"Atanasoff: Father of the Computer,” at Augustana College -- February 23.
Documentaries are always at the mercy of their subjects. All the flash and technique in the world won't matter a damn if the subject being documented isn't inherently arresting, or at least relatively engaging. But the opposite is also true. A doc can get away with an unexciting, even bland presentation so long as the story it tells captures and holds your interest, and directors Mila Aung-Thwin's and Daniel Cross' 2014 documentary Atanasoff: Father of the Computer kept me interested, and quite invested, through the whole of its too-short 45 minutes.
In telling of Iowa physicist and Ames-based professor John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995) and his long wait to be recognized as the innovative inventor referenced in their film's title, Aung-Thwin and Cross don't do anything remotely revolutionary with their material – nor do they need to. Father of the Computer is a traditional, talking-head doc to its teeth, complete with experts' commentary, occasional biographical re-creations, and the requisite appearances of Big Names to underscore and celebrate Atanasoff's greatness. (I was rather surprised, through, that the computer-world celebs recruited here – Apple co-developer Steve Wozniak and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales – were merely featured in the final minutes, and that their participation wasn't also teased at the start to give an immediate sense of the scope of Atanasoff's historical standing.)
Yet in its small-scale, no-frills way, Atanasoff: Father of the Computer (which is currently viewable on YouTube) still works awfully well, primarily because Aung-Thwin and Cross don't spend much time fashioning their short as a standard-issue bio-doc. Through both narration and on-camera reminiscences from our title “character” – a man who comes off as a jovial open book with a charming regional accent that, as David Foster Wallace once defined, “isn't Southern so much as rural” – we're certainly given insight into Atanasoff's history. We learn about his fascination, even as a child, with solving problems through binary logic; his professorial tenure at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University); his irritation at ISC not filing a patent application on the man's initial computer design – an oversight that led to an estimated four billion dollars in lost revenue. We also learn, amusingly, that Asanasoff had his “A-ha!” moment leading to the first computer's creation after a two-hour drive at top speeds from Ames to Illinois – reportedly, although not stated in the doc, a bar in Rock Island – just because the guy was desperate for a drink. Forget those contrived eureka moments of the A Beautiful Mind variety; this, apparently, is how genius finds its true inspiration.
Yet the crux of the film isn't actually on Atanasoff. It's on a patent lawyer named Charles Call – interviews with whom make up the majority of the doc's length – as he guides us through a terrifically involving tale. For decades, there was a patent held on a computer named the ENIAC, which the New York Times cited as “the greatest secret of World War II.” Known as the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrators Computor … and yes, “Computor” with an “o”) was designed by physicist John Mauchly alongside J. Presper Eckert, and led to the creation of the world's first computer company the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Yet its patent meant that no one else could fashion even another form of computer, given that the concept's original idea was completely Mauchly's and Eckert's. Or was it?
What Atanasoff: Father of the Computer subsequently becomes, then, isn't a documentary so much as a juicy detective story, with the young lawyer Call, for a number of years beginning in the mid-1960s, enlisted to determine whether there was a possibility of breaking the ENIAC patent. And it proves to be a helluva fun ride – at least for the documentary's viewers.
With Call, in his later years, sharing his investigative journey, we hear about the boxes and boxes of records Call was forced to sift through, all of which were stored under stadium seats of the University of Pennsylvania's Franklin Field. We're told of Call's discovery of an intriguing mention on page three of R.K. Richards' book Electronic Digital Systems, in which the author gives John Atanasoff credit for computers' ancestry. We learn that Mauchly actually met and spoke with Atanasoff years before the ENIAC debuted, with the latter sharing ideas and processes that Mauchly later, in court, effectively deemed stupid. (There's a rare moment of Aung-Thwin and Cross editorializing during this re-enacted reveal, with Mauchly, on the stand, shot from the back in a thick haze of cigarette smoke that makes him look ultra-menacing.) We know, because we live in the world, that the ENIAC patent was eventually broken. Yet what it took to make that happen is expertly, enjoyably conveyed by Father of the Computer's directors. While Julia Roberts never appears, you get some of the same David-versus-Goliath tingle from this short film's real-life case that we got from Erin Brockovich.
Toward the film's end, it's explained that because the patent case's verdict came out during the height of the Watergate scandal, the historic import of what Call and his team accomplished was mostly lost on the public and effectively buried by the press. Atanasoff: Father of the Computer makes a first-rate argument for this saga being more well-known. After all, as Wikipedia's Wales states on-screen, without the concept developed by a largely unknown physics professor from Iowa, “The Internet never would have happened.” I guess we can both thank and blame Atanasoff for that.
Atanasoff: Father of the Computer will be screened during the “Birth of the Computer: The John Atanasoff Story” presentation taking place in Augustana College's Wallenberg Hall on February 23 beginning at 6 p.m. For more information, visit Augustana.edu.
