CORPORATIONS: The Brain Builders

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"THINK." IBM's new brain is a logical extension of the company's famed slogan, "THINK." In the age of giant electronic brains, IBM's President Thomas J. Watson Jr. is applying to machines the slogan which his father, IBM's Board Chairman Thomas J. Watson Sr., applied only to men. President Watson hopes to mechanize hundreds of processes which require the drab, repetitive "thought" of everyday business. Thus liberated from grinding routine, man can put his own brain to work on problems requiring a function beyond the capabilities of the machine: creative thought. Says Watson: "Our job is to make automatic a lot of things now done by slow and laborious human drudgery. A hundred years ago there was an industrial revolution in which seven to ten horsepower was put behind each pair of industrial hands in America. Today we're beginning to put horsepower behind office hands, electric energy in the place of brain power."

IBM is not the only company with the idea of automating U.S. offices. In the fast-growing business equipment industry, such big firms as National Cash Register, Burroughs Corp. and Remington Rand are busy making everything from adding machines to the new electronic computers. But IBM is the biggest of all with 25% of the two billion dollar industry.

IBM, with orders for 14 of its Model 702 electronic computers (renting at $20,000 a month), has already delivered 19 giant computers of an earlier model—the 701. Almost no job under the industrial sun is too tough for IBM's electronic brains if the problem can be reduced to a formula. The Atomic Energy Commission has three 701 computers, uses them to figure out incredibly complex problems on its nuclear production line. The Navy has a 701 keeping track of inventories and shipments, calculating when to reorder thousands of different items and how much to buy. IBM has just delivered a new NORC computer (TIME, Dec. 13) to the Navy; it cost $2,500,000 to build, can do one billion calculations daily.

Even bigger electronic brains are being readied for the Air Force's supersecret "Project Lincoln." These computers will one day direct the defense of North America by calculating the course, speed and altitude of approaching enemy planes, then firing guided missiles to intercept them. A 701 has gone to work for the Weather Bureau, and will attempt to make weather forecasting an exact science. Weathermen will feed into it hundreds of reports on rainfall, temperature, humidity, expect that the brain will be able to predict accurate weather for any place in the U.S. 48 hours in advance.

On the West Coast, almost every aircraft company has at least one big IBM computer. At Lockheed, for example, a brain is given all the characteristics of a plane, e.g., weight, wing stress, etc., then "flown" at imaginary speeds, put into dives, etc. Swiftly and accurately, the brain tells what would happen in real flight. In its spare time, the brain solves production problems by coordinating thousands of workers with thousands of parts flowing into plane assembly lines.