How was the first computer invented?
Long before laptops or smartphones, before anyone could even imagine a screen in their pocket, the world ran on pencils, paper, and people doing math by hand. Banks hired rooms full of "computers" — that was the job title! — humans who sat at desks adding numbers all day. It was slow. It was boring. And everyone knew there had to be a better way.
The breakthrough came during World War II, when the U.S. military desperately needed to calculate artillery firing tables — massive charts showing where a shell would land at every angle and distance. Each table took a human computer weeks to finish, and the army needed thousands of them. A physicist named John Mauchly and an engineer named Presper Eckert had a wild idea: what if a machine could do the math?
