On the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, there is a building that most people pass by without giving it a second look. The Center for Durham Computation. A replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the first electronic digital computer in history, is located inside behind glass on the ground floor. It was constructed in this basement in the late 1930s by a graduate student and a mathematics professor. It’s likely that the majority of visitors don’t fully comprehend what they are viewing. It’s possible that Iowa State has always been that kind of organization—doing amazing things in places where people aren’t quite paying attention.
The university didn’t begin with lofty goals in the Silicon Valley sense when it was founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm. The original campus was built on 648 acres of land that cost slightly more than $5,000. The name Story County, Iowa, doesn’t exactly shout “scientific revolution.” However, in that flatland environment, something subtly remarkable began to take hold. The Morrill Act of 1862, a federal policy that radically changed American higher education by establishing land-grant universities intended to make higher education accessible to common people, not just the elite, was first adopted by Iowa. From the beginning, Iowa State was founded on that idea, and it seems that the school has never fully abandoned its egalitarian ethos.
Today’s campus, which spans about 2,000 acres, gives the impression that it developed naturally rather than through design committee. Named for one of the university’s most influential early presidents, Beardshear Hall, the main administrative structure, continues to serve as a quiet, authoritative anchor for the campus. After taking over in 1891, William Beardshear hired serious faculty and expanded programs while maintaining the school’s pragmatic identity, effectively bringing the institution into the modern era. He realized something crucial: there is no conflict between research and practical application, and a university can be both useful and rigorous.
This philosophy manifested itself in amazing ways. Iowa State made a direct contribution to the Manhattan Project during World War II. The Ames Process, a technique for producing large amounts of high-purity uranium metal, was created by researchers under the guidance of Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm. Ames, Iowa provided one-third of the uranium used in the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in history. In 1945, the Army/Navy E Award for Excellence in Production was given to the university. It remains the only American university with a physical Department of Energy research laboratory on campus. People are often surprised by that detail.
Perhaps the most interesting story in the university’s history is that of John Atanasoff. One night in 1937, he drove to Illinois in an attempt to decompress after becoming frustrated with the shortcomings of the available computation techniques. Somewhere along the way, the idea for the electronic digital computer was born. He drew it up. returned. Clifford Berry, a graduate student, helped build it in a basement. Before a federal judge formally acknowledged in 1973 that Atanasoff, not the more well-known ENIAC team, had created the electronic digital computer, the rest, as they say, had to fight decades of legal battles. It turns out that history is not always linear.
Tens of thousands of students are currently enrolled in Iowa State’s eight colleges, which offer programs in everything from engineering, design, and business to veterinary medicine (Iowa State founded the nation’s first state veterinary college in 1879). It is regarded as one of the country’s top doctoral universities for research activity. The Big 12 is where the Cyclones play. The campus continues to expand. The extent to which this one university, situated in the middle of Iowa on a small plot of farmland, subtly influenced our world is still unknown to the general public. However, if you take the time to look closely, the evidence can be found in that glass case on Durham’s ground floor.
