Dr. Cuthbert Corwin Hurd

In 2947 Hurd worked for Union Carbide as mathematician at the United States Atomic Energy Commission facility Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He taught and later served as a technical research head under Alston Scott Householder. At Oak Ridge he supervised the installation of an IBM 602 calculating punched card machine to automate the tracking of material in the facility, and saw the potential for automating the massive amounts of computation needed for nuclear Physics research. In February 1948 he was invited to the dedication of the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), a custom-built machine in New York city. He asked if the SSEC could be used for calculations being done at Oak Ridge for the NEPA project to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor, but the demands for the SSEC produced a backlog. In the meanwhile, he requested that the first IBM 604 calculating card punch be delivered to Oak Ridge. It was, but the calculations remained slow with the limited electronics in the 604.