Wang An’s Story – The American Dream Come True

It rarely happens in history that a scientist and inventor manages to build a successful high-tech business. Especially if this scientist was not born in the USA, but came there from another country. In this regard, the story of a talented engineer and businessman of Chinese origin, Wang An, who would have turned 103 today, is very interesting and instructive.

Wang An was born on February 7, 1920 in the town of Yushan near Shanghai in the family of an English teacher and a housewife. In the 20s of the XX century, Shanghai became the main financial center of the Far East, it was actively developing: thanks to Western influence, the telegraph, telephone and cinema appeared here, public transport was established, tram traffic was launched, but still the region did not reach the European capitalist countries in terms of standard of living. Nevertheless, the education system allowed children with a penchant for science to gain knowledge sufficient for a successful career in the future. Young Wang An received his primary education in his hometown and then transferred to the Jiangsu Provincial High School, where he successfully prepared to enter the Shanghai Transport and Communications University, showing the best result among all applicants in the entrance exams. He graduated in 1940: An successfully defended his thesis and received the specialty of an electrical engineer.

Shanghai in the 1920s:

When hostilities unfolded in the Pacific Ocean, Japanese troops occupied the territory of Shanghai, and the region became restless. In 1945, Wang An moved to the United States to enroll in a master’s program at Harvard University, where three years later he defended his dissertation and received a Ph.D. After graduating, he decides to stay at Harvard, especially since a very interesting and promising project was being implemented at the University at that time: a young engineer and graduate student, Howard Hathaway Aiken, was building an electronic computer Mark IV, which was planned to be used by the US Air Force. Wang An joined the development of the device for controlling the transmission of impulses in the electrical circuits of this computer.

Mark IV memory module:

The Mark IV computer used magnetic drum memory, which was not very fast or reliable. While experimenting with computer circuits, Wang An and his colleague Wo Weidong noticed that the ferrite rings used in the design of flip-flops remain magnetized when an electric current is passed through them. A similar principle was described in his works by one of the founders of ENIAC, John Eckert, but he was unable to implement it “in hardware”. By assembling several such flip-flops into a single circuit, Wang An and Wo Weidong created a fundamentally new device called a shift register. This invention, in turn, served as the foundation for the discovery of a new way of storing information in computers – memory on magnetic cores.

The operating principle of “ferrite memory” is based on the concept of magnetic hysteresis. When a voltage is applied to the core (biax), it becomes magnetized in a certain direction. The magnetic field persists even after the voltage is removed, allowing the core to “write” a bit of data. The magnetization can then be changed in the opposite direction by sending another electrical impulse to the core. One of the key advantages of this type of memory is its speed and reliability. Unlike the magnetic drums used in the Mark IV design, this memory could acquire and store data quickly and reliably, making it suitable for use in high performance computers.

Another advantage of magnetic core memory was its capacity. With small biases connected in a matrix, ferrite-core memory could store large amounts of data in a relatively compact space, making it an ideal choice for use in military aircraft on-board computers. But this design had disadvantages – one of the most serious problems was sensitivity to magnetic fields, which could lead to damage or loss of data.

Memory on magnetic cores:

Subsequently, such memory was used in many civil and military computers until the late 70s: in particular, it was used by the on-board computers of American bombers and fighters, and it flew into orbit on the reusable Space Shuttle until the early 2000s.

Wang An received a patent for his invention in 1955, unfortunately, his colleague Wo Weidong did not live to see this day, having died due to illness. But a little earlier, in 1951, Harvard University stopped funding the Mark IV, and Wang An left this educational institution to found his own company, Wang Laboratories. The startup’s first major deal was the sale of a patent for Wang An’s memory to IBM Corporation for $500,000. It would seem that this business could be curtailed, but Wang An competently disposed of the money received – his company began to produce pocket and desktop calculators, and in the 70s mastered the assembly of special personal computers for word processing “Wang”. The machine was equipped with a built-in CRT display and a streamer based on a conventional audio cassette.

Dedicated typing computer Wang2200:

The computers were a huge commercial success, driving the company to more than $30 million in profits and growing its workforce to 1,400 employees. However, over time, things went from bad to worse for Wang Laboratories: “specialized” computers were forced out of the market by “universal” personal computers from IBM and Apple on more modern and faster hardware platforms with more advanced text editors, and in the calculator segment, its products were replaced by cheaper ones. Japanese, and later – Chinese models. Gradually, the company began to generate losses, and in 1992 began bankruptcy proceedings. The remains of Wang Laboratories were acquired by the Dutch company Getronics, which in 2007 was resold to KPN Corporation, and a year later to CompuCom, after which Wang An’s organization finally ceased to exist. Its founder himself died on March 24, 1990 in Boston at the age of 70, two years before the collapse of his own business.

Wang An was a visionary computer engineer and inventor who made significant contributions to the development of IT technology. The magnetic core memory he invented and the “text computer” changed the way people worked and opened up new avenues for the development of the computer industry. And his entrepreneurial spirit has inspired generations of computer engineers to build careers and businesses in the IT industry. We can say that Wang An is a vivid example of the “American dream” that came true, when a young emigrant scientist without start-up capital, relying only on his own knowledge, built a successful multi-million dollar business from scratch, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world used his products. Very few succeed.

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