Fifty-five years ago, in the basement of Penn's Moore School of Engineering, ENIAC -- the world's first electronic computer -- was born. John Mauchly, the inventor of ENIAC, was honored at yesterday's 55th anniversary celebration. As a tribute to ENIAC's proud father, Philadelphia director Paul David unveiled his documentary "Mauchly: The Computer and the Skateboard." "Most people know who Thomas Edison or Eli Whitney are. Why not John Mauchly?" David asked. The documentary exposes a dark underbelly in the story of ENIAC and its successor, UNIVAC. According to the film, Mauchly's fame was smothered over the years by a series of legal struggles that questioned Mauchly's right to the patent. "I hope this film says something about the complex relationships between inventors and corporations; between ideas and money," David said. The first patent struggles occurred when Mauchly and Presper Eckert, a professor in the Engineering School, left Penn when they were asked to sign over all patents to the University. After leaving the University, Mauchly and Eckert started their own company and created UNIVAC, the commercial version of ENIAC. The new version was first built for the U.S. Census Bureau, but was later used to predict the 1952 Presidential election results. After a short period of being blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, Mauchly was sued by Honeywell -- which was later to become IBM -- over patent rights. The film suggests that this lawsuit was, in David's words, "a deliberate attempt to sabotage the patent," from which Mauchly never emotionally recovered. The screening of the film at yesterday's anniversary celebration drew about 50 students, faculty members, and residents of West Philadelphia. Several audience members, who showed up expecting to see a history of the first computers, were surprised by its expose-like tone. "Parts of the film seemed to be hinting at the dark side of Mauchly," Engineering alumnus Dan Widyono said. "It made it interesting, but it wasn't what I expected." Other viewers said they were pleased with the twist. "It was alternative in a sense," said Charlie Reichenbach, a graduate student in systems engineering. "The movie illuminated not only [Mauchly's] genius but also the irony in his struggle." David and his co-director, Mauchly's grandson Jim Reed, spent three years researching Mauchly's story. The pair experienced some setbacks in the filming of the documentary, including having to throw out 10 hours of interviews with Mauchly's wife Kay because the reflection in her eyeglasses kept going in and out of focus. "At one point during production, Jim and I were going through boxes in Kay's attic when we came across the original ENIAC patent," David said. "That type of discovery really helped motivate us to keep working on this secret history of the computer." The documentary included never-before-seen footage of interviews with Mauchly, during which he laments the fact that he had become less well known for his invention of the computer than for his invention of the skateboard. The documentary also included rare footage of Mauchly riding a jet-propelled skateboard on top of a desk during one of his lectures.
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