Five 1951 BBC Broadcasts on Automatic Calculating Machines

Researchers of Britain’s early postwar history of computing have known for some time that a series of five British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio broadcasts under the general title of “Automatic Calculating Machines” was broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme radio service in May–June 1951. In these broadcasts, five British pioneers of computing spoke about their work. In the order of their broadcasts, they were Douglas Hartree, Max Newman, Alan Turing, Frederic (“Freddie”) Williams, and Maurice Wilkes. Apart from Turing’s broadcast, which has been discussed by B. Jack Copeland1 and Andrew Hodges,2 these broadcasts have received little attention from historians of computing. No sound recordings of the broadcasts survive, although they all were recorded on acetate phonograph discs prior to transmission. However, texts of all five broadcasts survive as BBC transcripts, which were taken from the recordings shortly after they were made. These transcripts are held at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre in Caversham, near Reading, and are the basis for this article. In addition to the existence of the five BBC transcripts, three of the speakers’ scripts are known to have survived. These are Turing’s, held at the Alan Turing archive at King’s College, Cambridge, and those of Wilkes and Newman, copies of which are held by Wilkes. Turing’s script has been published,3 although curiously not in the Collected Works of A.M. Turing,4 and is also available on the Word Wide Web.5 None of the other scripts has been published. All five of the speakers in this series were, or had been, involved with one or more of the three major computing projects in the UK in the immediate postwar period: • ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), at the National Physical Laboratory, designed by Turing, launched in 1946 and experimentally operational in a pilot version in 1950, although not completed until late 1951.6 • EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer), at Cambridge University, designed by Wilkes, begun in 1947 and operational in May 1949.7 • Mark 1 Prototype at Manchester University, associated with Newman, Williams, and (from 1948) Turing. Operational from April 1949 to August 1950, having evolved from an earlier “Baby” test machine (operational June 1948) and replaced in February 1951 by the Ferranti Mark 1.8