Hansen, Henry L.

Lawyer. Henry L. Hansen received his B.S. (1943) in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State College (now University) and a law degree (1951) from Willis Mitchell Law School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hansen was the Corporate Patent Counsel for Honeywell, Inc. during the ENIAC trial.

In this trial, Sperry Rand was attempting to establish the validity of patent rights they had purchased from J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly. These rights included the Electronic Numerical Integrator (ENIAC) which Eckert and Mauchly had patented in 1964. Honeywell, Inc. was trying to establish that Mauchly had obtained important concepts used in the ENIAC from examination of a device known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, during a visit to Iowa State in June, 1941.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was developed by physics professor John V. Atanasoff and physics graduate student Clifford E. Berry during World War II at Iowa State, but the computer was never patented.