The Moline Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus
12-10-06
ILLINOIS STYLE: In which Rock island tavern was computer invented?
JONATHAN TURNER
The Moline Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus
ROCK ISLAND, Ill. - Was the world's first electronic computer invented over
bourbon, under a painting of a nude woman, after midnight at Rock Island's
Hunter's Club?
Kirwan Cox, a documentary filmmaker from Montreal, thinks so.
This fall, he wrote to Rock Island urban planner Jill Doak to suggest that a plaque
or historic designation be given to Hunter's to recognize its significance in such a
momentous invention. The restaurant is currently closed for remodeling.
But the Rock Island Preservation Commission has expressed doubt about Cox's
claims.
John Atanasoff, an Iowa State University professor, is credited with coming
up with plans for the first electronic computer in 1937 at a "Rock Island
roadhouse." Atanasoff died in 1995, and never remembered the name of the
place where he stopped and scribbled the designs on a cocktail napkin.
"There's nothing that proves that it was or was not Hunter's Club," Doak said.
"Rock Island at that time enjoyed a quite racy reputation. There were a lot of
taverns in that vicinity."
Doak said the place he stopped has never been named.
"This is what Mr. Cox believes to be the place. The Preservation Commission,
based on his information, didn't have the same assuredness about it," she said.
Cox was in Rock Island this summer, working on his planned 2007 TV
documentary about Atanasoff. He filmed at City Hall, at Hunter's, and with Paul
Fessler of Rock Island, a former Preservation Commission member who
interviewed Atanasoff in 1988 at his Maryland home.
According to what is known of that frigid December night in 1937, the professor
drove to Rock Island from Ames, after getting frustrated with his work and
wanting to clear his head. He crossed the Government Bridge around midnight
into Illinois because he was "wrestling with a problem and needed a drink," Cox
wrote. Iowa was dry at that time, but Illinois was not.
Atanasoff apparently drove about a half-mile to a mile off the bridge and turned
right, which at that time would have been 4th Avenue. He stopped at a tavern
"that wasn't very substantial."
While Atanasoff sat in the tavern, reportedly drinking bourbon, he devised
theories and concepts that became key to the creation of the computer he would
go on to develop with graduate student Clifford Berry in the early 1940s.
In the interview with Fessler, Atanasoff described in detail the route he took to
the roadhouse. Cox, his cameraman, and an Iowa State professor named John
Hauptman followed his route off the bridge and "it led us to the Hunter's Club,"
Cox said.
"With one stroke of genius, the modern computer was conceived that cold night
at the Hunter's Club roadhouse ... under the oil painting of a nude that still hangs
on the rear wall," Cox wrote to city staff, noting the painting had been there in
1937.
But in an e-mail to Doak, Fessler wrote that making Hunter's a landmark "would
be a stretch."