In the summer of 1951, the United Kingdom held the Festival of Britain, a national exhibition held throughout the UK to promote the British contribution to science, technology, industrial design, architecture, and the arts and to commemorate the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition. British engineering firm and nascent computer developer Ferranti promised to develop an exhibit for the Festival. In late 1950, John Makepeace Bennett, an Australian employee of the firm and recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Cambridge, proposed that the company create a computer that could play the game of Nim. In Nim, players take turns removing at least one object from a set of objects, with the goal of being the player who removes the last object; gameplay options can be modeled mathematically. Bennett's suggestion was supposedly inspired by an earlier Nim-playing machine, "Nimatron", which had been displayed in 1940 at the New York World's Fair. The Nimatron machine had been designed by Edward Condon and constructed by Westinghouse Electric from electromechanical relays, and had weighed over a ton. Although Bennett's suggestion was a game, his goal was to show off the computer's ability to do mathematical calculations, as Nim is based on mathematical principles, and thus showcase Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than to entertain.