How the Election Night Debut of Commercial Computing Almost Didn't Happen

Democrat Adlai Stevenson had the 1952 election all but in the bag. This was the common assumption, anyway, before that year's Election Day, and even as early poll returns began trickling in. Predictions, gleaned from pre-election voter surveys, ranged from a full-on Stevenson landslide to a thin win over the Republican challenger, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Ahead of the election, CBS News had some of its team stationed, not at polling sites or Washington DC hotel ballrooms, but the Philadelphia headquarters of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (part of Remington Rand, which eventually became Unisys).

They were tasked with reporting on the output of UNIVAC I, which was the first computer designed explicitly for commercial use. As part of a Remington Rand public relations scheme, the machine had been programmed to process early election returns and deliver projections.

"We saw it as an added feature to our coverage that could be very interesting in the future, and there was a great deal of pride that we had this exclusively," Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchor that election night, told CNN's Computerworld in 1999. "But I don't think that we felt the computer would become predominant in our coverage in any way."

At 8.30 pm, the machine delivered its first prediction. Eisenhower would win by a landslide with 100-to-1 odds. Sig Mickelson, the CBS news director, made a call: Trash the results. UNIVAC I's prediction was shelved as defective goods and election night went on in analog fashion.

At 9 pm, UNIVAC I was fed another set of numbers, with much more palatable results. Eisenhower was now the slight favorite, projected to win with 8-to-7 odds. This was finally reported on-air, but not long after, Max Woodbury, the University of Pennsylvania mathematician who wrote the machine's election prediction code, noticed a mistake. On entering the early returns for New York state, he had added an extra 0.

Without that errant 0, the computer was back to predicting 100-to-1. And by the time the electoral dust settled, it was clear that UNIVAC I had nailed it to a startling degree. Its first set of numbers had projected a win of 438 electoral votes to 93. The actual results: 442 to 89.

CBS wound up being the first network to call the race. Eventually, Rand sold 46 of the garage-sized UNIVAC I machines, each one going for about $1.5 million.