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rocket could have its own automatic guidance system. If we could duplicate what the EBEs had, we, too, would have the ability to explore space. In effect, the reverse engineering of solid state integrated circuitry began in the weeks and months after the crash even though William Shockley at Bell Labs was already working on a version of his transistor as early as 1946. In the summer of 1947, the scientists at Alamogordo were only aware of the solid state circuit research under way at Bell Labs and Motorola. So they pointed Nathan Twining to research scientists at both companies and agreed to help him conduct the very early briefings into the nature of the Roswell find. The army, very covertly, turned some of the Components over to research engineers for an inspection, and by the early 1950s the transistor had been invented and transistorized circuits were now turning up in consumer products as well as in military electronics systems. The era of the vacuum tube, the single piece of eighty year old technology upon which an entire generation of communications devices including television and digital computers was built, was now coming to a close with the discovery in the desert of an entirely new technology. The radio vacuum tube was a legacy of nineteenth century experimentation with electric current. Like many historic scientific discoveries, the theory behind the vacuum tube was uncovered almost by chance, and nobody really knew what it was or cared much about it until years later. The radio vacuum tube probably reached its greatest utility from the 1930s through the 1950s, until the technology we discovered at Roswell made it all but obsolete. The principle behind the radio vacuum tube, first discovered by Thomas Edison in the 1880s while he was experimenting with different components for his incandescent lightbulb, was that current, which typically flowed in either direction across a conductive material such as a wire, could be made to flow in only one direction when passed through a vacuum. This directed flow of current, called the "Edison effect, " is the scientific principle behind the illumination of the filament material inside the vacuum of the incandescent lightbulb, a technology that has remained remarkably the same for over a hundred years. But the lightbulb technology that Edison discovered back in the1880s, then put aside only to experiment with it again in the early twentieth century, also had another equally important function. Because the flow of electrons across the single filament wire went in only one direction, the vacuum tube was also a type of automatic switch. Excite the flow of electrons across the wire and the current flowed only in the direction you wanted it to. You didn't need to throw a switch to turn on a circuit manually because the vacuum tube could do that for you. Edison had actually discovered the first automatic switching device, which could be applied to hundreds of electronic products from the radio sets that | grew up with in the1920s to the communications networks and radar banks of World War II and to the television sets of the 1950s. In fact, the radio tube was the single component that enabled us to begin the worldwide communications network that was already in place by the early twentieth century. Radio vacuum tubes also had another important application that wasn't discovered until experimenters in the infant science of computers first recognized the need for them in the 1930s and then again in the 1940s. Because they were switches, opening and closing circuits, they could be programmed to reconfigure a computer to accomplish different tasks. The computer itself had, in principle, remained essentially the same type of calculating device that Charles Babbage first invented in the 1830s. It was a set of internal gears or wheels that acted as counters and a section of "memory" that stored numbers until it was their turn to be processed. Babbage's computer was operated manually by a technician who threw mechanical switches in order to input raw numbers and execute the program that processed the numbers. The simple principle behind the first computer, called by its inventor the "Analytical Engine, " was that the same machine could process an infinite variety and types of calculations by reconfiguring its parts through a switching mechanism. The machine had a component for inputting numbers or instructions to the processor; the processor itself, which completed the calculations; a central control unit, or CPU, that organized and sequenced the tasks to make sure the machine was doing the right job at the right time; a memory area for storing numbers; and finally a Component that output the results of the calculations to a type of printer: the same basic components you find in all computers even today. The same machine could add, subtract, multiply, or divide and even store numbers from one arithmetical process to the next. It could even store the arithmetical computation instructions themselves from job to job. And Babbage borrowed a punch card process invented by Joseph Jacquard for programming weaving looms. Babbage's programs could be stored on series of punch cards and fed into the computer to control the sequence of processing numbers. Though this may sound like a startling invention, it was Industrial Revolution technology that began in the late eighteenth century for the purely utilitarian challenge of processing large numbers for the British military. Yet, in concept, it was an entirely new principle in machine design that very quietly started the digital revolution. Because Babbage's machine was hand powered and cumbersome, little was done with it through the nineteenth century, and by the1880s, Babbage himself would be forgotten. However, the practical application of electricity to mechanical appliances and the delivery of electrical power along supply grids, invented by Thomas Edison and refined by Nikola Tesla, gave new life to the calculation machine. The concept of an automatic calculation machine would, inspire American inventors to devise their own electrically powered calculators to 70