One night in the late 1930's, in a bar on the border of Illinois and Iowa, a professor of physics at Iowa State College had an idea. After a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, John Vincent Atanasoff realized that a combination of the binary number system and electronic switches, together with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his lifeùand the lives of other similarly burdened scientistsùeasier. Then he went back and built the machine in the basement of the physics building. It worked. The whole world changed.Why don't we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of such genius computing pioneers as Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented the device, and the developers of the far better-known ENIAC, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, almost certainly stole his critical ideas. But in 1973, a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution and the digital universe we now inhabit.Who better than Jane Smiley to tell John Atanasoff's quintessentially American Story? Expanding the scope of her account to take in the race to develop the digital computer in England by figures like Turing and Tommy Flowers, and in Germany by the lone inventor Konrad Zuse, she shows that while computing was all but inevitable, how we compute was not. With technological clarity and extraordinary narrative drive, The Man Who Invented The Computer is a gripping, real-life techno-thriller that will change how we think of digital computing. Read Less