Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) was a German civil engineer who, working largely alone in his parents’ Berlin apartment, built some of the first programmable computers. Frustrated by the tedious arithmetic of structural engineering, he set out to automate it, and in doing so arrived independently at many of the foundational ideas of computing without formal training in the field. His work is documented by the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive, hosted by the Zuse Institute Berlin, which preserves his manuscripts, drawings, and patents.
Zuse’s central achievement is the Z3, completed in 1941 and presented to scientists in Berlin on 12 May of that year. Built from about 2,000 telephone relays, it was the first working program-controlled, fully automatic computing machine. It computed in binary using floating-point numbers, and crucially it read its program from a punched film tape, so a new calculation meant feeding in a new tape rather than rewiring the machine. The original was destroyed in a 1943 air raid; a working reconstruction is held by the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
For the library’s reader, Zuse is a reminder that the history of computing is not solely an Anglo-American story. The Z3 predates the better-known ENIAC, and Zuse also designed Plankalkuel, one of the earliest high-level programming languages. His work developed in wartime isolation, cut off from the parallel efforts of Turing and others, which is part of why it took decades for his priority to be widely recognized.