Data source is Douglas Mumma, 2123 Farmington Place, Livermore, CA 94550, email = doug@mumma.org
Data source is Roberta Mumma Hamlington, e-mail romham@aol.com
Title: Oral history interview with Robert E. Mumma
Call Number: OH 73
Interviewee: Mumma, Robert E.
Interviewer: William Aspray
Repository: Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Description: Transcript, 42 pp.
Abstract: Mumma describes National Cash Register's (now NCR) early years in the electronic computing industry. Mumma went to work for NCR in 1939 in their newly formed Electronic Research Department. Before the war he designed gas thyratron tubes for use as decimal counters in an electronic calculator, a working model of which was completed before the war. Mumma discusses the contact NCR had during this period with MIT and Harvard, and reviews some of the early research projects and personnel at NCR. He describes in guarded terms work NCR did before the war for NDRC on a secret communication system and during the war on a high speed counter for measuring muzzle velocity of cannon shells. He recounts how war-time work on cryptanalytic equipment took all the company's effort, and how this shaped company policy resisting government contract work after the war.
The second half of the interview describes NCR's move into commercial electronic computing in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, with such products as cash registers with punched tape, accounting machines with electronic multiplier, high-speed printers, bar code readers, point-of-sale terminals, and magnetic ink character recognition equipment. Mumma explains how NCR considered purchasing the Eckert-Mauchly Company prior to its acquisition of Computer Research Corporation, as a way of entering the computer field. The division of labor between NCR-Dayton and the NCR-CRC division are considered, as are the difficulties of promoting, developing, and marketing electronic technology in the mechanically-oriented environment of NCR headquarters in Dayton.
Subject(s): United States. -- Office of Scientific Research and Development. -- National Defense Research Committee ; Optical character recognition devices ; Office equipment and supplies industry -- History ; NCR Corporation ; National Cash Register Company ; Mumma, Robert E. ; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. -- Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ; Hauck, Erwin A. ; Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (Philadelphia, Pa.) ; Cryptography ; Computer Research Corporation ; Computer industry -- United States -- History ; Banks and banking -- Automation
Citation: Robert E. Mumma, OH 73. Oral history interview by William Aspray, 19 April 1984, Dayton, Ohio. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
This interview can be downloaded at:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/pdf.phtml?id=1
or
URL: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/oral_histories/transcripts/mumma .html
Robert Mumma Oral History (15 September 1995)
(Page numbers refer to pages in the printed transcript held at the IEEE History Center. On-line, they should be used as relative measures)
1-2 Born in Manila in 1905, came to the US in 1914. Went to Purdue, taught at school.
Joined General Motors Radio at Dayton, worked with Joe Desch.
2-3 Worked for the Dayton police as a radio operator
3-5 Joined Frigidaire at Dayton, together with Desch
5-6 Desch joined NCR, Mumma in charge of Frigidaire development department. Automation trends at Frigidaire
6-7 Mumma joined NCR, worked on electronic counter using gas thyratrons
7-8 Desch and Mumma's work on tube design
8-11 Mechanics vs. electronics at NCR. The multiplier
11-13 NCR Electrical Department's work for NDRC at the beginning of the war
13-14 Problems of early electronic calculation. Co-inventions with Desch
14-17 NCR Electrical Department's work for the Navy. The Bombe project, technical challenges
17-20 Desch's nervous breakdown. Mumma in charge
20-22 The Navy project, and Mumma and Desch's electronic work at NCR
22-23 Mechanics vs. electronics at NCR
23-25 Mumma on photographs given by Debbie Anderson (Joe Desch's daughter)
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NCR
National Cash Register
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NDRC
National Defense Research Council
RNs RNs RNs Celebrations! Now Online
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Ex-NCR engineer dies at 97
Mumma played role in WWII project to break German code
By Jim DeBrosse
Dayton Daily News
LEBANON | Robert E. Mumma, a retired NCR engineer who helped pioneer some of the earliest forms of computers and who managed NCR's top-secret Bombes project during World War II, died Friday at the Otterbein Home. He was 97.
During the war, Mr. Mumma, an electrical engineer by training, was business manager of NCR's electrical research department, then part of the U.S. Navy's top-secret National Computing Machine Laboratory for designing and manufacturing state-of-the-art codebreaking machinery.
The laboratory inside NCR's Building 26 produced 120 Bombes that, beginning in the fall of 1943, were instrumental in cracking a variety of German Enigma codes, including the toughest ones used by the Nazi U-boats.
Mr. Mumma was the top assistant to Joseph R. Desch, chief of NCR's electrical research department who designed the Bombes for the U.S. Navy. When Desch suffered a nervous breakdown in November 1944, Mr. Mumma took over as head of the laboratory until the end of the war.
Born to United Brethren missionaries in the Philippines, Mr. Mumma attended elementary school in Dayton and Lewisburg and graduated from Lewisburg High School. He then attended Purdue University and graduated from Otterbein College.
His first love, however, was electronics and the budding technology of radio. He worked for General Motors in both its Delco Radio Division and its Frigidaire Division.
Mr. Mumma holds a number of early patents in the design and construction of the first analog fixed-program computer. He retired from NCR in 1969 as head of Peripheral Equipment Engineering with a total of 36 patents in his name.
He is survived by two daughters, Roberta M. Thiele of Tennessee and Ellen M. Kneisley of Englewood, and eight grandchildren.
A memorial service will be at 1 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Otterbein-Lebanon United Methodist Church, 585 N. Ohio 741, in Lebanon. Friends may call from noon until the time of service. Burial will follow at 3:15 p.m. at Roselawn Cemetery in Lewisburg.
Contributions may be made to the Fairview United Methodist Church, 828 W. Fairview Ave., Dayton, OH 45406, or to the Ottterbein Home, Lebanon, OH 45036.
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[From the Dayton Daily News: 02.04.2003]
Another great link to a story about Robert.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/enigma/enigma_index .html
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Electric calculators got their start in Dayton
By Jim DeBrosse
Staff Writer
Updated 1:15 AM Monday, May 11, 2009
Calculators are so small and cheap, you can find them just about anywhere — on cell phones, wristwatches, even shopping carts.
But the world’s first electronic calculator was about the size of a house door and could perform addition only, up to three digits at a time. It was invented here, in 1938, by NCR engineers Joe Desch and Bob Mumma, who proved with their working prototype that electronic tubes could store and track data instantly without mechanical assistance.
The size of the “accumulator,” as NCR dubbed it, “is a riot,” said Mary Oliver, head of Dayton History’s NCR Archive, where the device is in storage. “But I don’t think it would be stretching things to say this was a step on the way to computer technology.”
It was a big enough step that NCR and IBM battled in court over the patent rights to the technology — the first of many such disputes between the two rivals. (NCR won this one.)
Desch and Mumma went on to expand and refine their invention, and in 1942, unveiled their first practical electronic calculator — a 350-tube behemoth about the size of a dishwasher. It could add, subtract and multiply up to 10 digits in a fraction of a second, but it could not divide.
Several months later, the U.S. Navy asked Desch to head a top-secret project at NCR to develop a computerlike machine that could break the Nazi submarine codes. Desch and Mumma dropped work on the calculator and, by August 1943, a code-breaking machine, the NCR Bombe, was in production. Historians say the Bombe hastened the end of World War II.
After the war, NCR went back to perfecting an electronic calculator. By the early 1970s, a basic desktop model sold for $400.
Editor’s note: This is part of an intermittent series on Dayton’s history.
Find this article at:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/dayton-news/electric-calculators-got-their-start-in-dayton-114526.html
1920: Adams, Champaign, Ohio
Marion Mumma 40
Fostoria Mumma 37
Robert E Mumma 14
Charles E Mumma 12
Mary E Mumma 9
Ruth E Mumma 7
Harry E Mumma 4
Mary E Macklin, mother-in-law, 66
1940: Harrison, Montgomery, Ohio
Robert E Mumma 34, b: Philippine Islands, research engineer
Katharine Mumma 34, b: OH
Joanna Mumma 6, b: OH
Roberta Mumma 5 b: OH
Ellen Mumma 1 b: OH
John Myers, father-in-law, 75, b: IN
Bertha Myers, mother-in-law, 64, b: PA