When, exactly, did our digital world arise? For many, the advent of social media might first come to mind. How about the birth of the internet? Or maybe the first PCs? Each of these technological developments have certainly been revolutionary, but George Dyson, in his book Turing’s Cathedral, argues that the framework for modern computers and the digital age was actually constructed long before any of these phenomena.
Logically, computers can be traced all the way back to the 17th century, when Gottfried Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, pioneered the binary number system, in which 0s and 1s can be arranged in myriad ways to represent and execute even the most complex mathematical problems. The 19th century then saw the English mathematician, Charles Babbage, create plans and a prototype for a mechanical computer. It was called the Analytical Engine, and there were even computer programs, written by Ada Lovelace, designed for it. But it wouldn’t be until the 1930s, when British logician and cryptographer, Alan Turing, published “On Computable Numbers,” that the theoretical basis for an electronic computing device built from binary code became distinctly possible. What Turing demonstrated is that numbers not only represent things, but that they have the power to do things as well.
Even then, though, building a functional computer was no easy task, and it’s this process--progressing from theory to application--that Dyson is most interested in. “The history of digital computing,” writes Dyson, “can be divided into an Old Testament whose prophets, led by Leibniz, supplied the logic, and a New Testament whose prophets, led by von Neumann, built the machines. Alan Turing arrived in between.” Thus, while Leibniz, Turing, and a range of other trailblazing scientists haunt the pages of Turing’s Cathedral, the central character is actually John von Neumann, a Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist. Von Neumann not only realized that a computer’s memory could store both data and programs, he also assembled a highly skilled team to build a computer based on this architecture.
It was a motley crew that descended upon the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, where von Neumann’s computer project was based from 1946-1951. There were mathematicians, physicists, engineers, meteorologists, and geneticists, all of whom had excelled in their respective fields prior to joining the IAS faculty. Dyson awards each of the main players their own chapter, and it’s their personal journeys that make the story of the early days of computers particularly compelling. In this way, Turing’s Cathedral takes the shape of a bicycle wheel, with each chapter a kind of spoke, starting early on in the life of a particular scientist and tracing their development (as well as the forebears and ideas that inspired them), ultimately convening in Princeton with the IAS computer project and John von Neumann as the hub.
While rigorous scientific research and discussion form the foundation of the book, Turing’s Cathedral is as much biography and cultural analysis as it is computer history, documenting the clash of ideas and cultures that lead not just to the development of the computer, but also to the breaking down of walls between scientific fields and between theory and real-world application. Ultimately, it’s a reminder that all great scientific advancements are never the work of a single person, but of a group of people who collaborate, experiment, and draw on the rich tradition of ideas and innovation that precedes them in order to change life as we know it.
We’ve come a long way from the room-sized computers, vacuum tubes, and paper tape described in Turing’s Cathedral, but, in many ways, the basic architecture of modern computers isn’t all that different from what von Neumann originally proposed. If you’re curious how computer works, be sure to check out the Community Technology Center’sComputer Hardware 101 class. And for those interested in making computers do things, stop by the weekly Learn to Code Meetup in ideaLAB or take our Javascript classes to try your hand at a bit of computer programming.