Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jane Smiley almost didn’t come across the subject of her latest novel, former Iowa State physics professor, Dr. John Atanasoff.

Her former husband, William Silag, who was sitting at their table typing on their “ancient” 1985 computer, threw his arm up in the air just as he had finished [“The Invention of the Electronic Digital Computer at Iowa State College, 1930-1942,”] and he lost everything, said Smiley.

Silag had to talk his way through the information again and Smiley had to listen to it all again, but this time, it stuck in her mind for good.

When she was approached to do a biography on Norman Borlaug, Smiley rejected the idea because Borlaug was alive at the time and she didn’t want him to be able to object to her work.

She instead asked if they knew who invented the computer, and the reply was no.

“Well there’s your story,” she said.

Smiley’s lecture Thursday, March 3, in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union was a part of the National Affairs Series on Innovation where she discussed her new non-fiction novel, “The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer,” to a full crowd.

The lecture and novel focuses on the bigger picture of how the computer on Smiley’s desk got to her in the first place, something Smiley says “is one of the most peculiar tales of the 20th century.”

“The lineage is clear and the question is not who invented the first computer…[it’s] how did my MacBook Air come to me, and I believe this story is the true story of that,” Smiley said.

Smiley said that she asked Atanasoff’s son if his father wanted to win the Nobel Prize, and his son said that his father was sad about not winning it and did, in fact, seek recognition later on for what he had created. Smiley felt that Atanasoff lead a successful life in that he did things his own way.

He took what he had, [$650], and he did what he could with it, and it worked and that’s what worked. That’s a happy life, she said.

In the audience was Delwyn Bluhm, Ph.D, who was a part of the team in 1994-1998 which replicated the original ABC, Atanasoff-Berry Computer, built in 1937. The group was lead by former ISU professor, John Gustafson, who Smiley says also helped her correct the details of the novel.

There was speculation in 1973 through the ‘90s whether or not ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, built and introduced by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1947 after being worked on at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first digital computer to exist.

Due to Atanasoff’s World War Two duties, there was no patent for his and Berry’s model until the machine was discovered and thrown out in the ‘60s.

As the ABC-replication was completed before the dawn of the new millennium, the digital computer created by Atanasoff and his graduate engineering student partner Berry was proven as the true first digital computer to be constructed.

Using original purchase orders made by Dr. Atanasoff for transite piping that worked as storage devices at the time, Bluhm said he and his teammates ordered the remaining 6-feet transite piping left from the same company that gave 6-feet of the same materials to Atanasoff forty years earlier.

It would take two years, but the Iowa State scientists would create a nearly-exact replication of Atanasoff’s and Berry’s machine.

“It was proven to the world that it was a working model,” said Bluhm. “I think that confirmed everything they had said.”

After questions concluded, Smiley signed copies of her book.

Smiley’s next project is a trilogy called “The Last 100 Years,” which is about an Iowa family from 1920-2019, five kids and their descendants.

One of the characters is the “naughty,” eldest son who goes to Iowa State. She is done with the first volume and is a third of the way through the second volume and plans on completing the trilogy in the next couple of years.

Smiley’s favorite thing about being involved with the Atanasoff project was how interesting it was.

“It was just too fascinating for words,” she said after the lecture, eating a piece of cake as the lights were being turned off above.