Corrections to the second printing

Figure 40, the University map got weirdly blacked out in the publisher’s process. A clean version is here.

p112 trea-tment

I have not seen the ebook version that The History Press has prepared for sale based on the second physical printing, but I am keen to hear of reader experiences with it.

Corrections to the first print edition.

I’m grateful to my readers for some of these, which have all been corrected for the most recent ebook version 2.7 published by me of 2021 and the second printing.

References

Figure 7 appears in John Dummelow, 1899-1949, Manchester: Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company Limited, 1949 as mentioned in the Figure Notes but omitted from the reference list.

Figure 43 is from a Ferranti internal report of January 1954. There is a copy in University of Manchester Special Collections NAHC/FER/C/13b.

Notes and queries

On p53 I have confused the Telecommunications Research Establishment in Malvern and the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill.

p54 Figure 38. The dot in Williams’ Figure is in Sweden, not Norway. I don’t know what installation this refers to.

The arithmetic in Figure 43 on p61 appears wrong, but only because I cropped out a line item at the top where Ferranti had also predicted £100K of commercial sales. Looking at it now, I wonder if they hit their target.

Figure 47 only shows the fog map, not the partner rainfall map.

p66 The road is Nursery Avenue, not Nursery Road.

p68 Figure 51. There is evidence that the power station was on the Trafford Park side of the canal.

p115 Ida Fitzgerald was the lone wirewoman in the University lab, and the woman photographed is not (necessarily) doing a wirewoman’s job, but she was doing it in Ferranti. So the identification of the woman in the photograph as Fitzgerald is less than likely.

p116: Alan Turing’s secretary was S J Wagstaff (SL).

p119: There is doubt as to whether Mary Croarken had worked in Hartree’s group (SL). I have somewhat mangled the physical tasks of using the Mark I and the reader is best referred back to the original sources.

p145: In the service of a throwaway gag about two and a half machines (the third Atlas machine was not sold at anything like list price) I’ve given the poorly sourced impression that the project was a failure on its own terms, but that whether or not that it is true does not obscure its considerable technical achievements.

p175: The University of Manchester has added a number of items to its online catalogue Elgar. In some cases catalogue entry numbers have changed from those in the printed catalogues I used. This may affect NAHC/MUC 5 to 9 in particular.

In Note 9, the neuron estimates were actually a million, a thousand million, and ten thousand million.

Note 38 says that the history of Noel Teulon Porter and the Half Moon Club is still to be written. After publication I came across Philip Pattenden’s article in the 2005/6 Peterhouse Annual Record, which covers most but not all of the sources I know. Thanks to the Librarian at Peterhouse College Cambridge for supplying a copy.

Note 318 on the history of the Sackville Gardens memorial would have benefited from reading Dennis A Hejhal’s perceptive article, “Turing: a bit off the Beaten Path”, Mathematical Intelligencer, 29(1), 2007 which Marjorie Senechal kindly showed me.

Over-hypen-ation and tpyos

p10 second para line 2: missing ‘been’.

p26 at Haweswater, opened in 1941 (THP)

p43, 7 lines from bottom: extra ‘was’.

p55 l-2 rec-ru-uited

The caption of Figure 45, p63 has a repeated phrase.

p92 math-should-be-atical

p110 Sun-day

p115 ma’-chines. Fig 100 thepacking

p128 Mis-sed

p157 duly-qualified

p163 second line: ‘you can’t see them both’.

p172 sWo

Notes 298, 332, 341, Fig 18: start-of-line space

authors with multiple references sometimes have additional line breaks.

Some of the Figure captions (57-61) and 112-115) got permuted. Also I do not know who owns the copyright of Figure 115 of Wilmslow Police Station.