Word: vacuumers
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...look at most history books, they'll tell you ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first true all-purpose electronic computer. Unveiled in 1946 in a blaze of publicity, it was a monstrous 30-ton machine, as big as two semis and filled with enough vacuum tubes (19,000), switches (6,000) and blinking lights to require an army of attendants. Capable of adding 5,000 numbers in a second, a then unheard of feat, it could compute the trajectory of an artillery shell well before it landed (compared with days of labored hand calculations...
...while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At Harvard, large, clattering electromechanical computers in IBM's Mark series also did wartime calculations. Even the Germans made a stab at computing with Konrad Zuse's Z electromechanical computers, the last of which was the first general-purpose computer controlled by a program...
From the day he first handled one in college in 1948, Robert Noyce knew the new gadget meant the end of balky, bulky vacuum tubes. But he also realized you couldn't do much with transistors until you could link them together, like fibers in an Oriental rug. To everyone's astonishment, the gifted young man from Grinnell, Iowa--a minister's son--achieved that goal in a decade. His integrated circuit, or microchip, not only helped rename an orchard-filled California valley but also led to a seemingly endless harvest of silicon devices, from PCs to coffeemakers...
...professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and later at Clark, Goddard tried to figure out just how. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he calculated the energy-to-weight ratio of various fuels. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could indeed fly in a vacuum, thanks to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most important, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would need something...
...took a bemused backward glance at a tart little editorial it had published 49 years before. "Further investigation and experimentation," said the paper in 1969, "have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error." The grim Professor Goddard might not have appreciated the humor, but he would almost certainly have accepted the apology...