Berkeley, Edmund Callis

Dates:

Active 1923

Active 1980

Biographical notes:

Berkeley joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 and worked at Dahlgren Laboratory as a mathematician. There, he was assigned to Howard Aiken's Harvard Laboratory to work on the sequential calculator project (Mark II). After leaving the Navy in 1946 he returned to Prudential Insurance. At Prudential, Berkeley worked on a "hazards project" that convinced him that nuclear war was the greatest hazard facing humankind. After Prudential abandoned the project, Berkeley left Prudential and established Berkeley Associates in 1948 (incorporated as Berkeley Enterprises, Inc. in 1954). Berkeley wrote one of the first books on electronic computers for a general audience, Giant Brains, Or Machines that Think (1949), and began research on robotics. In 1947 he helped found the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, renamed the Association for Computing Machinery in 1948,

and served as its first secretary. He published a quarterly, the Roster of Organizations in the Field of Automatic Computing Machinery (renamed the Computing Machinery Field, and eventually retitled Computers and Automation), which developed into a monthly journal in 1951. Most of Berkeley's endeavors were based on the premise that helping the common man to think logically would lead to the end of the nuclear threat. Berkeley was active in the peace movement and in 1958 became involved with the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) led by Norman Cousins. Berkeley published the Greater Boston Area SANE Newsletter and later the Newsletter for the Boston Committee for Disarmament and Peace.

From the description of Edmund C. Berkeley papers, 1923-1980. (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). WorldCat record id: 62481286