Editing John Mauchly (section)

==Biography==
John W. Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907, to Sebastian and Rachel (Scheidemantel) Mauchly in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family was of German descent, and his father spoke German, but Mauchly didn't grow up speaking it as it was not spoken in the family.<ref>{{cite interview |last=Mauchly |first=John  |subject-link=John Mauchly |interviewer=Nancy Stern |title=Oral Histories - John Mauchly |publisher=[[American Institute of Physics]] |location=Ambler, Pennsylvania |url=https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/31773 |access-date=May 25, 2024 |quote=It shouldn’t have been rough, because my father spoke German. But he never spoke it in the family. We came from a family in Ohio where German was apparently a rather common tongue, and my mother’s maiden name was Scheidermann so her family, you might say, was on the German side too, and so if they had spoken German in the family, why, I might have had that as a second language. But they didn’t do that.}}</ref> He moved with his parents and sister, Helen Elizabeth (Betty), at an early age to Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Sebastian Mauchly obtained a position at the [[Carnegie Institution of Washington]] as head of its Section of Terrestrial Electricity. As a youth, Mauchly was interested in science, and in particular with electricity, and as a young teenager was known to fix neighbors' electric systems. Mauchly attended E.V. Brown Elementary School in Chevy Chase and McKinley Technical High School in Washington, DC. At McKinley, Mauchly was extremely active in the debate team, was a member of the national honor society, and became editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper, Tech Life. After graduating from high school in 1925, he earned a scholarship to study engineering at [[Johns Hopkins University]]. He subsequently transferred to the physics department, and without completing his undergraduate degree, instead earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1932.<ref name="Papers">{{cite web |title=John W. Mauchly Papers |url=http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/ead/detail.html?id=EAD_upenn_rbml_PUSpMsColl925 |website=Penn Libraries |publisher=University of Pennsylvania |access-date=April 4, 2020}}</ref>

From 1932 to 1933, Mauchly served as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins University where he concentrated on calculating energy levels of the formaldehyde spectrum. Mauchly's teaching career truly began in 1933 at [[Ursinus College]] where he was appointed head of the physics department, where he was, in fact, the only staff member.<ref name="Papers"/>

In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took a Defense Training Course for Electronics at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering. There he met the lab instructor, [[J. Presper Eckert]] (1919–1995), with whom he would form a long-standing working partnership. Following the course, Mauchly was hired as an instructor of electrical engineering and in 1943, he was promoted to assistant professor of electrical engineering. Following the outbreak of World War II, the [[United States Army Ordnance Department]] contracted the Moore School to build an electronic computer which, as proposed by Mauchly and Eckert, would accelerate the recomputation of artillery firing tables.<ref name="Papers"/>

In 1959, Mauchly left Sperry Rand and started Mauchly Associates, Inc. One of Mauchly Associates' notable achievements was the development of the Critical Path Method (CPM) which provided for automated construction scheduling. Mauchly also set up a consulting organization, Dynatrend, in 1967 and worked as a consultant to Sperry UNIVAC from 1973 until his death in 1980.<ref name="Papers"/>

John Mauchly died on January 8, 1980, in [[Ambler, Pennsylvania]],<ref>{{cite news |title=Computer Inventor John Mauchly Dies |url=https://www.newspapers.com/clip/55582587/john-mauchly-1907-1980/ |newspaper=Detroit Free Press |date=January 10, 1980 |page=7 |via = [[Newspapers.com]] |access-date=July 18, 2020}} {{Open access}}</ref> during heart surgery and following a long illness. His first wife, [[Mary Mauchly|Mary Augusta Walzl]], a mathematician, whom he married on December 30, 1930, drowned in 1946. John and Mary Mauchly had two children, James (Jimmy) and Sidney. In 1948, Mauchly married [[Kathleen Antonelli|Kathleen Kay McNulty]] (1921–2006), one of the six original ENIAC programmers; they had five children Sara (Sallie), Kathleen (Kathy), John, Virginia (Gini), and Eva.<ref name="Papers"/>