Today in Technology History

(Published weekdays. To receive "Today in Technology History" by e-mail, click here. To read past issues, click here.)

March 18

Every so often, we like to talk about the men and women whose labors in the trenches of technology are forgotten -- those unremembered engineers and inventors who made modest contributions to the world of machines. Such is the case today, with the career of Mr. J. Wesley Leas, who died exactly one year ago.

A graduate of Ohio State University, Leas worked on radar for the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War. For a few years after the war, the government employed him to help put in place a navigation system that would allow pilots anywhere in the U.S. to know where they were, even without landmarks. (That navigation system is called VOR, or VHF Omni-Range, and it is based on the ground.)

Leas then took a job with RCA, where he was a managing engineer on one of the world's first business computers. "Bizmac," which RCA produced in the early 1950s, was the company's first commercial computer. (RCA had already built two computers, one for the military and one for a university.) With its thousands of vacuum tubes, Bizmac was gigantic -- sometimes the size of a bowling alley. And it was expensive, too, costing several million dollars. For all the equipment and all the space, users would get a computer that we would today consider painfully slow with an unreliable memory. Still, about a half-dozen Bizmacs were sold, and companies used them to keep track of sales and customer accounts.

In later years, Leas stayed involved with technology by opening up a consulting and engineering firm that specialized in mass transit. He was talking about smart cards for paying fares in the early 1990s, long before most people had ever heard of smart cards.

Leas died on March 18, 2002.

Related links:

• Scroll down this page to read a short obituary for Mr. Leas.

• Use these links to read more about and to see a picture of Bizmac.

 

 

| Biotechnology | Convergence | Creativity | Culture | E-conomics | Education |

| Equity | Gov't & Politics | Innovation | National Security | Personal Security |

For errors, broken links, questions or comments,
contact webmaster@tecsoc.org.