He now joined the Third Reich’s Aerodynamics Research Institute which funded the building of a
He now joined the Third Reich’s Aerodynamics Research Institute which funded the building of a full-scale computer, the Z3. The Z3 became operational in December 1941, and was by two years the world’s first practical automatic computer. As a boy he was gifted in both the arts and sciences: an accomplished artist and an enthusiastic amateur actor, he also delighted in constructor sets and decided to make his living as an engineer. In 1927 he enrolled at the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he studied civil engineering. On graduating in 1935 he became a stress analyst for the Henschel Aircraft Company, where he worked on problems of aircraft vibration. Stress analysis involved formidable calculations, which could then only be performed with great difficulty using teams of human “computers” equipped with desk calculating machines.Zuse was seduced by the calculating problem. Working in his own time in the evenings and at weekends, he began to design and build a mechanical computer in the living room of his parents’ house.
He called the computer the “V1″ for Versuchsmodel 1 – Experimental Model 1. (After the war he renamed his machines Z1, Z2 etc, to avoid confusion with Wernher von Braun’s flying bombs.) As a computer builder, Zuse worked as an amateur, completely outside the mathematical community, although he obtained some financial assistance from a local calculating machine manufacturer. Zuse then developed an electric model based on telephone relay technology, and planned a much faster machine to be built with electronic tubes. This had only reached the stage of a small prototype when, in 1942, the project was axed by the German Army Command. As one historian later wrote, Zuse “cracked open the door to an awesome and strange new world, but that door slammed shut before he could pass through”.
Zuse was born in 1910 in Berlin, the son of a post office official. If Germany had been a victor in the Second World War, then today Konrad Zuse would probably be recognised world-wide as the father of the computer. In 1941 he completed the Z1, the world’s first fully operational automatic digital computer: a mechanical device of limited capacity and speed.
But he was out of place in a political world which was coming ever more to rely on a style which he did not possess, rather than a substance which he undoubtedly did.Patrick CosgraveHarold Arthur Watkinson, politician and businessman: born 25 January 1910; MP (Conservative) for Woking 1950-64; PPS to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation 1951-52; Parliamentary Secretary to Ministry of Labour and National Service 1952-55; PC 1955; Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation 1955-59; Minister of Defence 1959-62; CH 1962; group managing director, Schweppes Ltd 1963-68, chairman, Cadbury Schweppes Ltd 1969- 74; created 1964 Viscount Watkinson; President, CBI 1976-77; Chairman, Council, BIM 1968-70, President 1973-78; married 1939 Vera Langmead (two daughters); died 19 December 1995.. He was never fully consoled, but he made for himself a glittering and lucrative career in the business world becoming, among many other things, managing director of Schweppes, executive chairman of Cadbury Schweppes, and a director of the Midland Bank.He also found time for a host of good causes, for his remarkable energy sustained him until nearly the end of his life He was a bluff man, who did not suffer fools. “Poor Dickie,” he wrote, “talks all the time and has (with all his charm) a very limited mental capacity.”Watkinson was rewarded (this was Macmillan’s own way of man management) with a Companionship of Honour, and a peerage. Macmillan’s idea was to impose a visionary concept of a united service organisation on the suspicious and often captious individual forces. By 1962 he concluded that Watkinson was not the man for the job. Instead, he employed Duncan Sandys, with his fearsome reputation as a hatchet man, and then Peter Thorneycroft, who was equally ferocious. The First Sea Lord, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was employed to do the charming Macmillan had no illusions about this.
It was, however, more than a year before Churchill resumed office. In 1951 Watkinson became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation. After a stint at the Ministry of Labour, he returned to his old department as its head, in 1955.As he rose through relatively junior ranks Watkinson earned a well-deserved reputation as a superbly competent organiser In 1959, therefore, Macmillan made him Minister for Defence. This was a somewhat anomalous job, created for himself by Churchill in 1940, in order to take power from the three Service ministries. But it was, until 1959, a job really only made for such a man as Churchill. It was not made for a non-political politician.Macmillan, moreover – who had served, briefly, as Minister of Defence himself – had a particular dream for the department. It was, essentially, to reduce the power and the status of individual Service ministers, and to make the senior minister the senior man.
