A Computer Called LEO

Lyons Teashops and the World’sFirst Office Computer

GEORGINA FERRY

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

1 A Mission to Manage

2 The Electronic Brain

3 Made in Britain

4 A Computer for Lyons

5 LEO goes to work

6 In Business

7 Leo’s Last Roar

Epilogue

Sources

Index

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Profile of Georgina Ferry

Snapshot

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the Book

A Critical Eye

Imagining the Future

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This You’ll Like …

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

MEET THE £150,000 ROBOT THAT KNOWS ALL THE ANSWERS.

Puzzled? LEO the Brain Will Do Your Thinking For You.

Robots have begun taking over work which is too complicated or too laborious for human beings. In cold print this may seem fanciful. But now one is confronted by LEO, Britain’s new electronic brain … He is the only one of his kind on commercial work in the world.

Evening News, 16 February 1954

What is there in a name? Plenty if it is LEO, for it is a name coined at the dawn of computer technology, that has carried with it a long list of first achievements. For that reason alone it merits perpetuation.

Engineering, 5 March 1965

To some, it was a supreme irrelevance, a quixotic venture into the unknown by a respectable family business that ought to have known better. To others, it was an enterprise of boldness and vision, whose ultimate failure resulted from the conservatism and short-sightedness of others, and whose story contains lessons that succeeding generations would do well to learn.

LEO was a computer. It burst into the British public consciousness through a snowstorm of popular articles in February 1954, although its genesis lay some years earlier. It was not the first computer in the world, by any of a number of possible definitions. As a piece of electronic engineering it was not fundamentally original. LEO and its creators deserve their place in history not because of what it was but because of what it did. For LEO was the first computer in the world to be harnessed to the task of managing a business. That business was J. Lyons & Co., renowned the length and breadth of the land for its fine tea and cakes, available in grocers’ shops everywhere but savoured especially in the Lyons teashops, a chain of more than two hundred high street cafés.

LEO was designed and built by Lyons’s own engineers, and its first programs were written by Lyons managers before the computer programmer existed as a job description. At the time, the few who knew anything about computers thought of them as tools for scientists and mathematicians. LEO was a novelty in that its circuits hummed not with non-linear equations but with the hours worked and rates of pay for the bakers who produced, among other things, 36 miles of Swiss roll per day. Rather than calculating missile trajectories (though it could do that, too), LEO grappled with the task of restocking each teashop every day with no more and no less than it needed to keep its customers supplied with bread rolls, boiled beef and ice cream. It even turned its attention to ensuring that Lyons continued to produce the perfect blends of tea on which so much of the company’s reputation rested.

Fifty years later it is hard to imagine a time when the computerisation of such activities was remarkable or even revolutionary. Today we use computers not only for all forms of record-keeping and financial management but to go shopping, to teach children, to fly aeroplanes (and to write books). They have become an extension of more or less every human cognitive capacity, and invaded every area of human activity. Off-the-shelf software packages have removed the need to understand how computers work or to speak their language – instead it is we who are programmed to point and click. But to reach this point we had to start somewhere, and LEO was in at the beginning.

LEO’s development brought about the convergence of two histories that until that point had been quite separate: the history of computers, and the history of office management and office machines. In this it anticipated by at least five years IBM, a giant of the office machines business in the first half of the twentieth century but a relative latecomer to commercial computers. LEO’s creators were acutely conscious of their pioneering role, and were not slow to exploit the opportunities of their position. Soon after LEO’s first public debut, with several applications running successfully on a single machine and interest building from outside the company, Lyons set up a subsidiary called Leo Computers Ltd, with the intention of manufacturing computers for sale to other businesses.

A background in catering is not normally seen as an obvious qualification for high-tech start-up companies, and Leo’s later history showed that many potential customers and others found this hard to swallow. They made the mistake of judging Lyons by its best-known products: cake-making was seen as a light and fluffy enterprise, a far cry from the sparks and sinews of electronic engineering.

Nevertheless, the advantage gained simply by being first in the field meant that for a brief period in the late 1950s Leo Computers Ltd was one of the leading computer manufacturers and computing consultancies in Britain, if not the world. That shining moment of glory was achieved by a small group of individuals whose vision of what computers could achieve – and how to manage them so that they fulfilled their potential – showed a creative imagination unmatched in their time by those running any other business. Their story has now been all but forgotten, except by those who participated directly and the slightly wider circle of computer history buffs. As we move into a world in which it seems there is no business that is not e-business, it seems timely to look again at how it was that technology, commerce and management converged in a British catering firm to produce the world’s first business computer.

1 A Mission to Manage

The clatter of machinery was relentless. Light fell through the high windows on row after row of workers, bent to their identical tasks; but this was no factory. This was the Checking Department of J. Lyons & Co. at Cadby Hall in West London, part of the vast clerical infrastructure that underpinned the operation of Britain’s largest food empire in its mid-1930s heyday. Seated at their desks in ruler-straight rows, the clerks tapped away at their Burroughs mechanical calculators, separated from one another by partitions erected to reduce distraction. The adding machines, solid constructions of steel and varnished wood, had up to a dozen columns of numbered keys to input the figures, and a crank on the side to sum the totals. Like a cash register, they printed out a record of the calculation on a roll of paper.

The three hundred clerks in the department, most of them girls not long out of school, had but a single job to do: to add up the totals on the waitresses’ bills from the two hundred and fifty-odd high street teashops run by Lyons, and to check them against the cash takings banked by the shops. A squad of office boys kept them supplied with sets of bills, received from the teashops that morning in locked leather bags and sorted into numerical and alphabetical order by the office juniors. The senior clerks and managers, invariably male, stalked the aisles between the desks in their sombre suits, ensuring that every fashionably waved head was bent to its task; it would be their duty to follow up any discrepancies revealed as the streams of numbers gradually unrolled.

The Checking Department was one of three central offices at Lyons supervised in those pre-war days by a young manager called John Simmons. Yet as Simmons surveyed the roomful of clerks and their clacking machines, all he saw was a waste of human intelligence. Punching a Burroughs calculator could be worse drudgery even than unskilled factory work for the girls who made up most of the workforce. At least on an assembly line, he mused, you could chat to the next worker or let your mind wander while you carried out a repetitive task. Mechanised clerical work demanded total attention, but granted no intellectual satisfaction in return. Simmons began to dream of the day when ‘machines would be invented which would be capable of doing all this work automatically’. Such machines would free managers such as himself from marshalling their armies of clerks, and allow them ‘to examine the figures, to digest them, and to learn from them what they had to tell us of better ways to conduct the company’s business’.

Within little more than a decade he had made that dream a reality by persuading the board of Lyons that their company must become the first in the world to build its own electronic, digital computer. This was not, as computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly has written, merely ‘the whim of a highly-placed executive’. While occasionally unrealistic, perhaps even grandiose in his conceptions, Simmons was not a man subject to ill-considered whims. From his perspective, building a computer was not only logical and rational but essential to the good of Lyons and the efficiency of British business. Moreover, his idealism was not out of place in the Lyons corporate culture. Far from being surprising that the seed of business computing should take root and grow in Lyons before any other company in the world, in almost every respect it provided ideal conditions.

A Family Affair

To anyone who has lived in Britain for more than thirty years the name of Lyons is instantly recognisable. The fame of J. Lyons & Co. rested principally on its chain of high street cafés known as the Lyons teashops. Before the outbreak of the Second World War there were more than two hundred and fifty of them throughout the country, with the densest concentration in London. Oxford Street alone had six, while the closely packed streets of the City of London, the financial heart of the capital, revealed another teashop at almost every turning. They spread through the suburbs from Camberwell to Wembley; from Plymouth to Newcastle, provincial cities each had their own.

At its peak the Lyons empire also included grander restaurants and hotels in London and other big cities, including the legendary Lyons Corner Houses and the Trocadero; a food manufacturing and distribution business that not only supplied the teashops and restaurants but also delivered Red and Green Label Tea, Kup Kakes and Lyons Maid ice cream to grocers’ shops the length and breadth of the country; and a catering service for large-scale events including Masonic dinners, Buckingham Palace garden parties, the Chelsea Flower Show and the Wimbledon tennis championships.

How did a firm founded on gratifying English tastes for tea and bland, comforting food become a high-tech pioneer? Behind the Lyons shopfronts with their pyramids of iced fancies lay a manufacturing and distribution empire launched with immense commercial vitality. The Lyons of the early twentieth century was a young, progressive company, eager to adopt new methods in both manufacturing and management. The company was founded just as a wave of social and technological change was beginning to transform the world of business; for the first fify years of its existence, Lyons was riding the crest of that wave.

J. Lyons & Co. had its origins in a family tobacco business established in London by Samuel Gluckstein, whose father Lehmann Meyer Gluckstein had brought him and his seven siblings from their native Prussia to settle in London in 1841. Jewish immigration to Britain from continental Europe in the mid-nineteenth century stemmed from the discriminatory practices of a number of trade and craft guilds, which effectively excluded Jewish citizens from many profitable areas of work. German and Dutch Jews settled predominantly in the narrow, crowded streets of Spitalfields in East London, and it was here that Samuel Gluckstein first lodged with his aunt Julia Joseph. Samuel and his younger brother Henry started a small tobacco business in Leman Street, Whitechapel, in 1864 with their cousin Lawrence Abrahams, employing skilled local people to make cigars and cigarettes by hand. But the partners fell out among themselves and the company had to be dissolved in 1870.

A few years after arriving in London Samuel married his cousin Hannah Joseph, and by the 1870s they had ten surviving children. In 1872 Samuel started a new, small-scale cigar-making business in Whitechapel Road, in partnership with his sons Isidore and Montague and another tobacco trader, Barnett Salmon, who had married Samuel’s daughter Helena. Almost immediately their fifty-four-year-old father’s unexpected death from diabetes left the young men with responsibility for the welfare of a large extended family.

Still shocked at their bereavement, the three remaining directors met to decide how to proceed. Mindful of the feud that had destroyed Samuel’s first company, they shook hands on an extraordinary agreement. Adopting the motto L’union fait la force (strength in union), they placed the assets of the new company, Salmon & Gluckstein, in a family fund in which each of the sons and sons-in-law of Samuel Gluckstein had an equal share. While individual family members undoubtedly had greater or lesser influence in the years to come, the philosophy of collective family ownership and collective family decision-making proved extraordinarily durable. The family continued to hold its property in common until the early 1990s, sharing all the proceeds of the business equally and owning houses and even cars communally rather than individually. Pushed to think of an exception, a surviving family member says that he supposes he might have been allowed to keep his winnings if he had a lucky bet on the horses.

From small beginnings the company grew rapidly. To increase its profitability in the highly competitive cigar-making market, the directors opened a retail tobacconist’s shop in Edgware Road shortly after the company’s foundation. By 1894 there were thirty Salmon & Gluckstein shops throughout London. Three years later there were double this number, and by the end of the century it was the world’s largest chain of tobacconists with 140 shops.

The shops sold Salmon & Gluckstein’s own products – such as ‘Raspberry Buds’ and ‘Snake Charmer’ cigarettes – as well as cigars and cigarettes from other manufacturers. With Boots the Chemists, the stationers W. H. Smith and Barratt’s Shoes, the company was among the first in Britain to recognise that selling through multiple outlets gave it the bargaining power to drive down wholesale prices, and hence to inspire consumer loyalty by passing on savings to enthusiastic customers. It sold its products at aggressively competitive prices, leading to frequent protests from small, independent tobacconists who could not command such large discounts from suppliers. Salmon & Gluckstein also made extensive use of advertising (‘The more you smoke, the more you save!’) and of gimmicks such as cigarette cards, now collectors’ items, that could be saved up and exchanged for gifts. Their business methods occasionally verged on the unscrupulous: on one occasion they were successfully sued for continuing to label their cigarettes ‘handmade’ after they had introduced automatic cigarette-rolling machines. But while their competitiveness provoked indignation among their rivals, their success could only earn grudging admiration.

By the end of the nineteenth century the tobacco business in the United Kingdom was under threat from the United States. ‘Buck’ Duke, the uncrowned king of the American tobacco industry, had used factory automation, national advertising, price-cutting and takeovers to give his American Tobacco Company a virtual monopoly on the booming cigarette market in the United States. In 1901 he bought a British company, Ogden, and seemed set to wipe out all British competition in the same way. In some respects the situation mirrored the predicament of the British computer manufacturers sixty years later, and the tobacco industry adopted the same solution. In December 1901, thirteen of the biggest British companies, led by W. D. & H. O. Wills, merged to form Imperial Tobacco Ltd. In 1902 American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco agreed not to compete in each other’s home territories, and formed a joint company, British American Tobacco, to market all their products overseas.

Salmon & Gluckstein had held on to their independence in 1901. But a year later they sold a controlling interest in their greatest asset, the Salmon & Gluckstein chain of retail tobacconists, to Imperial Tobacco. By that time, however, tobacco had ceased to be the main business interest of the Salmon and Gluckstein family.

Montague Gluckstein, though younger than his brother Isidore, was the driving force of the business and spent much of his time on the road promoting the company’s products at trade fairs and exhibitions around the country. Entrepreneur that he was, he used the time to think about new business opportunities. He told his story to the author William H. Beable, whose Romance of Great Businesses was published in 1926: ‘Any man moving about the country can, if he cares, pick up useful information upon the needs of the public, and he can then try to plan a way to meet them.’ It was Montague’s experience at exhibitions that ‘first brought home to me the dreary and standstill methods’ of the catering establishments he was forced to patronise.

The Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, was the forerunner of a series of similar events mounted by major cities in the years that followed. They combined popular entertainment with the opportunity for businesses at home and overseas to promote their wares. They were the Millennium Domes of their day: the difference being only that they were hugely popular and successful. The Manchester Exhibition of 1887, for example, attracted five million visitors. But as he queued for an indifferent and expensive cup of tea, or ventured in search of a pie or a sausage in a neighbouring pub, the fastidious Montague Gluckstein reflected that as far as refreshments were concerned the exhibitions catered very poorly for their visitors, especially women and families. ‘The ordinary man visiting a strange town and wanting a meal had a choice between a public-house, where he would get cold meat, pickles and beer, or a coffee-house, with its dirty little horse-box-like compartments, untidy shirt-sleeved waiters, grimy tablecloths, bad food and worse smells,’ wrote Thomas Charles Bridges, describing Montague Gluckstein’s experience in his 1928 book Kings of Commerce.

Surely, thought Gluckstein, there was money to be made from offering people at least a good cup of tea when they were away from home? When, in the mid-1880s, he proposed to his brother and brother-in-law that they diversify into catering, they were slow to agree. They were concerned about the risks involved in a new area of business, one which, as Montague Gluckstein himself put it, was seen as ‘hardly the thing for people engaged in the aristocratic business of cigar manufacturing’. Eventually they concurred, as long as the catering venture was screened behind a different trading name.

The compromise was to find a partner to run the new venture who was almost family, but not quite. Joseph Lyons, an entrepreneur and salesman, was a distant relative of Rose Cohen, the wife of Isidore Gluckstein. Born in Southwark in 1847, Joseph Nathaniel Lyons had begun his working life as an optician’s apprentice, but his quick imagination and gift for selling had led him into a colourful assortment of other occupations. He invented a device called a chromatic stereoscope – a combination of telescope, microscope, magnifying glass and binoculars – and sold it for 1s 6d (7½p). He wrote detective stories, music hall sketches and songs, and was a moderately successful watercolourist. He was married to Psyche Cohen, the daughter of an entertainer who later ran the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel; his marriage certificate gave his occupation as ‘artist’.

Once the brothers had agreed that Lyons was their man, Montague Gluckstein went to meet him. At the time he was running a stall, probably selling his own artistic or technological creations, at the 1886 exhibition in Liverpool. ‘I went there for a night, that stall was closed down, and the terms of our arrangement I put on an ordinary sheet of notepaper,’ recalled Gluckstein. The deal they struck was that they would go into the catering business together as long as Joe Lyons could win the catering contract for a large exhibition taking place in Newcastle in 1887 to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Joe Lyons had no previous catering experience, and none of managing a business larger than a market stall. But he was cheerful, ebullient and persuasive, and he had the resources of a highly respected firm behind him. He won the contract, and he and his partners discovered, just as Gluckstein had supposed, that there was a vast, untapped market for the combination of style and good value that they felt they could offer. There was nothing tentative about the first venture into catering by J. Lyons & Co., the name adopted for the new company in 1887. Customers in the tea pavilion at the Newcastle exhibition were entertained by a Hungarian string band, they could choose from a varied menu and enjoy attentive service, and of course, they could wash their meals down with a pot of excellent tea for threepence (1¼p). ‘Out of that humble but very important trio, tea, bread and butter of the best kind sold at a reasonable price,’ reflected Gluckstein later, ‘the foundation was laid of what was afterwards to be the largest catering business in the world.’

Catering on a huge scale for exhibitions and similar temporary events was to remain an important part of the company’s activities for the rest of its existence, but the Lyons directors did not stop there. In 1891 Joseph Lyons raised the capital to mount a spectacular entertainment called ‘Venice in London’, complete with Italian gondolas on water-filled canals, at the Olympia exhibition hall in West London. The show ran for more than a year, and others followed. At the same time J. Lyons & Co. won the contract to provide all the catering at Olympia, a contract they held until 1978. The association with Olympia was a factor in uprooting the family firm from its East London origins. First, Montague Gluckstein moved from his flat above a tobacconist’s to a house in Kensington, next to Olympia. Then in 1894, the year J. Lyons & Co. was formally registered as a limited company, it moved its headquarters from Whitechapel to Cadby Hall, a former piano showroom and factory in Hammersmith Road, near to Olympia. Following the earlier model of the tobacco business, the company began to manufacture the products needed to supply its catering enterprises, beginning with bread and rolls from the Cadby Hall bakery. Within twenty-five years the site held a complex of red-brick factory buildings, erected fortress-like around a central yard; thousands of workers were employed on the site.

A retail chain to match demand to supply seemed an obvious next step. In the last years of the nineteenth century, ever-increasing numbers of clerical workers were commuting into central London from the suburbs to work, and they needed somewhere to buy their lunch. There were pubs, sausage and pie shops and coffee houses, and the chain of ABC restaurants run by the Aerated Bread Company. But these places, often known as ‘slap-bangs’ for the style of service they offered, had a somewhat sleazy reputation, and none was designed to appeal to the increasingly female workforce. The Lyons directors saw a gap in the market, and resolved to open a chain of establishments offering ‘good temperance fare at economic prices in attractive surroundings and with polite and dignified service’.

With the opening of the first Lyons teashop at 213 Piccadilly in 1894, Joseph Lyons and his partners set standards of service to customers and sumptuousness of surroundings that astonished and delighted their clientele. Between the drab shopfronts of late Victorian London, the name of J. Lyons & Co. shone out in hand-carved art nouveau lettering, ornamented with floral swags and finished in real gold leaf against a white background. Inside there were gas chandeliers, red damask wallcoverings, elegant chairs and marble-topped tables, silver-plated teapots and fine china. Highly trained waitresses, originally known by the name ‘Gladys’ but later christened ‘Nippies’ (a shrewd PR move) for their speedy efficiency, eagerly waited to take the orders in made-to-measure uniforms with starched white aprons. The tea, of course, was delicious, and only twopence (1p) a cup. It was an instant success, with queues of customers patiently waiting outside on benches thoughtfully provided by the management. Within a year the capacity of the teashop had to be increased to cater for 400 rather than 200 customers at a time.

The model was repeated over and over again. Two more teashops, in Queen Victoria Street and Chancery Lane, opened in 1894, another dozen the following year; there were 37 by the end of the century and 200 by 1925 on prime sites in London alone. The provincial expansion began in 1909, when Lyons bought the Ceylon Café chain; within a few years cafés in Bradford, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Liverpool had been converted into Lyons teashops.

The identical white-and-gold fascias became as much a part of London life as double-decker buses or underground trains. At Montague Gluckstein’s insistence, the prices were the same whether a teashop was located among the department stores of the West End or the tailors’ shops of the East End – another innovation for the time. Whether or not they drove the dramatic social changes that followed the First World War, they certainly reflected them. Writing in the Daily Mail in October 1921, and quoted by Peter Bird in his history of the company, Lady Angela Forbes observed: ‘For the business girl, not only in the city but in every part of London, the nearest teashop is not far away … They share a table with men as naturally as they take a seat – or a strap – in tram and tube … From every point of view, and most emphatically from a woman’s, London has changed for the better during the past 25 years, in that metamorphosis the teashops have played a meritorious part.’

Working on an even grander scale, the company simultaneously launched a number of larger and more up-market establishments, notably the Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus (1896), a palatial restaurant in the heart of London’s theatre district, and the Lyons Corner Houses. The first Corner House opened in Coventry Street in London’s West End in 1909, and was capable of serving 5,000 people at a time. There were restaurants catering to different tastes and budgets on the four upper floors, each with its own live band. (By the mid-1920s, Lyons had a budget of £150,000 a year for music alone – over £5 million in today’s terms.) There was a food hall on the ground floor, selling tea, coffee and high-quality cakes and biscuits. You could even get your hair done, book theatre tickets or avail yourself of that novel instrument, the telephone.

Two more Corner Houses had opened in London by the mid-1930s, in Oxford Street and the Strand, as well as Maison Lyons at Marble Arch. They quickly achieved landmark status. ‘In these places,’ noted Montague Gluckstein with satisfaction, ‘people made the astonishing discovery that beauty and luxury in eating were not the prerogative solely of the very rich, and the man of modest income and his wife could realise something of the spirit of refinement and thoughtful service which actuates the very best and most exclusive restaurants of this and other European countries.’

By the end of the 1930s Lyons had a total workforce of well over 30,000, making it one of the largest businesses in the country. Although its teashops and restaurants were the most visible part of the operation, food manufacturing occupied around two-thirds of its staff. As the number of outlets to be supplied grew, so did the Cadby Hall site and the range of products that Lyons made. After bread came tea, cakes, ice cream, confectionery and eventually ready frozen meals. The food production areas were highly mechanised: the Lyons continuous Swiss roll plant, which took in raw ingredients at one end and delivered filled, rolled, wrapped and packaged cakes at the other, was only one of a number of specialist bakeries working day and night. In addition to its own restaurants and teashops, the company supplied almost every grocer’s in the land with Red and Green Label Tea packed by the quarter pound, foil-wrapped Kup Kakes and Lyons Maid ice cream. In London it also delivered to private customers, its blue, white and gold liveried vans even drawing up at Buckingham Palace.

In its unrelenting quest for quality, the company gradually brought many of the services it needed to run the business under its own control. The strong tradition of family ownership translated into a philosophy of self-reliance that pervaded every aspect of the company’s operations. It developed its own printing and packaging, laundry and dressmaking, and transport and vehicle maintenance operations, and bought a tea plantation in Nyasaland (now Malawi). The attention to detail that had gone into the design of the teashops remained a feature of all these activities. The new uniforms for the Nippies, designed in 1925, which were still made to measure for each waitress, followed fashion by featuring a shorter skirt, and were trimmed with no fewer than 30 pairs of pearl buttons. The tea leaves that ended up in a packet of Lyons Red Label were carefully blended from stocks either bought at auction in Mincing Lane, the centre of London’s tea trade, or imported direct from producers. Soft drinks for the restaurants were precisely graded, those for the Corner Houses containing little preservative and having a three-day shelf-life, while those for the teashops contained more preservative and could be kept for six weeks.

Despite its size, Lyons remained very much a family business. After Joe Lyons’s death in 1917 Montague Gluckstein succeeded him as chairman, and thereafter the board consisted almost exclusively of Salmons and Glucksteins, fathers and sons, uncles and nephews. They tended to have large families, and there were many marriages between cousins so that the network of blood relationships was very close. The exception was the company secretary, George William Booth, who joined the company in 1891 and caused consternation in the early 1950s when he suggested he might retire – at the age of over eighty. ‘He wasn’t family,’ says Anthony Salmon, former Lyons board member and grandson of Montague Gluckstein, ‘but the family would never move without consulting him. He acted as a public conscience.’

It was Booth who recognised that concern for quality and value, and a fine sense of what the customer wanted, were not always enough to ensure profitability. The problem Lyons faced was simple to express, much harder to solve. A typical teashop customer bought no more than a bun and a cup of tea, costing a few pence. The profit to the company on that transaction might be as little as a farthing (barely a tenth of a penny in today’s decimal currency, and even allowing for inflation worth only about 4p). Although the scale of the operation – 150 million meals sold per year – meant that overall turnover was high, the modest profit margin on each purchase could easily be wiped out if the clerical work involved in recording and analysing all those transactions was inefficient. And since almost everything Lyons sold had a limited shelf-life, it was essential to have an ordering and distribution system that accurately matched supply to demand.

The same applied to the retail business: Lyons supplied goods such as tea and cakes directly to small shops, with no wholesaler involved, dealing with 30,000–40,000 orders worth a few pounds each in a week. Meanwhile, the efforts of the armies of clerks culminated in little more than simple profit and loss accounts – the concept of management accounting was then still in its infancy. That the business remained comfortably in profit during the 1920s and 1930s owed more to Montague Gluckstein’s instinct for what would sell than to any detailed analysis of the company’s performance.

Booth saw that success in the long term would depend on a more systematic approach. In adopting this view he showed himself to be in tune with the most advanced ideas on scientific management that were then beginning to circulate on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘One Best Way’

The term ‘scientific management’ originated with Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), a former Pennsylvanian steelworker turned engineering consultant. Taylor believed that losses to industry through inefficiency could be remedied through the application of systematic management, and that ‘the best management is a true science, relying upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles’. He proposed that rather than leaving it up to skilled workers to plan and execute jobs in manufacturing, managers should analyse every task to reduce it to the minimum number of essential movements – the ‘one best way’, as he termed it, of completing the task. They should then allocate tasks to specialised workers and give them appropriate incentives to perform them at a rate that maximised their efficiency.

Taylor was widely attacked by those who saw his methods as inhumane, and he died a disappointed man. But during the First World War, when labour was short and productivity at a premium, a new generation of disciples picked up and developed his ideas. Factories were invaded by eager young men with clipboards and stopwatches, carrying out the ‘time and motion’ studies that were an essential feature of Taylorism.

In the years following the war, the watchword of efficiency began to be heard in offices as well as factories. The business office as we know it today was itself a creation of the late nineteenth century. When most businesses were still small, family-run affairs, all they needed was a few clerks in the ‘counting house’ to keep the books and write letters. The level of education required for a clerk was not high by today’s standards – basic arithmetic and elegant handwriting were the main requirements – but as long as much of the population was illiterate, clerical work was a relatively high-status occupation. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialisation had massively increased the size of manufacturing businesses, and vast new enterprises such as the railway companies had been created. There was an urgent need for staff to look after accounts, sales, marketing, personnel and all the other ‘non-productive’ functions of these businesses – functions that today seem to dominate the world of work, but which a century ago came a distant second to the business of making things. At the same time service industries such as banks and insurance companies grew to meet the needs of the large manufacturers, and public administration was also an expanding field. By the early years of the twentieth century governments were increasingly requiring companies to produce public accounts, and eventually to undergo external audits; the leather-bound ledgers of the past were no longer sufficient, and whole offices were dedicated to compiling accounts to satisfy shareholders and tax inspectors.

At the same time, the introduction of compulsory elementary education provided a ready pool of young people, both men and women, looking for an alternative to the skilled or unskilled manual work that had been the only choice for their parents. The numbers speak for themselves: between 1851 and 1901 the number of clerks in the labour force in the United Kingdom rose from around 70,000 to over 2 million. The proportion of these who were female rose from 0.1 per cent to 13.4 per cent in the same period; by 1981 it had reached 74.4 per cent.

The social changes went hand in hand with technological change, led all along by the United States. In that fast-growing country labour was scarce, and there was a great enthusiasm for machines that could increase productivity. The typewriter, patented in America in 1868, was taken up and promoted by Remington, the gunsmiths, who had found demand for their products falling after the end of the Civil War. In 1878 they brought out the Remington 2 typewriter, a design classic that remained in use for decades. Sales leapt from 146 in 1879 to 65,000 in 1890. The women who were entering the clerical labour force in increasing numbers proved to be particularly adept at using the new machine and so established their position in the hitherto male world of business, albeit at a low-paid level. Together with various forms of copying machine, the typewriter made it quicker and easier to communicate and to keep records of communications. Meanwhile, devices that we would hardly think of as ‘inventions’ today, such as index cards and vertical filing cabinets, revolutionised record-keeping. Adding and calculating machines, one popular version of which was patented by William Seward Burroughs in 1883, relieved clerks of the necessity to be accurate calculators themselves.

The office equipment industry boomed, led by a sales force that persuaded managers that simply by buying their machines they were buying greater efficiency. A dreadful poem published in The Clerk in 1937 epitomised this view:

Early to bed and early to rise

Is really very little good

Unless you mechanise.

But others cautioned against buying expensive machines without first analysing the functions of the office as a whole. Chief among these, and the author of several textbooks on office management, was William Henry Leffingwell, a former clerk in a Chicago photographic company, who had risen to become a ‘consulting management engineer’ – one of the first forerunners of the management consultants of today. He wrote: ‘The ingenuity of inventors and the persistence of machinery salesmen have brought about a condition in which the present-day office manager is not asking himself whether or not his office needs a machine of some kind, but what machine he shall choose from among the multitude offered.’

Leffingwell saw the office as fertile ground in which to sow the gospel according to Taylor. He published frequently in the monthly magazine System (founded in 1901, the forerunner of Business Week), and brought out the first of several books, Scientific Office Management, in 1917. His verbose texts covered in minute detail the arrangement of desks to optimise work flow, the distance walked by clerks to reach the water fountain, the design of forms, and even the ‘one best way’ to open a letter. They remained influential for decades: the third edition of his Textbook of Office Management appeared in 1950, three years after his death. Business historians have not been slow to point out the irony that scientific management itself increased the bureaucratic workload through generating forms to be filled, activities to be monitored, and reports to be analysed and filed.

In 1919 Leffingwell founded the National Office Managers’ Association, creating a forum for research, debate and discussion. Its regular publications added to the prolific literature on the subject. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Office Machinery Users’ Association, founded in 1915, picked up the importance of giving system precedence over technology and renamed itself the Office Management Association.

Efficiency had long been a priority at Lyons, and the factories were organised very much according to the principles of Taylorism. Each was laid out to handle the particular kind of cake, pie, bun, loaf or bread roll in which it specialised. Under the direction of a Planning Office, every operation was time-and-motion studied to arrive at a fair, efficient time. These times were used both to calculate the number of staff required, and to compute the standard cost of the labour entailed in making the product, which in turn partly determined its selling price. The Lyons company secretary George Booth was interested in extending the same scientific approach to the clerical work of the company. He decided that the best way to find those with the skills to introduce such methods was to venture into graduate recruitment. None of the family board members had been to university, all following their fathers into the business at the earliest opportunity. The usual career path was a spell in the Trocadero kitchens, followed almost immediately by promotion to the management of one or other of the company’s businesses – tea, confectionery or hotels, for example. While some prided themselves on their ability to add up a column of figures rapidly and accurately, they had no experience of mathematical analysis or scientific enquiry. Below general management level in Lyons the usual approach was to recruit school leavers and train them for specific tasks. Academic qualifications had hitherto seemed irrelevant.

In 1923 Booth persuaded the board to add some intellectual rigour to the company’s management by recruiting some of the brightest young minds in the country. One of the five young men who constituted this new class of management trainee was John Simmons, who had just received a first-class degree in mathematics from Cambridge. It could have been a risky experiment: brilliant mathematicians do not always make good managers (some have been notoriously incapable of tying their shoelaces). Nonetheless, either by luck or judgement, in John Simmons Booth had found exactly the person he needed.

Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1902, John Richardson Mainwaring Simmons was the son and grandson of missionaries who dedicated their lives to spreading the Christian gospel in the Indian subcontinent. His mother died when he was only five. Two years later his father remarried, to a colleague in the Church Missionary Society. A boy of outstanding intellectual gifts, in 1920 John Simmons entered the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, and emerged three years later with first-class honours. At the time his choice of a career in a catering company was somewhat unexpected for a wrangler, the honorific title of Cambridge’s top mathematics graduates. It was even less expected that a company such as Lyons would regard pure mathematics as relevant to its day-to-day activities, beyond the basic task of accurate accounting. Yet Lyons had always been open to progressive ideas in managing its manufacturing operations; it was not hard for Booth to persuade the board that they needed to be equally progressive on the clerical side.

Simmons was unobtrusive in appearance; of medium height and build, he always dressed soberly in a jacket and tie. His hair was neatly combed straight back from his high forehead; his expression was habitually serious but even as a young man he carried an air of absolute conviction. He arrived at Cadby Hall knowing little of business. Nothing in his pious childhood or his years of intellectual endeavour at Cambridge had prepared him for the reality of life at Lyons. On his arrival he was put to work in a department where black-coated clerks still stood at Dickensian high desks entering figures in huge ledgers by hand. Typewriters and adding machines had been introduced into some Lyons departments before 1900 but there had been no serious attempt to rationalise office methods.

A quiet, austere and intellectually exacting man, Simmons found his spiritual home at Lyons; he was to remain with the company for forty-five years. Taken on in the junior role of statistician and management trainee, he nevertheless reported directly to Booth and so had unprecedented access to the highest levels of the Lyons management. Booth gave him a free hand to investigate clerical operations at Lyons and make recommendations. He immediately began to apply his analytical skills to the task of increasing efficiency through eliminating duplication and any unnecessary paperwork. He looked for rational alternatives to methods that had evolved in more or less ad hoc fashion. He streamlined and simplified, breaking jobs down into their component parts and allocating tasks to specialised clerks. He extended the use of office machines wherever they made economic sense.

His top-down approach – analysing the work of the clerks and then telling them how to do it better – owed a great deal to the examples of Taylor and Leffingwell, but he soon found that his mentors had underestimated the human factor. For example, Lyons had three central clerical departments: Accounts, which kept the basic records of incomings and outgoings and managed the payroll; the Stock Department, which kept stock records and computed the costs of producing and distributing Lyons products so that they could be priced accurately; and the Checking Department, which checked the cash takings of the catering establishments against the waitresses’ bills. These departments kept records that were intended only for the general managers on the board. The managers of the individual departments – Bakeries, Teashops and so on – had their own offices and kept separate records for their own purposes.

Simmons initially favoured greater centralisation, and began by trying to bring all clerical work into the three main specialist departments. But he very quickly learned that ‘arguments which applied to machines did not necessarily appeal to human beings’ – a lesson that devotees of scientific management often had to learn the hard way. Imagine his chagrin when he discovered that one departmental manager, deprived of his personal platoon of clerks and told to get the information he needed from the central departments, had simply recreated his original office within a year of the change. Simmons ruefully admitted that ‘records had better be kept where they were going to be used, even if it meant they were kept somewhat less efficiently’.

Other innovations proved more durable. Simmons saw that office machines, such as adding and bookkeeping machines, brought advantages in terms of accuracy and efficiency. There was a problem, however. The American machines were designed to work with the decimal system, suitable for US dollars and cents. The Britain of the 1920s (and indeed for almost fifty years afterwards) used the idiosyncratically non-decimal pounds, shillings and pence of sterling currency. Moreover, weights and measures each had their own units, none of them decimal. In 1928 Simmons solved the problem by training the clerks to convert currency and weights and measures into decimal units before carrying out calculations on the machines, and then back again afterwards. Five years later a textbook, Office Practice, by William Campbell, described this innovation as what was ‘usually’ done.

True to his ancestry, Simmons went about his work with a missionary zeal. The company was supportive of his incremental reforms, but after a few years he felt he needed to establish the scientific approach to management on a more permanent basis. The board agreed to let him set up a department of Systems Research within Lyons – a team of analysts who would investigate inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the company’s office systems and propose solutions. A forerunner of what was later called the Organisation and Methods Department, it was one of the first such research departments in the country. Once it was up and running Simmons recruited a twenty-four-year-old chartered secretary called Geoffrey Mills to manage it. Mills quickly became an effective evangelist for Simmons’s scientific approach, and later published a series of textbooks on office management. Up to this point British authors had been slow to follow the American consultant William Henry Leffingwell’s lead in providing the tools to educate a new generation of managers. Mills’s first book, Office Organization and Method (1949) was dedicated to John Simmons and acknowledged his ‘authoritative criticism and advice’. It referred to Leffingwell’s textbooks, but at the same time echoed Simmons’s own mature reflection on the limits of the scientific approach to running an office. ‘The clerks … are often the most difficult to understand. It is they who make office management an art as well as a science.’

Mills was the architect of another innovation, audacious in its simplicity, that lightened the load on Lyons’s clerical systems by using a new technology to make paperwork unnecessary. In 1935 Systems Research received a plea for help from the Wholesale Bakery Sales Department, which supplied bread and cakes directly to shops all over the country. They found that clerks were drowning in paper, copies of invoices and packing notes, all of which needed to be filed. By using an early microfilm camera, called a Recordak, to make the only record of customers’ orders, they were able to use the same paper order for pricing and valuation, then as a packing list and eventually to return it to the customer as an invoice, leaving nothing to file. It was the first commercial use of microfilm anywhere in the world.

Though they did not know it at the time, the questions Simmons’s young disciples in Systems Research set out to ask, and the analyses they produced – accompanied by beautifully drawn flow charts – were exactly those that would confront businesses two decades later as they grappled with the possibilities of computers in the office.

Simmons’s zeal for reform won him notice well beyond Lyons. In 1933 he became a member of the Office Management Association. A year later he was on the governing council, and by 1938 he was chairman, a post he held until 1950. The Association’s members included representatives of most of the major British industrial and commercial firms, and it regularly held conferences to discuss advances in methods and technology. Simmons, with the confidence born of absolute conviction, placed himself in the vanguard of this movement. If there was anyone in the country who had the experience and vision to recognise what computers could do for a business, it was him.

2 The Electronic Brain

John Simmons was a hard man to convince. Here in his office were two of his most trusted lieutenants, Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson, babbling excitedly about an ‘electronic brain’ and asking his permission to visit a military research laboratory in the United States to find out what was going on in the field of electronic, digital computing in the aftermath of the Second World War. They seemed to think an electronic calculator might be relevant to their mission to increase clerical efficiency. Yes, he conceded, like them he had always dreamed of automating routine office work. But in 1946, with an exhausted economy and severe currency restrictions in force, it was absurd to think of buying an expensive American machine, even if such a machine existed.

Not that Simmons was opposed to the American trip itself; it had been his idea to send the two men across the Atlantic as soon as possible after the war was over to find out about the latest developments in office machines and office methods. The American office technology industry had virtually no counterpart in the United Kingdom, apart from its own licensed offshoots, and Simmons had long been used to monitoring American innovations as he developed his own approach to office management. He had made his own first visit to the United States, as a young trainee in 1925, to find out how big companies there managed their operations.

One of the companies Simmons had visited on that occasion was International Business Machines. IBM traced its origins to the invention of punched card calculators by a young New York engineer named Herman Hollerith at the end of the previous century. While working for the Bureau of the Census in Washington DC, Hollerith had invented a range of machines that could process the data from census returns by means of holes punched in cards. Hollerith’s innovation was so much faster than manual methods that it seemed little short of miraculous at the time. It received its first trial in the analysis of the 1890 US census. Clerks entered each citizen’s details on a single card, about the size of an elongated postcard, which was printed with a 40-column grid of numbers. By hitting a key on a keyboard corresponding to a particular position on the grid, the operator punched a hole in the card: the positions of the holes represented the citizen’s age, sex, employment category and so on. The stacks of cards were then fed into a ‘tabulating machine’. The machine sensed the positions of the holes through a matching matrix of spring-loaded pins, each of which completed an electrical circuit if it passed through a hole and thereby added one digit to the running total in one of the forty counters operating concurrently in the machine. Another type of machine called a sorter could arrange the cards in alphabetical or numerical order. With dozens of machines operating at once, Hollerith had a rough population count ready within six weeks, and detailed analysis of the results in just over two years. By contrast, the 1880 census, analysed with pencil and paper by almost 1,500 clerks, had taken seven years to complete.

Hollerith quickly saw the commercial possibilities of his machines, and after forming his Tabulating Machine Company in 1896 he successfully sold a number of installations to factories, insurance companies, telephone companies and other large businesses. In failing health, in 1911 he finally agreed to sell his company to a wealthy investor, Charles Ranlegh Flint, for $2.3 million. Flint merged the company with the Computing Scale Company, which made scales for shopkeepers, and the International Time Recording Company, which made the clocks that employees punched as they arrived and left their workplaces each day. The new company was called C-T-R (the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) and Flint appointed Thomas J. Watson Sr as general manager.

Watson had developed his consummate skills as a salesman in the aggressive culture of the National Cash Register Company (NCR). He quickly rose to the position of sales manager there, but was summarily fired in 1911 by the company’s eccentric founder John H. Patterson. On his arrival at C-T-R he immediately implemented many of the marketing and sales strategies he had learned at NCR, rapidly transforming it into a key player in the office machines business in the first decades of the twentieth century. Under Watson it was the company’s practice to lease its machines rather than selling them outright, ensuring a continuing income even in times when new customers were hard to find. It also held a monopoly on the supply of the cards. By 1924 the company had subsidiaries operating across four continents and in that year, to reflect its increasingly global impact, Watson changed its name to International Business Machines – IBM.

The following year, when John Simmons arrived from Lyons to pay a visit, the young Englishman had not found it difficult to resist the hard sell. To hire the machines and buy the specially made cards was expensive, and for the purposes of Lyons, the time and labour needed to punch the cards and feed them through the machine was not much less than that needed to do the work manually. Simmons judged the application of this technology to be of little relevance to the clerical administration of Lyons’s food manufacturing and distribution business. At that time he was more interested in extending his company’s use of manual adding and accounting machines, and in introducing the kind of office organisation extolled by American authors such as Leffingwell.

According to Oliver Standingford’s own account, when he and Thompson went to the United States in 1947 it was he who proposed that their research should include an enquiry into electronic computers. Standingford had joined Lyons straight from school in 1930 as a management trainee in the Stock Department. By that time, Simmons’s reforms had included a new system of cost accounting that included setting rigorous standards for every step in the food production chain. Everything was specified, from the value of the energy needed to bake a loaf of bread to the thickness of the jam spread on the Swiss rolls. Much of the clerical work in the Stock Department involved checking actual performance against these standards. It was a task that produced useful information for management but was short on job-satisfaction for most of the clerks who had to carry it out. Standingford had found himself supervising a section of ‘seventy calculator operators doing nothing but multiplying, adding, subtracting and writing down the answers by hand’.

Although he was no engineer, Standingford had looked at the technology around him and had begun to think about how it might be used to automate the work of the Stock Department clerks. Towards the end of the 1930s, he had come up with a scheme for ‘a device composed of the existing multiplying accounting machine and an arrangement of automatic telephone equipment and magnetic records … It would have stored information and recovered it automatically.’ Eager for the endorsement of a more technically minded supporter, he had shown his plans to Jack Edwards, Lyons’s chief electrical engineer. The most Edwards had been prepared to concede was that the idea was ‘not mad’.

With war in Europe becoming inevitable, there was no opportunity to take it further. Both Standingford and Edwards had signed up for war service and would not return to Lyons until 1945. As soon as the war was over, Edwards had sought out Standingford, having never forgotten the eager young manager’s questions. In the course of his war service as an engineer, Edwards had discovered that the military boffins had developed electronic devices to improve the aim of the anti-aircraft gunners who had successfully defended British skies. Electronics, he suggested, would be the technology of the future for office machines, much faster than the electromechanical machines then in use.

The field of electronics was launched almost a century ago with the invention of the thermionic valve (or vacuum tube as it is known in the United States). First invented by the British scientist John Ambrose Fleming in 1904, a valve looks like a small light bulb. It consists of a glass tube from which all the air has been removed, sealed to maintain the vacuum inside. Held upright, side by side within the tube, is a small number of metal wires, or electrodes. Fleming’s original invention had just two electrodes and so was known as a diode; later models incorporated up to five electrodes. Just as the valve in a plumbing system holds back water until someone opens it by turning a tap, thermionic valves allow current to flow in one direction only. They had revolutionised radio engineering during the 1920s, valve-based receivers replacing the crystal sets that had first been used to capture broadcasts. Edwards explained to Standingford that a calculating device made of valves would be thousands of times faster than any mechanical design as it would have no moving parts: all of its operations would be carried out by the movement of electrons in wires.

Standingford had hardly digested this information when he saw an article reporting that American engineers at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had developed just such a machine, which the article described as an ‘electronic brain’. He was immensely excited at this development, and determined to investigate further.

In the post-war reorganisation of Lyons, John Simmons had been appointed comptroller. This somewhat archaic title referred in Lyons to the head of management accounting – the person responsible for presenting the company’s figures to the board in such a way that managers could identify areas for action and improvement. The Comptroller’s Department gradually assumed overall responsibility for the management of clerical work in the other departments. Standingford was promoted to become one of the assistant comptrollers. It was in this capacity that Simmons proposed to send him to the United States, in May 1947, to study advances in office methods. Accompanying him on the trip would be Simmons’s chief protégé, Raymond Thompson. Sensing that he would have an able advocate in Thompson, Standingford sounded him out before the two of them approached Simmons to ask permission to visit the Moore School while they were in the United States. He was more successful that he could have hoped – Simmons later insisted to an interviewer that it was Thompson’s idea to investigate computers.

Thomas Raymond Thompson had been recruited by Simmons to further his ideas for Lyons. In May 1931 he had written to Simmons on his own initiative. ‘Being up in Town for a few days, I am venturing to call and see you on Tuesday,’ he began. ‘I am looking for a position as Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Accountant or Statistician of a progressive business and I thought it possible that you might have some such position to offer me.’ Simmons’s reputation had evidently travelled far; for the previous two years Thompson had been working as acting secretary to a Liverpool department store, Owen Owen. Born in 1907 into a relatively humble family – his father ran a grocer’s shop – he won a scholarship to Cambridge where, like Simmons, he proved to be one of the ablest mathematicians of his generation and graduated with first-class honours.

There the similarity between the two men ended. While Simmons was soft-spoken and unfailingly courteous, Thompson was excitable, choleric and arrogant. Where Simmons spoke and wrote with thoughtful elegance, choosing his phrases carefully and striving for clarity, Thompson’s enthusiasm at times ran ahead of his powers of expression, so that the words tumbled out with little sense of whether his listeners were keeping up. He was given to explosions of temper if he believed that subordinates were slacking, or if crossed in argument, and was universally known (behind his back) by his initials TRT, no doubt for their resemblance to the explosive TNT. He grasped new ideas with great rapidity and was full of what one of his acquaintances described as ‘intellectual joy’, a quality that could be appealing as long as you were not on the receiving end of one of his wrathful outbursts. Simmons, for whom the younger man had enormous respect, was able to channel Thompson’s enthusiasm and harness his undoubted ability. In 1947 Thompson had just been appointed chief assistant comptroller, and so was the more senior of the two men making the trip to the United States.

At the time the post-war shortage of labour had to some extent lessened the burden of clerical work at Lyons. The company had shared the indomitable spirit of wartime London, serving tea in its surviving teashops (70 were destroyed by bombs) throughout the Blitz and entertaining soldiers on leave with the gaiety of its Corner Houses. Part of Cadby Hall, which survived unbombed, became a depot where volunteers packed boxes of rations to be dispatched to serving soldiers. Many Lyons staff at all levels either joined the services or took up war-related work elsewhere. One group of Lyons managers even ran a munitions factory at Elstree. With exemplary efficiency, the factory had turned out millions of bombs by the time the war was over.

The vast majority of Lyons staff who had been on active service returned to their old jobs in 1945. The post-war picture was subtly altered, however. One symptom of the harsher climate was that the Nippies had disappeared from the teashops. Labour shortages in wartime had forced Lyons to convert the shops to self-service cafeterias, and when the war ended, rising costs obliged the company to keep the same system. No waitresses in the teashops meant no Checking Department – the job for which John Simmons had dreamed of using a miraculous automatic machine had simply ceased to exist. But his vision had fired the imagination of his younger colleagues: ‘the idea,’ as Simmons later put it to an interviewer, ‘was in our blood’.

Yet Simmons himself was at first surprisingly lukewarm about Standingford’s plan to look at computers in the United States. Being unaware of any moves towards electronic computing in the United Kingdom, he assumed that the only way to acquire a machine of the ‘electronic brain’ variety would be to buy it from an American supplier, and it was virtually impossible for British firms to spend such large sums of money overseas at the time. But before he finally came to a decision he consulted his mentor, the ageing company secretary George Booth. Booth expressed the indulgent view that ‘youth should be given its head, even if that head contains unusual ideas’. (At the time Standingford was thirty-seven and Thompson forty, but such things are relative: Booth was seventy-eight.)

So Simmons wrote to Dr Herman Goldstine, a researcher then at the maths and science hothouse, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, asking if Thompson and Standingford might come and see him. During the war Goldstine had been the US army liaison officer attached to the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia, where the ‘electronic brain’ – or to give it its proper name, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC – had been developed for the US Army Ballistics Research Laboratory. He replied that the two men would be welcome to visit him. In the spring of 1947 (a spring all the more welcome in that it followed one of the worst British winters in living memory), Thompson and Standingford boarded a ship for the five-day crossing of the Atlantic.

It brought them to a land of plenty, even of excess: abundant food, central heating, large, gas-guzzling automobiles, all in stark contrast to the privations of bombed-out, rationed Britain. But they were far from dazzled by much of what they saw. In the course of a whirlwind programme of visits to office equipment suppliers and large organisations, they found nothing to match the systems that had been put in place at Lyons by Simmons and his team. They were astonished at the readiness of American managers to have their problems diagnosed by office machinery salesmen, whose remedies inevitably involved buying more of their equipment. Few seemed to have paid more than lip-service to the ideal of scientific management, apparently happy to believe that efficiency could be bought off the shelf from whichever salesman produced the most convincing argument or dazzling demonstration. For example, most companies were using IBM’s punched-card installations, but few had seriously evaluated their cost-effectiveness.

Even in the layout of office buildings, Thompson and Standingford felt that the new Lyons administrative building at Cadby Hall, Elms House, meticulously designed under John Simmons’s direction according to the principles of scientific management, was superior to any American organisation’s offices. While they were in Washington DC they took in the War Department’s Pentagon office building, completed only three years before at a cost of $80 million. Their guide reeled off the statistics: 30,000 workers, more than 6.5 million square feet of floor space on five floors, and 17½ miles of corridors. The two men left, laughing and shaking their heads incredulously at the time that would be wasted in getting from one part of the building to another.

At last they headed for Princeton and their meeting with Herman Goldstine – a meeting that made the whole trip worthwhile.

ENIAC

Herman Goldstine was the godfather of ENIAC, the ‘electronic brain’ that had caused such a fever of press excitement and had stimulated Raymond Thompson and Oliver Standingford to explore the possibilities of electronic computing. Having gained a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Goldstine joined the army when the United States entered the war. In 1942 he found himself assigned to the army’s Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, with the rank of lieutenant. In his crisp uniform he looked every inch the military man, but he never truly left academic life behind; always hungry for ideas, when he found a good one he would do everything possible to make sure it had a chance to flourish.

One of his tasks was to liaise with the Moore School of Engineering, not far away in Philadelphia. Here, teams of women – ‘human computors’ – were being trained to calculate firing tables for artillery using mechanical desk calculators. With ordnance capable of firing along parabolic trajectories over a range of up to a mile, it was impossible for heavy gunners to take accurate aim by eye. The tables told the gunners how high to aim their weapons given a target at a certain range, calculated on the basis of the weight of the shell, its velocity on leaving the muzzle, and other variables such as the wind speed and direction, and the air temperature and density. A typical trajectory required 750 multiplications, and a typical firing table about 3,000 trajectories. Goldstine was desperate for an alternative to these human computers, whose work was time-consuming and vulnerable to error.

He found what he was looking for in a proposal to build an ‘electronic computor’ (sic) containing 5,000 valves, put forward in 1942 by John Mauchly, a physicist trained for war-related work in electronics at the Moore School. The army refused to take the proposal seriously until Goldstine took up Mauchly’s cause in the spring of 1943 and, through careful diplomacy and a persuasive manner, won from his superiors funding for an even larger revised version. Mauchly was not a great salesman for his own ideas, but was one of very few people in the world at that time who grasped the potential of electronics in computing. Before the war he had worked on the design of a (non-electronic) machine to automate numerical methods of weather forecasting. Through giving a talk on this work he had met John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State College, who invited him to see his own prototype computer. It was an electronic adder – properly a calculator rather than a computer – with a modest 300 valves, which Atanasoff had built with his graduate student Clifford Berry between 1939 and 1942.

Mauchly had spent five days discussing it, although he later denied that he had learned anything from Atanasoff. The work had received virtually no recognition at the time, and never advanced beyond a working prototype. But the priority of the little Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was established years later in a successful bid to deny patents on aspects of the ENIAC design to the Moore School team. The question ‘who invented the computer?’ still rages on internet sites and in a succession of publications, and probably does not have a clear answer. Credit for being the first to build a valve-based prototype calculating machine should probably be shared between Atanasoff and Berry, and Konrad Zuse and Helmut Schreyer, who built an electronic demonstration model at the Technical University in Berlin in 1938.

Whatever it owed to his encounter with John Atanasoff, John Mauchly’s proposal exceeded anything previously seen in its scope and ambition. ENIAC, conceived by Mauchly but brought to life by teams of engineers working sixteen-hour days under the direction of the gifted Moore School engineer Presper Eckert, was a monster. As eventually completed in 1945, it was 2.5 metres high and nearly 50 metres long, its racks of valves, cables and other components arranged in a U-shape around the walls of a large room. It weighed over 30 tons, incorporated almost 18,000 valves, and cost the army $800,000. When it was working, ENIAC could perform 14 10-digit multiplications a second – 500 times faster than the best of the female ‘computors’ with their mechanical machines.

Its reliability, however, was in inverse proportion to its size: the only certain thing about its performance was that it would break down at least once a day. Valves, like light bulbs, have a limited life, and losing just one out of the 18,000 could ruin a calculation. More serious shortcomings were built into its design. Its builders could have cut the number of valves by over a third if they had considered representing the data in the machine in binary code.

Human calculators, having ten fingers, find it easiest to do arithmetic using decimal numbers. For computers, however, it makes much more sense to use the binary system. Binary code resembles Morse code in that it has only two symbols, usually written as o and 1. Any number can be converted into its unique binary equivalent – a string of os and 1S in which the value of each place is twice the value of its right-hand neighbour, rather than ten times as much as in the decimal system:

The advantage for computers of thinking in binary code is that their language consists of identical electrical pulses. At any point in a circuit, either there is a pulse, or there is not. On or off. 1 or 0. While a message written out in binary code might look extraordinarily cumbersome, it is in fact much quicker for a computer to work with instructions in this form than to incorporate some more complicated method of representing all the numbers and letters that human brains cope with quite happily.

In ENIAC, Eckert and Mauchly represented numbers in their conventional decimal notation. They used ten valves to represent a single digit: the fifth valve in a row of ten indicated the number five, and so on. Using binary code, just five valves would have been enough to represent all the numbers up to 31. To be fair to the Moore School designers, the theory of information processing based on binary digits, or ‘bits’ for short, was still being developed by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs when they began work on ENIAC. It has since been fundamental to the design of all modern computers.

Another major shortcoming of ENIAC was that it could not store programs. Mauchly had not taken the logical step that as programs consisted of information that could be represented digitally, they could be treated in the same way as data and stored in the computer itself. Each time ENIAC’s engineers wanted to run a new calculation they had to set up the program afresh by plugging wires into sockets, a process that could take a whole day.

The machine’s own builders realised that by the time they had it working, it was already obsolete. It deserves credit, however, for being the first to demonstrate publicly the power of electronic computing. It did work for the purpose for which it had been designed, and the army went on using it until 1955. Meanwhile, the publicity it attracted stimulated others to develop new avenues in the history of computing that would lead directly to the computers of today.

Among those who watched the building of ENIAC with interest was the Hungarian émigré mathematician John von Neumann. Von Neumann was by then an international star of mathematics, having established the mathematical foundations of quantum theory as well as developing the principles of game theory, which were to have a huge impact in economics, international relations, population biology and many other areas of modern experience. He was a founder member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and had become an adviser to the army in 1940 when he joined the scientific advisory committee of its Ballistics Research Laboratory. Since 1943 he had also been attached to the Los Alamos atomic bomb project. At that time he was trying to model the explosion of the bomb mathematically and to predict the ensuing fireball, but had not been able to find any machine capable of crunching the numbers fast enough.

According to Herman Goldstine’s widely circulated account, it was his own chance meeting with von Neumann that first brought ENIAC to the renowned mathematician’s attention. One day in 1944 Goldstine looked up while waiting on a station platform for a train from Aberdeen to Philadelphia and saw von Neumann just a few feet away. Conscious of his lowly academic status but never one to miss an opportunity, he introduced himself and they fell into conversation. When the topic turned to ENIAC and what it would be able to do, Goldstine remembered, ‘the whole atmosphere changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics’.

A few months later von Neumann became a consultant to the Moore School team on the design of a successor machine that would avoid the serious shortcomings that had become apparent as ENIAC came into operation. Called the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), it would handle data more economically by using binary rather than decimal digits and, most important of all, it would incorporate the means to store programs along with data.

In June 1945 von Neumann summarised these discussions in a memo, ‘A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC’, formalising the logical design of such a machine. The report described the principles of an automatic, digital machine, consisting of five basic components: a memory, which stores both program and data; a control unit, which interprets the program; an arithmetic unit, which adds and subtracts data as directed by the program; and input and output units, which read in the program and data and deliver the final results. Computers with this design – and that includes the vast majority of modern computers – have ever since been said to have ‘von Neumann architecture’.

As in the case of Atanasoff and Mauchly, much ink and hot air has been expended over the injustice done to Eckert and Mauchly in denying them credit, especially for the stored program concept. Eckert had not only thought about this before John von Neumann joined the project; he had begun to design and build a prototype store. There was undoubtedly a conflict of interest between the academics von Neumann and Goldstine, who wanted to see the ideas in the EDVAC design incorporated as widely as possibly, and the engineers Eckert and Mauchly, who were thinking about capitalising on its commercial possibilities. The academics won hands down when Goldstine, apparently on his own initiative, distributed the report with von Neumann’s sole name on it to a couple of dozen carefully selected recipients. That was all it took to ensure that von Neumann’s name was permanently cemented to the concept of a stored program. Although EDVAC itself, eventually delivered to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1949, was not an especially significant machine, every subsequent computer designer was influenced by the contents of von Neumann’s report.

When Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson came to see him in 1947, Goldstine was back in academic life. His boldness in accosting John von Neumann on that station platform had paid off, and he was now working as his assistant on a new computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study. The two men found him in his office on the elegant, tree-shaded campus. His mood was relaxed and expansive. If he was surprised at being approached by representatives of a commercial company, far from the world of theoretical physics and higher mathematics that he inhabited, he gave no sign of it. He listened closely as the two men explained that they were exploring the possibility of using electronic calculators in the office. ‘That’s not a problem I’ve thought about before,’ began Goldstine. Thompson eagerly explained how much of the work of the Lyons clerks amounted to routine calculation, and how their whole approach to office systems was based on distilling useful information from the mass of data.

Goldstine instantly saw the point, and became tremendously enthusiastic. Sketching furiously on a yellow pad, he launched into a description of possible approaches to the problem given the technology that had been developed so far. At the same time he explained the advantages of electronic calculators of the type he was now working on over previous types of calculating machine. The most obvious was their speed of operation. While an IBM punched card tabulator could carry out the same processes of addition and subtraction, its speed was limited by the speed of its mechanical moving parts. The electronic calculator, in contrast, operated at the speed of an electron moving in space – in principle, each step in a calculation could be completed in less than a millionth of a second.

The real source of an electronic calculator’s power, said Goldstine, was its potential to store its own program along with interim and final results. It would operate automatically – there was little or no need for human intervention in the course of a run. While punched card machines could carry out as many parallel operations as there were columns on the card (the standard had increased from 40 to 80 since Hollerith’s time), most electronic computers operated serially, taking one instruction or piece of data from the store at a time. However, the gain in speed and the possibility of running a large number of different operations in a single program gave the electronic computer overwhelming superiority.

Goldstine finished by giving Thompson and Standingford a list of everyone he knew about in the United States who was doing serious work on electronic computing. Then, enjoying the astonishment of his listeners, he dropped his bombshell. ‘And, of course, there’s Professor Douglas Hartree in Cambridge, England.’

Hartree had recently been appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. Goldstine informed his astonished listeners that one of Hartree’s new colleagues was building a state-of-the-art computer in the Mathematical Laboratory there. The two men had come 3,000 miles to find out that a computer was already under construction a couple of hours’ drive away from Lyons’s headquarters. Goldstine warmly recommended that Thompson and Standingford should talk to Hartree about their ideas for a business computer. As soon as they had left, he sat down and dispatched a letter to Cambridge on their behalf.

With a much clearer understanding of the technology, and buoyed up by Goldstine’s enthusiasm, Thompson and Standingford then made a tour of every organisation on his list. They were not able to see ENIAC itself, which had been taken over by the army and was being rebuilt at their Aberdeen firing range. Permission initially granted was suddenly withdrawn on the grounds of confidentiality – but Goldstine said later that the army’s engineers had probably failed to get the notoriously unreliable machine working and were too embarrassed to admit it. At the Moore School itself, where ENIAC had been built in a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm, they found that the disbanding of the original team had left ‘a general air of apathy’. A smaller experimental calculator was built and working, but no one showed the smallest interest in their ideas on office computing.

Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who had designed and built ENIAC, had left the Moore School a year earlier (following a dispute with Goldstine and von Neumann about the right to patent their invention) to form the Electronic Control Company. They, apparently alone among the early computer pioneers, planned to develop a computer for commercial production based on the EDVAC design, to be known as the Universal Automatic Calculator or UNIVAC. Naturally, a visit to their Philadelphia office was high on Thompson and Standingford’s list of priorities.

Eckert told them that he was talking to the Prudential Insurance Company of America about designing a machine to issue bills, and to carry out actuarial calculations. The big insurance companies had millions of policyholders and employed thousands of clerks to draft policies and send out bills for premiums. The office machinery suppliers had come up with some labour-saving devices for this kind of work, such as machines for printing frequently used addresses, but essentially the insurance business required heroic efforts of typing and filing. Prudential was the first and only example Thompson and Standingford came across of a company planning to use a computer for clerical work. A visit to its offices in Newark, New Jersey, revealed a company with an attitude as progressive as that of Lyons, though in a completely different line of business. It had a large Methods Division (comparable to the Systems Research Department at Lyons), with an innovator at its head, Dr Edmund C. Berkeley (later to become the author of the first popular computing book, Giant Brains). He was apparently confident that his company would have a machine installed and working within two years. In addition to preparing bills for insurance premiums, Berkeley planned to use the machine to prepare contracts, storing the 2,000 standard clauses and programming the machine to select those required in individual cases. This was the first Thompson and Standingford had heard of the possibilities computers offered for what we now call word processing. As things turned out, the Electronic Control Company was dogged by financial problems; in 1950 Prudential cancelled its contract with Eckert and Mauchly and later bought its first computer from IBM.

Extraordinary as it seems today, Eckert and Mauchly were out on a limb in perceiving a need for a general purpose commercial computer which could be produced for sale. The obvious candidates to pursue such a development were the existing office machine companies, who already had the customers and the sales forces to exploit a new market. Those that the Lyons pair visited, such as IBM, NCR and Burroughs, were secretive about their own research but they seemed to be more concerned to protect their traditional products than to develop entirely new ones. Standingford later wrote: ‘We were given a polite hearing, lunch and the sort of restrained reception reserved for the mentally unstable.’

It was a relief to have their confidence restored with a second visit to Goldstine. They found he had spent the intervening weeks thinking about the special requirements of office computing, and he gave them a detailed list of the components their computer would need. This time he took them to his engineering labs and showed them not only his partly built computer but prototype peripherals such as a device that would load programs and data into the machine through spinning magnetic wire (a forerunner of magnetic tape) from one reel to another. Profuse in their gratitude for Goldstine’s information and encouragement, Thompson and Standingford returned to New York and the boat home in a state of intellectual euphoria. Their minds were ablaze with the possibilities before them. While some might have used the cruise home, on the Queen Elizabeth, as an opportunity to relax, they lost no time in recording the knowledge and impressions they had gained in the first draft of the lengthy report on their visit they would be presenting to the Lyons board.

The first three sections of the report disposed of their visits to office machine companies and other businesses, concluding that Lyons’s methods were already so advanced that they had little to learn in this sphere. But Section D, headed ‘Electronic Machines in the Office’, stands as a prophetic document, showing both a firm grasp of the capabilities and limitations of the technology then developing, and a vision of where it all might lead. It was never published at the time, circulating only within Lyons, but in Britain at least no comparable account of the subject had ever been written.

Thompson and Standingford were unequivocal about their own enthusiasm for an electronic calculating machine. ‘Our object,’ they wrote, ‘in inquiring into the nature and possibilities of this machine was to find out whether it, or any adaptation of it, was capable of being put to use in commercial offices, and if this was not the case, to try to stimulate the development of such a machine.’ They went on to list the functions a computer might be capable of performing: storing data and instructions, performing sequences of calculations on stored material automatically, comparing words or figures in its memory and reacting to differences, and printing out results. They emphasised the astonishing speed at which these functions could be carried out, but showed how it posed a problem whose solution would later become the first priority in the development of the Lyons computer. ‘It is obviously wasteful to have a machine that is capable of working at these superhuman speeds,’ they wrote, ‘unless the information it is to work upon can be made available to it at relatively comparable speeds. The feeding clearly cannot be directly by clerks but mechanical and electrical means have been developed that are satisfactory.’

Thompson and Standingford recognised that what might be ‘satisfactory’ for a computer working on mathematical problems that might require minutes or hours of computation would not do in an office, ‘where the problem is to carry out a large number of simple operations’. This note of realism continued in an account of the importance of punching every input tape twice, using a device that compared the first and second versions to eliminate errors. The authors had clearly absorbed the philosophy that time on the computer was valuable, and everything possible had to be done to make sure that it was used efficiently.

After giving a short summary of the memory devices then under development, and an account of how a computer actually worked, Thompson and Standingford went on to suggest three examples of its applications in the office: sales invoicing, the typing of form letters and payroll. In each case, they explained, permanent information such as customers’ code numbers and addresses or employees’ names and rates of pay could be stored on magnetic wire or teleprinter tape and used again and again, while each week another input tape or wire would be prepared, giving hours worked, bonuses and so on. These two, together with an ‘instruction wire’ containing the program, would be played into the computer’s memory, the necessary calculation performed, and the computer would then print automatically the invoices, letters or payslips required.

Although almost all of their informants had been preoccupied with computers as mathematical tools, Thompson and Standingford were able to use their own background in systems research at Lyons to see how clerical tasks with rather little mathematical content, such as word processing and payroll management, could be recast as ‘calculations’ for the computer. It was a lateral step that hardly anyone, with the possible exceptions of Eckert and Mauchly and Edmund C. Berkeley at Prudential Insurance, had yet taken. All that now remained was to convince Simmons and the Lyons board that this was the way they should go in the future.

3 Made in Britain

It was predictable that Simmons and his colleagues should look to the United States for advances in technology, including computers. Its vast markets, coupled with a native enthusiasm for innovation, provided a fertile breeding ground for ideas and their commercial development. They did not know at that stage that the history of computing also owed much to British pioneers.

Charles Babbage (1792–1871), a showman as much as a thinker, had been in the forefront of the enthusiasm for scientific discovery and technological invention that ignited elements of London society in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Although he had held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for a number of years, he had spent very little time there. He was interested in everything, but his greatest concern was to subject the problems of society to scientific and preferably numerical analysis. He developed a passionate interest in factory management, and the studies he carried out predated by almost a century the ‘time and motion’ craze of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, in his 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures he published figures on the numbers of men, women and children needed to make pins, the time taken for each part of the process and the cost of each pin, taking into account labour and materials.

Writing of his search for laws and principles governing factory work, he commented: ‘Having been inclined during the last ten years to visit a considerable number of workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of making myself acquainted with the various resources of the mechanical art, I was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalisation to which my other pursuits had naturally given rise.’ From his observations he developed a poor opinion of the ability of the human species to undertake any repetitive work reliably. ‘One of the great advantages which we may derive from machinery,’ he said, ‘is from the check which it affords against the inattention of, the idleness or the dishonesty of human agents.’

The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Machines spun and wove in factories at speeds unmatched by traditional cottage industry. Babbage the mathematician began to wonder if a machine could be made to do calculations. The best approach, he soon realised, was to reduce the calculation to a series of simpler stages, so that all the machine had to do was add and subtract. He owed this insight to the French mathematician Gaspard Riche de Prony, who had been charged with finding a feasible way to calculate all the new mathematical tables that would be needed following the introduction of the metric system by the French revolutionary government. De Prony’s solution was to organise a hierarchy of mathematical workers, beginning with a few professional mathematicians at the top and ending with a large team, who could add and subtract according to a formula worked out by those higher up the ladder. (The lowest tier was composed of redundant hairdressers, whose former customers had either lost their hair along with their heads, or prudently adopted a style of suitably radical simplicity.)

Babbage was convinced that anything a roomful of hairdressers could do, a machine could do better. He drew up designs for what he called his Difference Engine, and eventually persuaded the government to part with funds for its development. He got as far as producing a demonstration model that he displayed to wondering visitors in his London drawing room. It consisted of dozens of interconnected brass cogs with complex gears between them, which would perform predetermined (and apparently ‘miraculous’) procedures as he cranked a handle. The money ran out before he could produce a full-scale version. His design was vindicated when in 1991 curators at the Science Museum in London used his notes and drawings to produce his improved Difference Engine No. 2. Doron Swade, who led the project, tells the whole story in his book The Cogwheel Brain.

Money was not the only problem. Babbage had sidetracked himself by thinking up an even better machine: the Analytical Engine. Rather than setting up a calculation by positioning various cogs by hand, Babbage proposed to feed the Analytical Engine both program and data on punched cards such as those the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed to automate the weaving of damask patterns into cloth. The machine never progressed beyond the design stage (although the design notes filled thirty volumes). But it encompassed much of the thinking behind the design of modern electronic computers: it had inputs, in the form of punched cards, a store or memory, a processing unit (which Babbage called the ‘mill’), and a variety of different outputs, including printed results or more card-punching.

The Analytical Engine also inspired a historic document, all the more remarkable in its day because the author was a woman. The document was entitled ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq.’ and published in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs in September 1843. The ‘Sketch’ was originally written in French by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea. The English translation in the Memoirs, with the addition of extensive explanatory ‘Notes’, was by Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and only product of the short-lived marriage between the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Ada Lovelace, who was twenty-eight years old and a mother of three when the ‘Sketch’ was published, developed a passion for mathematical ideas at an early age. With all the emotional volatility of her father – although a cruelly restricted upbringing could have had as much to do with this as genetics – her own assessment of her mathematical gifts was sometimes unrealistic. But she formed a strong intellectual bond with Babbage, and proved an able advocate of his work. Her ‘Notes’ constitute the first accessible description of the capabilities and limitations of a computer. And a century before the sensational ‘electronic brain’ articles began to appear in the British and American press, she knew better than to oversell the discovery. ‘It is desirable,’ she wrote, ‘to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine … The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform … Its province is to assist us in making available, what we are already acquainted with’ (her italics). Today, when commentators frequently speculate that machine intelligence is on the verge of taking over from the human variety, her remark seems as percipient as ever.

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