| Notes |
- Dr Joseph J Eachus, Honeywell E D P staff scientist. He developed the communications equipment neded to link computer to telex systems. The computer telex link up permints persons at remote locations to transmit & recieve computer data, and to control processing of data by computer.
Census 1930; Oxford, Butler, Ohio, he was 18.
(Family group sheet FG1/5)
(Obituarie OBIT 1/1)
- Bletchley Park's hut 11 was built to house five bombes, the first of which went into operation about the first of March 1940. Hut 11 was the secret within the secret of Bletchley Park. "The few visitors allowed into hut 11 had to sign the visitors book, having first been identified by a third person."
Covering the period from 1941 to 1943, hut 11's visitor book records the visit of US Army Signal Security Agency (SSA) cryptanalyst William F Friedman on May 7 1943, a visit coincided with the signing of the British-USA Agreement between the GC&CS and SSA. Less familiar signatures document growing cryptanalytic cooperation: Solomon Kullback, SSA (June 20 1942); Robert B Ely and Joseph J Eachus, US Naval intelligence, Op-20-G (July 12 1942). Ely and Eachus were there to learn as much as they could about the British Bombes in order to help design US Navy's future bombes.
Obituarie: The Daily Telegraph, Friday December 19th 2003
Joseph Eachus, who has died aged 92, was one of a very few American codebreakers at Bletchley Park; he went on to become a leading computer expert at the
U S codebreaking organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), where he was known as "the father of the main frame". He was a US Navy reservist teaching Mathematics at Purdue University, Indianapolis, when he was called up to active duty in 1942 and sent to Bletchley Park, the British wartime codebreaking base at which a motley collection of mathematicians and linquists was breaking the Nazi Enigma ciphers. The American and British codebreakers had been co-operating for more than 18 months when Eachus first arrived in the spring of 1942. But they remained highly suspicious of each other. The British believed that the Americans might leek the secret thta Enigma had been broken; the Americans saw the British as obstructive and unhelpful. Lieutenant Joe Eachus was told to find out the details of the British Bombe, a machine designed by AlanTuring to determine the daily changing keys in use on the various Enigma ciphers. With Britain suffering under rationing, Eachus found a simple way around the suspicion. The US Navy had officially designated him as a detached unit. "That title covers a multitude of sins, from an individual to a ship" Eachus recalled. "So when I went toLondon, I got my supplies from the same place that the ships did - sugar in 100lb bags and coffee in 20lb casn.Consequently, when I would go to some other office to ask them to tell me about what I was doing, I would take a cup of sugar with me, which made me a good deal more welcome than I might otherwise have been". The information that Eachus sent back to his bosses at the US Navy's OP-20-G codebreaking organisation allowed American technitions to produce even more advanced bombes which, during the Battle of the Atlantic, were crucial in breaking the German U-boats' Shark cipher and keeping the trans-Atlantic shipping lanes open.
Joseph Eachus was born on November 5 1911 at Oxford, Ohio. He studied Mathmatics at Miami Universitym Ohio, before moving to Indianapolis to teach at Purdue University and the University of Indiana. He already had a keen interest in codbreaking before he was called up, and was therefore a natural candidate for the post of US Navy liaison officer at Bletchley Park. He also found time to work in the Royal Navy's codebreaking section, Hut 8, alongside such luminaries as Turing and Hugh Alexander. "Some of the British had been in the Foreign Office as professional codebreakers for some years", Eachus recalled. "But there were no US Navy guys who fitted that description, everybody had been amateurs before. We were working on the German Enigma, and oftentimes we were reading stuff currently. Other times, something would happen and we were told not, and there was just a feeling of gloom around when we would go for a week without reading things, very downhearted. Then it got going again and you would see the smiles in the corridors." Eachus would later reflect that his liaison work also had its moments of frustration, "My nominal task was to tell Washington what was happening at Bletchley Park, and in that role I got to see more of Bletchley Park than a lot of the people who were part of it." "As a liason officer, I was occasionally asked to get specific stuff. and on one occasion I was asked by Washington for an organisational chart of Blechley Park. I went to this man and said, could I have a chart of the organisation. He paused and said 'I dont believe we have one' I didn't pursue this with him, but I was never quite sure whether he meant we dont have a chart, or we don't have an organisation ." While at Bletchley, Eachus met and fell in love with Barbara Abernethy, the personal assistant to Alastair Dennison, the Deputy Director and nominal head of Bletchley Park; they were to marry in 1947. In September 1943, just over a year after arriving in England, Eachus was recalled and sent to the headquarters of National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio, to assist in the design and production of the US bombes, which were 25 to 30 per cent faster than their British predecessors. He went on to become one of the leading computer experts in the postwar US codebreaking organisation, the NSA, where he earned the title of "father of mainframe". Eachus left the NSA to jion Honeywell in 1955, but remained a member of its scientific advisory board. His work on computers led to 21 patents, 17 of which listed him as the sole inventer. They included pioneering work on expanding computer memory and the transmission of data over telephone lines. The most outrageous of his experiments on the expansion of computer memory involved the magnetic core memory technique, in which data is stored on a tiny doughnut-shaped magnets strung together by a wire grid. Eachus created a memory storage unit one inch wide and several hundred feet long. The data was decoded and passed along the length of the unit in a process likened by some to a python digesting a pig - and the device became known as the "Joe Eachus's Snake". Joe Eachus died on December 9th His first marriage, to Ruth Porter, was dissolved in 1946, and in 1947 he married Barbara Abernathy, who survives him along with two sons from his first marriage.
|
1911 - 2003 (92 years)
[1] 