Howard Aiken (1900–1973) was the engineer who finally realised Charles Babbage’s Victorian dream. In the late 1930s, while at Harvard, Aiken conceived a machine to automate the soul-crushing labour of physical calculations.
With IBM’s funding and components, he built the Harvard Mark I — a 50-foot-long electromechanical monster of clicking relays and rotating shafts. It was the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the US and proved that large-scale, automated computation was no longer just a theoretical curiosity.