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P U B L I C P O
L I C Y A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A
L
A F F A I R S
The Story That
Doesn't Compute
Author's Notebook
By Dale Keiger
I teach writing, and in several classes I've taught a fine piece
of journalism by Richard Preston titled "The Mountains of Pi."
Preston is a good, careful journalist, and his piece appeared in
The New Yorker, which is renowned for the thoroughness of its
fact-checking. And yet, in his story I read this: "Working at the
same laboratory, John von Neumann (one of the inventors of the
ENIAC)..." John von Neumann had virtually nothing to do with
ENIAC. Yet he gets credit for inventing the modern electronic
computer, credit denied to the true inventors, Pres Eckert and
Hopkins alumnus John Mauchly. Writers construct a historical
record, and mostly they do a good job. Take your typical daily
newspaper. Four sections, maybe 60 pages. Now imagine compiling a
list of every individual fact conveyed in that one issue of the
paper. The list would be impressively long, and 95 percent of the
information would accurate. If you stop to consider the
conditions under which newspapers are produced each day, the
vagaries of securing accurate information from sources, and the
complexity of communication among people, that level of accuracy
is remarkable. But writers also perpetuate error, decade after
decade. One hundred years from now, I bet people still will be
writing, "John von Neumann, inventor of the computer...." What a
shame for John Mauchly and Pres Eckert.
RETURN TO
NOVEMBER 1999 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
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