories had been lost. churchill, i think there were 12 colossus, or glossy, 10 of them were destroyed. so when the book colossus came out it was pretty interesting to discover that the work could have gone another way, and that i talk about that in this book, too. that part of the reason, one of the dramatic things that happen is that the first message, the

first decoding of german army information, that colossus conformed was performed the day before d-day. and they brought a note to eisenhower who was sitting in a room talking to his generals and making a plan, and he read the note and he said we go tomorrow. i mean, that's still an amazing. that still affects me, and i wasn't even alive. >> host: that is amazing. every time you turn around something amazing is happening to even atanasoff's own father, his father was from a small village in bulgaria. that was then part of the ottoman empire, and that area rebelled against the ottoman empire. >> guest: as the family was fleeing the village, atanasoff's

father would carry the baby who was, you know, a few months old in his arms. he got shot to the back by a turkish soldier, the bullet creased the scalp of the baby as exited the father's chest. the baby lived. so i mean, that was, you know -- >> host: what a chance 10 that i haven't touched in all of those. it's just one drama after another. >> host: how do you think that that background, his family story impacted him? >> guest: the father was the go-getter. the father came to america at age 12 or something like that. and was one of those classic immigrant children in new york trying to make his way. he kept a chicken in his room for a while. he managed to connect with

religious congregations and tell his story, earn some money, go to college, and then get married. the father was constantly getting ahead, but all of the computer pioneers in your head of these early 20 century stories of, you know, life on the street, working in the electrical factory, whatever. and so in that way the whole story of the invention of the computer is a series of windows of the world that used to exist and doesn't exist anymore. >> host: i wonder while you are writing this book do you think at all about what this portends about, our united states as we go forward? >> guest: now turn it into discrete different great. >> guest: it's so different

the way that they came to be. by me, all the inventors of the computer were born between about 1900, and about 1912. so they were all born into victorian families. they were all on the cusp of the new age, and he did know what the new age was. but they were -- they all have a sense because they were scientists and mathematicians, they'll have the sense of the pressure of data, the pressure of things that need to be organized, knowledge that need to be organized. they all had this since pushing them all the time. and i don't know that we have that sense anymore. maybe there are other countries where this feeling of being on the cusp of something is current, you now? i don't know, but i don't think, i don't think we live in that

world anymore. >> host: can you talk a little bit about, you started talk about how you came across this story and you learned about all sort of jailed into the characters. at what point did you realize despite anything interesting characters, this was worth a book? >> guest: when the person to i don't know who invented the computer. i knew it was worth a book. but then went to the mit inventor website and there's no atanasoff up there. and, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of inventors on the mit website, and some the things that invented you have never heard up. and so i decided, well, it was time to try again. you know, to try to get him into modern conscious. but the reason i didn't go to the families and say, i did have

access to the book that his grandfather wrote, it was published by able carrion press, because the family was bulgarian, so i have access to more personal information, but i wanted the story to tell itself. there are many books about, you know, many books are partisan. but the story is much more interesting if you're not particular with partisan. you have to have an opinion about who you think invented it, but the story itself is way beyond -- the system of the story is way beyond, you know, i'm getting your guy, anthony, you know, i grew up, not grow up, but for years and years i thought of mauchly as the antagonist here, but when i read

about i realize mauchly was the savior, not the antagonist. because he was, that which without, if he hadn't gone to iowa. it doesn't matter how he subsequently acted as if he hadn't gone to ames, then boom, and the abc would have been taken apart. it was taken apart, but it would've just been a pile of junk. so mauchly is, you know come we can say atanasoff is an inventor but mauchly is the savior. and so i don't, i'm sorry that there has been this partisan sort of antagonism between all the potential inventors. but that doesn't need to be. and i thought, -- >> host: if you could step back, the way you going to come it does sort of you like a

biography/so. so they be that's what you unique, it's sort of i can see, you know, i would go about organizing this with he shed she said, he said she said that you didn't do that. how did you go, how do you think about the process of going about writing this and the structure? >> guest: it jelled chronologically. i realized all he had to do really was, i had a couple of things. one was to tell the story chronologically because it was dramatic enough. to unfold as a story. but the other one was, it had to be, and this is the hard one for me, i had to be pretty clear about the technical aspects of it. and additional earlier craft of the manuscript to a friend of

mine, and i would note where people got bogged down. i have a friend who is a scientist, a veterinarian, but he is up to date in that way of thinking about the world, the technical scientific way of thinking. so if he is getting bogged down we have a problem. >> host: that's a real obvious question. are you, jane, are you a techie? >> host: no, no, no. i mean, i understand the four basic principles of atanasoff's idea, but i got a guy named john pissed off as a computer scientist, and who actually, he used to work at iowa state and he got a bunch of guys together in the '90s and they rebuilt the abc. and it's now in the computer museum in san jose. he knew a lot about, he knew everything as far as i'm

concerned about not only the abc but how the abc fits in with other computers. it was interesting to talk about putting it together because he said only old guys can put this together because they had to have that building skills and the technical skills that people would have had in the '40s. and even that has gone by the wayside. >> host: what do you mean by that? >> guest: handling those kinds of materials, and you know, making riveting things together, you know, just putting angle iron together. and also understanding of vacuum tubes work and how capacitors work because those are all outmoded things. he said he always made them laugh, this whole doesn't have had white hair, except his, his

hair was red. but i own them a lot. he was really great and he explained a lot of things to me. and sorted a lot of things out for many. >> host: it seems courageous. i cover technology and i don't know if i was able to set up doing this, in that -- >> guest: i felt that since i understood those were principl principles, but somehow i would get through it. and yet, i did get bogged down from time to time in the text up within the drama which is keep going. the death, interesting guests on among the group. clifford berry, did he commit suicide? alan turing, did he commit suicide? touring as we all know are as anyone who's interested in in computers knows, turing wasn't ultimately -- openly gay man.

in the 1950s he became unemployable, partly because of his openly gay status during the cold war. so the question still arises, well, what happened to them? did he commit suicide? his mother believed that. so i don't know. i don't go too deeply into all of that, but it's just another aspect of the drama. and as i'm sitting having all my i have a come. no, here's a bit and apple which is a reference to the way that turing committed suicide. so it's would've liked iconic. >> host: can you explain to the audience a little more? >> guest: to ring was killed by an apple that was infused with poison.

maybe he put the poison in the. maybe someone else put the poison in there. i don't know, but supposedly when apple was founded and they got their icon, that was a reference to the death of alan turing. >> host: are there any figures, moguls today in the tech world that you find, you draw parallels to some of the characters to in this book? i think about design focus as steve jobs for example. or do you not think that way? >> guest: i don't think that way. you know, maybe the way sergei brin and, you know, the google thing. sergei brin and larry -- i'm blanking. sorry, larry.

but the way it seems to work that is, or the way it works with google, the way it works with facebook, is that these young guys gather together somewhere like in college, and they started talking and thinking, let's go for it. we can do it. that's not exactly how atanasoff worked. but maybe it would have been if he'd gone to to harvard and howard aiken. but the other thing is what current tech people are coming up with, manages information, what atanasoff and those guys are coming up with was the hardware. so they had to have access to some way to put the hardware together, some way to try out how to make something. to make a real thing. when alan turing come at the same time that atanasoff was

sitting in the bar pondering his computer, alan turing was thinking that technology was going to be more like the liverpool tide predicting machine, which was, you know, pulleys and gears rather than lightbulbs going on and off. but turing didn't have access to the same kind of education that atanasoff had. when atanasoff went to the university of florida and then iowa state and the university of wisconsin, he had access to land grant type education which was a very practical education. so that atanasoff could not become a mathematician at the university, or a physicist at the university of florida. it was an offer. he could go into the engineering school and take some courses, and that was the way to land grant system worked. you weren't allowed just two

thing. you actually had to make something. but that's the way it worked with d'souza because d'souza went to the technical university in berlin. one of the courses they had to go out in the street and work with workers who are building things. and so that push away their thought into practical paths, whereas when alan turing was a cambridge nobody ever said boo about let's see how you would make that thing. so even though he might have been leaning toward making things, i mean, relatives on his mother's side were engineers who were makers of things, he was encouraged to do that. in fact, when he would make something at the school that he went to as a young boy in england, it all would get thrown away. he would leave it on the windowsill and it would get

tossed because nobody wanted that around the room. so that was another thing that fascinated me was the way to land grant system focused on one thing, and the way that other types of universities by cambridge and princeton focused on another thing. >> host: certainly another history, window in history. value is assigned in some instances and not others. jane, were you particularly interested in a time of this entry, or -- now, it all just kind of gelled? >> guest: they came from being with atanasoff. >> host: did you find yourself researching more about the history? >> guest: in order to learn about the losses, i had to know the progress. but eniac code breaking machine

was about naval codes because, that was the first one that the result or salt. the polish, and in the english building on the polish solution of the eniac code. because if there were a naval blockade of the british isles they would have been able to survive. so they focus on the naval one first. the codes that were made by the machine that was the army code making machine were much more complicated, and those were the our because and also the codes with which hitler communicated with his staff. they were much more difficult, but they weren't at the beginning of the worked they weren't as essential to the survival of england as an entity because they weren't used by the navy. but they were essential to the

survival, to the conquering or the resistance and ultimate resolution of the war because once they knew that, say, i mean, the that eisenhower was interested in was the code about d-day, of where were the german forces. and one of the things that he learned early on was that they had decided that d-day was a saint and they were really going to land to the south. and so they didn't move the german troops away from, toward the beaches of normandy which gave eisenhower an incredible opportunity. that's from colossus. >> host: did you find yourself traveling to england or germany in your research? everything is avail online now, jane. >> guest: actually i did most of my research in actual libraries come in books.

but i did organize them online. >> host: is there a connection on your apple or your laptop? will we see more biographies? did you enjoy this experience? >> guest: i've written a biography before. i did enjoy this experience. am i going to do a biography of samuel birdseye, the inventor of frozen foods? i doubt it. that could be really interesting. >> host: as some of approach you to write this, right? it wasn't your idea. >> guest: now. but it was so like the dickens but. whenever the dickens book somebody approached me and said we are doing a series about people who are still important in our world today. and i said, is dickens on there? and they said no. i said, and, lots of times when i joined a series i fill in what

i perceive as a gap. but, you know, i'm still working on my own novel. i publish a novel this year called private lives, which is about a woman married to a crackpot scientist. so i was in that mode. >> host: were you inspired? were you writing at the same time? >> guest: i was right at the same time. now, crackpot scientist in my novel once worked at the naval observance. he wouldn't have fit in. any of these come with any of these guys. he was a true crackpot at. >> host: how do you write two books at the same time? >> guest: that's something you try not to do actually. you just get too far ahead of yourself and you think i will finish that one by the time i start that would have been turned out that you get efficient -- you didn't finish that one. i'm also writing a series of force books for girls, but those are really very pleasurable.

>> host: are you into horses? >> guest: yes, i love horses. i love training. i love girls with horses. >> host: in our last two minutes can you talk about what inspired you? who do you read? what do you read? what do you observe that draws inspiration for you? >> guest: i get inspiration from almost everything. i came to see something and say i like that, and then find all about it. but, you know, everything newspapers and i think, wow, that's interesting and i get involved with it. i'm usually about three projects behind the other things that i'm interested in. i usually have a bunch of projects going on at the same time. and i think, oh, i'll have to do that, you to come into a two years when i finish with this,

or whatever. but i've never been at a loss for inspiration. once i broke my leg and that it had anything to do, i was uninspired for about a week. >> host: just one week. pretty ambitious. who is the audience for this biography? who are you trying to reach out to? what are -- >> guest: everybody who uses a computer. but since there's so much history in it, i think there's a lot in it about the 20th century and how it unfolded. atanasoff was born in 1903. he died in 1995. his life pretty much spent the 20th century come and was asthmatic about how the 20 century work in some ways. but i guess my general, my

general -- >> host: i hope it was written in a way, and finally, what has been the response from atanasoff's family, others? what do they think of your take? >> guest: his family likes it. i got an e-mail from his son adding a few little details. and i say we can put those in the paperback. and he said who cares? they like it. and i have not gotten much of a response from the others, you know, but these people were born a hundred years ago. anybody who is still carrying the torch, for whatever side, is pretty far removed from the actual incidence. i tried to be as objective as possible, and as accurate as it could be.

and to say it's not about who was first. those issues have been settled. it's really about how it happened. >> host: "the man who invented the computer," the biography of john atanasoff, i changed my. thank you much for coming by. >> guest: thanks for having m me. >> we are at the national press club talking with mark halperin and john about a best seller, "game change." can you tell us is another book in the works for the two of you? >> there is. we're working on a sequel as was in hollywood. it's the always making a movie about this one and at the same time we're working on a book about the next presidential campaign. >> will there be, it's probably the paperback edition come in an update to this one? >> the paper book has just come out and we have a new transfer