George R. Stibitz; Inventor of 1st Electric Calculator

George Robert Stibitz, who as a young research mathematician invented a primitive electric device that added numbers, leading many to credit him as the father of the modern digital computer, has died at his home. He was 90.

Stibitz, professor emeritus at Dartmouth Medical School, died Tuesday.

Stibitz earned a doctorate in physics from Cornell University in 1930 and became a research mathematician at AT&T; Bell Laboratories, where he developed powerful computers used to direct antiaircraft artillery in World War II.

Bell and others have called Stibitz the father of the modern digital computer because he designed the first electrical digital computer, changing the way computers were made, Bell spokesman Robert Ford said.

There is some dispute over that title because other inventors have said they did equally significant things at the same time as or earlier than Stibitz.

In 1937, Stibitz built a primitive binary addition machine on his kitchen table using dry cell batteries, metal strips from a tobacco can and flashlight bulbs soldered to wires from two telephone relays. A replica is in the Smithsonian Institution.

Stibitz and Bell engineer Samuel Williams expanded the adder into the Model I Complex Calculator.

In 1940, Stibitz demonstrated what is believed to be the first remote computer operation, sending problems through a Teletype from Dartmouth College to a Bell Labs computer in New York City.

He joined the Dartmouth Medical School faculty in 1964, and found a way to use computers to teach complex medical problems such as tracking the motion of oxygen in the lungs and brain cell anatomy.

Stibitz was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 and to the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983.