Why Is This Woman Not Famous?
Monday, December 20th, 2010
Everyone I know will occasionally Google their name to see what comes up. I’m not a modest man. I haven’t done so for a while, but for the purposes of this blog I’ve just done it. I’m lucky in that I’m the only “Gwyn Headley” in the world, so every hit relates to me in some way — it’s not like googling John Smith.
And I get 29,400 results. Not enough, I grant you, but quite a few. Now google “Evelyn Berezin”.
There are 810 results.
Why is this woman not famous?
Yes, I know, you’ve never heard of her. Neither had I.
She’s a nice old Jewish lady, lives on Long Island, probably plays a mean hand of Mah-Jong.
Oh yes — and she invented the office computer.
I love women in science and technology. Ada Lovelace, Rosalind Franklin, the stunningly beautiful Hedy Lamarr, Marie Curie — these are names we all know and revere. But who has heard of Evelyn Berezin?
And we should have done. Without Ms Berezin there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.
I sit and I stare at two computer screens all day, every day. I type on a computer keyboard. I cannot recall what I did before I had a computer, but I guess I spent a lot of time on the phone, with a notepad.
The reason I discovered Ms Berezin was because after Jacqui Norman rather cruelly mocked me in a recent Newsletter for having bought my first computer over 30 years ago, I rather idly googled “Redactron” to see if the manufacturer was still around.
It isn’t. The name is now owned by a Dutch orthopaedic bed manufacturer. I had to dig a little deeper. And I uncovered this amazing story.
In 1951 Evelyn Berezin graduated from New York University with a degree in physics. In graduate school she held an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship. She invented the first office computer in 1953 while working for the Underwood Typewriter Company. Underwood was later bought by Olivetti, which never marketed her invention.
She went to Teleregister, where she developed several real-time systems, including the first computerised airline-reservation system in the world. In 1968 she got the idea of developing a “Word Processor”, which would allow secretaries and others to write, store and edit texts instead of continually retyping them.
Ms Berezin founded the Redactron Corporation in 1969 to design, develop, and manufacture electronic word processing systems. This company built the machine I bought some ten years later for £5,000, and which I still have in my basement. You don’t throw away five grand that quickly.
It took four strong men to lift it. The cabling was the thickness of my forearm. There was no screen. The data was recorded onto two compact cassette tapes; one held the addresses, the other the letter. The Redactron merged the two. We could send out two to three hundred letters a day, compared to our competitors’ 25. When we turned it on the lights dimmed across Fitzrovia. The “printer” was an IBM Golfball electric typewriter — 60 characters a second. At full chat it sounded like a machine gun.
It made us a lot of money, because we were the first PR company in our field to have a computer, or word processor. The sheer bulk of our mailings gave us a dominant position in dealing with the UK media. Of course the others caught up in the end — after about three years — but it was a remarkable illustration of technology actually changing our lives. We got smarter and we got richer.
And it’s all thanks to Evelyn Berezin. Ma’am, I salute you.
