Clair D. Lake (1888 to 1958) was an IBM engineer and inventor who served as chief engineer for the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, known as the Harvard Mark I. He collaborated with fellow IBM engineers Francis Hamilton and Benjamin Durfee, alongside Harvard researcher Howard Aiken, to build the machine, which performed arithmetic, table lookups and logarithmic operations on numbers up to 23 digits long and was used by the Navy during the Second World War to compute artillery tables. Lake also patented the 80 column punched card and designed electromechanical components for other IBM business machines, and he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
Facts
Sources
1. IEEE Computer Society History Committee: Computer Pioneers: Clair Lake
IEEE Computer Society History CommitteeBiography headerQuote, Biography header
Born 1888; died 1958
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