UNIVAC Becomes a Household
Word A reading from Harry Wulforst's 1982 book BREAKTHROUGH TO THE COMPUTER AGEScanned by jds 1991 on Logitech 4" hand held scanner then OCRed with bundled software all at a cost of about $400.
The red light on the television
camera clicked on. Charles Collingwood, seated in a CBS studio in New York
City, smiled confidently at his unseen audience across America as he revealed
the network's plans for broadcast coverage of the 1952 presidential election:
"Here at CBS we are making elaborate preparations to bring you the results
of the night of November 4th, just as quickly and as accurately as is humanly
possible. Matter of fact, we want to bring them to you faster and more
accurately than is humanly possible, so we have enlisted the aid of Remington
Rand's UNIVAC.... If UNIVAC behaves the way we think it will, we'll all know
the winner long before the final votes are counted."
During the weeks preceding
Collingwood s announcement, political
analysts, statisticians, and computer programmers had huddled in meetings in
Philadelphia conjuring up ways to endow UNIVAC with sufficient expertise to
predict the winner of the Eisenhower‑Stevenson race after only a small
portion of the votes had been tallied. Months earlier, when UNIVAC was first
brought to the attention of CBS, the experts at Remington Rand had blithely
assumed that programming the system for analyzing voting patterns across
America would be a routine undertaking. However, as the weeks
rolled by and
the election night
deadline loomed ever closer, the experts thought that they had bitten
off more than they could chew.
It had started as a simple
business barter arrangement. In April 1952 a representative of the network had
come to Remington Rand with a proposition. The office equipment manufacturer
would be given nationwide television exposure at no cost in return for the
temporary use of a hundred or so typewriters and adding machines. The quid pro
quo was to be part of the programming: As television cameras panned around the
huge studio (which would be filled with workers diligently tapping the keys of
adding machines and typewriters), a camera
would zoom in
over someone's shoulder from time
to time to focus briefly on the Remington Rand logotype emblazoned above the
keyboard. The deal was sealed with a handshake, but before the CBS man reached
the door, a suggestion by a Remington Rand publicist stopped him in his tracks.
Sustaining viewer interest
during the tedious hours of reporting the vote, precinct by precinct and state
by state, was a tough challenge for broadcasters. Break the monotony, said the
publicist, by predicting the winner with an electronic computer and viewers
will stay with you all night to see if the computer is right or wrong. This
extra bit of show biz, which might possibly add some life to a slow-moving
story, was enthusiastically endorsed by CBS management, but
professional newscasters did
not know whether to take the
matter seriously or not. Their general uneasiness was evident in a response by
Walter Cronkite (then chief Washington correspondent for CBS) to a question by
Dorothy Fuldheim during an evening news broadcast by WEWS‑TV in
Cleveland, Ohio:
DOROTHY FULDHEIM: Tell me, Walter, what are you going to do to
report this very historic election? WALTER CRONKITE: Well, this year we've got the
same basic formula that we had before, which is, of course straight reporting
of how the returns are coming in. However, we do have a little gimmickry
this year which I think is most interesting, and may turn our to be something
more than gimmickry. We're using an electronic brain which a division of
Remington Rand has in Philadelphia. DOROTHY FULDHEIM: What does it do? WALTER CRONKITE: It's going to predict the outcome of the
election, hour by hour, based on returns at the same time periods on the
election nights in 1944 and 1948. Scientists, whom we used to call long hairs,
have been working on correlating the facts [for these predictions] for the past
two or three months. . . . Actually, we're not depending too much on this
machine. It may just a sideshow...
and then again it may turn out be of great value to some people.
At the time Cronkite was telling
Dorothy Fuldheim that UNIVAC might be of great value, the long hairs in
Philadelphia were fearful that its widely publicized debut on television would be a flop. Before
UNIVAC could be programmed
to rapidly analyze
the election night
returns, mathematical equations had to be formulated describing trends
and voting patterns for thousands of political sub‑divisions throughout
the United States. This massive undertaking was rendered more difficult by the
fact that there was virtually no precedent for an analysis of this magnitude. The statisticians, labouring over reams of
data covering the two previous presidential elections, had no existing body of
expertise to guide them.
Finally, a workable method for
processing the data gradually took shape. Now the experts could direct their
attention to the practical business of getting ready to run the problem when
the returns started coming in. Because
the only available UNIVAC systems were in Remington Rand's factory in
Philadelphia, a special Teletype line was reserved for transmitting the vote
counts from CBS election night headquarters in New York. Three UNIVAC systems figured in the plan: One to actually
process the data and be seen on television; a second UNIVAC, behind the scenes
to carefully check the output of the
first; and a third, on standby, in the event of an emergency.
called out on a
printer. Then the latest total
for that precinct was located on
the original Teletype and the correct count re-entered into the system, which
produced a validated listing on a fourth reel of magnetic tape.
While the most recent tallies
were being transcribed on the fourth tape, all of the precinct totals were
sorted into a predetermined sequence. At the same time, the data were subjected
to three additional tests. First, the number of districts reporting was checked
against the total number of districts in the area under study. Second, the
reported vote on any given pass had to be at least as high as the previously
reported total. And finally, the major party votes in each district were
compared with similar data compiled for that constituency in 1944 and 1948.
The vote totals were then in the
proper format for entry into the primary UNIVAC system. For this phase,
composite analyses of returns in the 1944 and 1948 elections had been stored in
the computer's memory in addition to a comprehensive history
of state‑by‑state voting
trends dating back to 1928. From
this information district profiles were charted that defined the relative
strengths of the major party registrations and the so‑called independent
vote.
The district totals fed into
UNIVAC's processor from the fourth tape were compared to the historical records
of those districts in the computer's memory. Then a final vote probability was
determined for each locality. These voting patterns became the basis for a
general preliminary estimate of the total national vote for each candidate.
Adjustments were then factored in at prescribed intervals to correct any
discrepancies that arose between the actual vote counted for a district and the
voting pattern selected for that district. In this way as the evening wore on and larger percentages
of the total vote cast could be fed into the system, each subsequent projection
could be based more on hard facts and less on assumptions.
By 9:00 p.m., with early returns
streaming in from the eastern and central time zones, the huge CBS election
night headquarters in New York City was buzzing with activity. Telephones jangled.
Teletype machines clacked
noisily. Scribbled figures on scraps of paper were passed hastily to
toteboard operators. Then the director in the control room, scanning an array
of monitors, barked an order. Instantly the face of Charles Collingwood flashed
on screens in living rooms across the nation as the comforting voice of Walter
Cronkite told viewers what was going on.
WALTER CRONKITE: And now to find out what perhaps this all
means, at least in the electronic age, let's turn to that electronic brain,
UNIVAC, with a report from Charles Collingwood. COLLINGWOOD: UNIVAC, our
fabulous mathematical brain, is
down in Philadelphia mulling over the returns that we've sent it so far. A few
minutes ago, I asked him what his prediction was, and he sent me back a very
caustic answer. He said that if we continue to be so late in sending him
results, it's going to take him a few minutes to find out just what the
prediction is going to be. So he's not ready yet with the predictions but we're
going to go
to him in just
a little while.
As Collingwood was telling his
audience that UNIVAC was not ready for a prediction, it had in fact
already made one. The business about needing more time was a cover‑up. Unknown to Collingwood, the folks in
Philadelphia had fabricated that story to save face.
A few
minutes earlier, with
only three million
votes counted, an astounding forecast rolled off the electric typewriter
that functioned as the computer's printer. UNIVAC gave 43 states and 438
electoral votes to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Adlai E. Stevenson would capture only
5 states and 93 electoral votes. The odds for victory by the Republican
candidate were predicted by UNIVAC as 100 to one or better in his favour ‑
an Eisenhower landslide.
Computer programmers huddled
around the printer in shocked silence. Throughout the campaign, pollsters and
political analysts had been predicting a close election that would not be
decided until the wee hours of the next morning. Yet with only 7 percent of the vote counted,
UNIVAC had gone way out on a limb. Too far, it seemed to those watching the
state‑by‑state breakdown emerge from the printer. What was this? Several
southern states going Republican. That hadn't happened in seventy‑two
years! Something was wrong.
A murmur in the crowd: There
must be a glitch in the program. Then a mad scramble. Everyone, grabbing code
books and programming records,
frantically flicked through reams of data, hoping, by some miracle, that any
error that had escaped notice would now surface and be recognized. But after several minutes of fruitless page
turning, punctuated by answering telephoned appeals from New York to get
UNlVAC's act together, the search was called off.
Arthur F. Draper, Remington
Rand's director of advanced research and the man in charge of
election night operations in Philadelphia,
agreed with his advisers that something drastic had to be
done to bring UNIVAC back to its senses. They decided to go right to the heart
of the matter and arbitrarily change the factor‑so carefully fine tuned
through months of preparation‑that extrapolated the number of returns
actually received into estimated final totals for each state. Fortunately, this was a simple
procedure. One merely had to run the program to the breakpoint where the
critical factor was computed, stop the run, type in a new figure from the
supervisory control desk,
and resume processing. Within two minutes, a new set of
totals began rolling off the printer. A chastened UNIVAC reported 18 states and
317 electoral votes for Eisenhower. Much
better, but not good enough for the thoroughly shaken crew in Philadelphia.
Still hedging, they tweaked the
formula again. This time UNIVAC called the election a toss‑up. It gave
twenty‑four states to each candidate with Eisenhower leading in electoral
votes by a scanty margin of 270 to 161. Breathing easier, and wiping
perspiration from foreheads, the computer people in Philadelphia released these
figures to CBS, which broadcast them on the network at 10:00 p.m.
By 11:00 p.m., however,
Eisenhower votes were rolling in like a tidal wave, and UNIVAC, shrugging off
the dampening influence of the twice‑revised formula, swung back again to
the original prediction of 100 to one odds in favour of the general. At
midnight, in his recap of the evening's coverage, Collingwood asked Draper what
went wrong:
COLLINGWOOD: An hour or so ago, UNIVAC suffered a
momentary aberration. He gave us the odds on Eisenhower as only eight to seven
. . . but came up later with the
prediction that the
odds were beyond
counting, above 100 to one, in favour of Eisenhower's election. Let's go
down to Philadelphia and see whether we can get an explanation of what happened
from Mr. Arthur Draper. Art, what happened there when we came out with that
funny
prediction. DRAPE.R: Well, we had a lot of troubles tonight. Strangely enough, they were all human and not the machine. When UNIVAC made it's first prediction, we just didn't believe it. So we asked UNIVAC to forget a lot of the trend information [concerning previous elections], assuming that it was wrong.... [but] as more votes came in, the odds came back, and it is now evident that we should have had nerve enough to believe the machine in the first place.
With less than 7 percent of the vote tallied at 9:00 p.m on election
night, UNIVAC gave 438 electoral
votes to Dwight D. Eisenhower and 93 to Adlai E. Stevenson. When the final count was in and the electoral
college convened several weeks later, the official total was 442 for Eisenhower
and 89 for Stevenson.
Many who had believed resolutely in the
superiority of man's intellect now harboured doubts. A machine, a computing
machine, had confounded the experts And
a new word, UNIVAC, which when uttered would conjure up fear, awe, or
disdain, had become a prominent fixture in the American vocabulary. |
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