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During the last of his four years at the Navy's Nebraska Avenue facility, Lieutenant Commander William C. Norris started thinking about other uses for the codebreaking machines. Surely, he thought, there must be business applications for machines as fast as these.
Bill Norris knew that the war would end soon and wondered about his options after he left the service. Unlike some of the other navy men, Norris had options. If he wanted, he could return to his family's farm in southern Nebraska, or he could go back to the Westinghouse Corporation in Chicago, where he had worked before the war selling X-ray equipment. A more staid personality might have done just that. After all, most of the country dreamed of little more than settling back into their prewar lives. But Norris wanted more, and he prided himself on his willingness to take risks to get it. A genuine, callous-palmed, Dust Bowl farm boy, he had traded his overalls for a slide rule thirteen years earlier, and at age thirty-five he wasn't anxious to go backward.
At the red brick school Norris methodically worked his way up in rank, despite being surrounded by some of the country's best scientists. Unlike many of the other codebreakers, he didn't hail from a posh eastern college or have a distinguished track record of scientific achievement, but he was a quick study who was forceful and direct, almost to the point of bluntness. With his wide face and high cheekbones, he looked a little like the tough-talking character actor Sheldon Leonard. Though he was an average-sized man, he had an air of intimidation about him. When the occasion called for it, Norris could, as the saying went, curse like a sailor.
Prior to joining the codebreakers, his crowning achievement had been in cattle farming. He'd grown up on a grassy spread of about a thousand acres along the Republican River in southern Nebraska. His life was classic midwestern Americana: small towns, rolling pasture lands, even a one-room schoolhouse.
He had been a bright student, but because he'd attended a school with only seven or eight other children in the tiny town of Inavale, Nebraska, it was difficult to know just how bright. Life on the farm had made him practical, an improviser. He had a strong mechanical aptitude and a passion for radio technology. His bedroom was strewn with vacuum tubes and copper wire and he was a ham radio aficionado. Alter he finished high school, Norris went on to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to study electrical engineering.
Decades later, after Norris had achieved overwhelming success, the stories of his early years on his family's cattle farm would still be recognized as his defining moments. He returned home from the University of Nebraska in 1932, an electrical engineering degree in hand.
Having been educated as an engineer, however, Norris wanted to try, his hand in the technical world. Alter two years on the farm, he interviewed for engineering jobs. Westinghouse offered him two positions: part-time engineer for $80 a month or full-time salesman for twice that much. Having survived the Great Depression, he opted for the logical choice and soon began working out of a Chicago sales office, traveling to accounts in various parts of Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, selling medical and industrial X-ray equipment.
Despite success in sales, his heart was still in engineering. When the war broke out, Norris jumped at a chance to break into a hardcore technical position. He took a job as a civil servant with the Bureau of Ordnance, where he hunched over a drafting board in a bullpen with about a hundred other engineers who worked on fire control for antiaircraft guns. Eventually he signed on with the Naval Reserve, ending up at the red brick school in Washington, D.C.
At the Nebraska Avenue analytical center Norris was in his element. Though he wasn't in an intellectual league with the scientific theoreticians, he was technically proficient, and his managerial style was well suited for the navy: smart, gruff, and practical. While working at the red brick school, he was promoted to lieutenant commander.
At CSAW (pronounced "Seesaw" by the codebreakers) Norris made more technical contributions than at any other stage of his career. At one point he discovered a method for identifying the source of German radio messages: Transmissions from each individual U-boat, he said, had their own set of peculiar characteristics. If he was right—and if they could identify the U-boat that was sending the message—they would crack the codes far faster. Scientists, however, questioned Norris's unproven theories and balked at the risks involved in using them. The characteristics, they said, were peculiarities of the ionosphere—the weather—not the U-boat. When they questioned his idea, Norris simply bypassed them and put the technique into effect. If he was wrong, he said, they could call him on the carpet. He wasn't wrong.
Three years later when Norris again pursued a risky course, he would change the face of technology. But at that time, the idea he pursued seemed downright absurd.
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No one was sure who first raised the concept of commercial applications for the codebreaking machines. But Norris occasionally found himself sitting around one of the research labs at the Nebraska Avenue building, idly brainstorming with some of the other technical people. During those sessions, they often wondered aloud about other uses for their machines. In the beginning it had seemed like a joke. He and Commander Howard Engstrom, a former Yale University mathematics professor who headed the research operation, lobbed ideas at each other and at some of the other men in the lab. What about flight reservations? Air traffic control? Guided missiles? Flight simulators? The old Link Trainer, a flight simulator for military pilots, was stiff, slow, and unrealistic. Digital electronics, they reasoned, could make the Link Trainer smoother, faster, and more flexible.
But all of them knew that the new technology needed more development. Sure, they could replace the electromechanical relays in the Link Trainers with digital circuitry, but the cost of the system would skyrocket. Same for air traffic control and flight reservations. Even though digital technology offered the potential for scorching speed, it wasn't yet economically viable.
Still, their pipedream grew. It started to appear so real that they stopped thinking of it as a joke. One evening during their ramblings Engstrom mused about the looming end to the war, "I, for one, don't want to go back to Yale, so I'd like to think in terms of something else."
Norris, Engstrom, and the others briefly considered continuing their work in a government lab after the war, but they were unanimous in their disapproval of that prospect. Next they discussed setting up a private company and working for the navy on a contract basis. A good idea, they all agreed, but it still wasn't enough. Cost-plus-fixed-fee government work was hardly a road to riches; in fact, it was barely a living. Someone proposed that they find companies to sponsor or invest in their start-up. Though their technology wasn't yet ready for industry, it could be with enough capital for development. Their game plan evolved, eventually calling for Norris, Engstrom, and the others to own half of the proposed company, while outside investors owned the other half.
In an extraordinary display of entrepreneurial wisdom, high-ranking navy officials drummed up support for the idea. The navy's rationale was simple self-preservation. The war's end was looming and the Cold War was on the horizon. Cryptanalytic work would be as crucial as ever, even after the war, yet navy officials would be unable to order their codebreakers to remain at the Nebraska Avenue facility. Most of the codebreakers had already dismissed the idea of continuing their effort in civil service positions, so the navy had little choice: Either keep the existing group together or start again from scratch.
Convincing the captains of industry to buy into their proposal, however, was another matter. In their own minds they could see how the technology might give a boost to, say, an airline company. A reservationist might talk to a business executive who wanted to fly from Chicago to Omaha. By punching a few keys, the reservationist could send the electrons zipping through bundles of spaghetti wiring, jumping across vacuum tubes, speeding through the logic circuits and electronic memory, where the information on the Chicago-Omaha flight would be stored as little magnetic bits of information. American Airlines at the time used "card boys," who dashed around the reservations office with little three-by-fives on which were scribbled the number of available seats for a flight. Given the state of the art, the need for electronic machines seemed obvious.
Still, it was a hard sell. Norris and Engstrom polished their shoes and donned their aristocratic-looking white naval officer uniforms with their shiny gold buttons. Through their navy contacts, they managed to get audiences with presidents of companies such as American Airlines and Western Union. But their pitch—replete with references to electrons, logic circuits, and bits of magnetic information—sounded like voodoo to the baffled company executives. The executives sat politely and listened and their ears perked up every now and then at the thought of the potential corporate efficiency, but their answers were always the same.
In the end it was simply too unrealistic. When it came to discussing reliability or past experience, Norris and Engstrom were handcuffed. They couldn't talk about past experience: All that information was classified and it was a felony to discuss it. They couldn't say how they'd used the machines, or for how long, or what their reliability record was. One of the few things they could say was that the machines existed.
Worse, Norris or Engstrom could offer no business savvy. They were a mathematician and an engineer proposing an entry into a foreign domain, and the time simply wasn't right for taking on such a program. As the war drew to a close, most companies were reorganizing and rethinking their business plans. One after another the executives listened, then politely declined. It was a fine idea, an idea with great potential, they said. But the war had just ended, their company was reorganizing, funding was difficult to come by, the risk was too great.
The navy, however, wouldn't let Norris and Engstrom quit. Determined to keep their cryptological programs afloat, naval officials arranged for the two to visit with James V. Forrestal, secretary of the navy and former Wall Street financier. Forrestal helped set up interviews with still more firms, including New York investment banker Kuhn Loeb & Co. But even there they met with resistance. Executives at Kuhn Loeb flatly concluded that there was no commercial future for their ... electronic calculators.
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