The Most Accomplished Man I Ever Studied
By: Randy Cassingham
Tags: Standardized Tests, History Of Technology, Teachers, IBM, Job Titles

The Most Accomplished Man I Ever Studied

Job titles don’t matter. What you DO does.

For more than 25 years, I’ve made my living writing about people. Individual, specific, real people. And the more I researched Reynold “Rey” Johnson, the more my mind was blown. He’s the most accomplished man I’ve ever studied.

Rey Johnson in 1952, as he established IBM’s West Coast lab. (Photo: IBM archives)

Born in Minnesota to Swedish immigrants, Johnson went to a private Christian school, perhaps for his entire 12 years of basic schooling, and he seems to have liked it: he then went to the University of Minnesota for his bachelor’s degree in Educational Administration, and became a high school science and math teacher in Ironwood on the western tip of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on the border with Wisconsin. Today, the town has about 5,000 residents.

At that time, there was a great new innovation in teaching developed by Benjamin Wood of Columbia University, something that totally changed the teaching profession. Let’s see if you can guess what Wood invented. Was it a) the intelligence test, b) standardized textbooks, c) recess, or d) the multiple-choice test? It seems weird to us today, because it seems so obvious now, but it was the multiple-choice test: he invented it in about 1929.

The problem Dr. Wood found, though, was it was time-consuming to score the tests. You’d think it would be easy compared to grading hand-written answers to various questions, but remember we’re talking about mass education here: thousands of schools jumped on the multiple choice bandwagon, and something easier was needed for the scoring.

Wood appealed to many office machine companies for help, and only one responded: International Business Machines. IBM president Thomas J. Watson Sr. authorized company engineers to design a machine, which takes us on a quick tangent.

Sorting Data Before There Were Computers

In the late 1800s, Herman Hollerith perfected something that was first invented in 1725 to record data by punching holes in a long ribbon of paper. Hollerith’s twist was to punch the holes in stiffer card stock. Hollerith cards or, more generically, punch cards. They were first put into wide use for the 1890 census. To produce the machines to process data punched on his cards, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. In turn, that company was merged with three others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or CTR in 1911, which in 1924 was renamed to something a little easier to say: International Business Machines, or IBM.

Hollerith cards from the IBM era (IBM photo).

So, what technology did IBM apply to the test scoring problem for Dr. Wood? The punched Hollerith card. By 1937 IBM was producing 5–10 million punch cards per day, so of course that was their solution. But it was ridiculous to even consider putting a bunch of keypunch machines in schools all over the country for kids to take tests on.

And that’s where we circle back to Reynold Johnson in little Ironwood, Michigan. He put his mind to the problem that he was having just like so many other teachers, and on his own, he came up with a better and cheaper solution. That’s right: a small-town high school teacher beat out IBM at their own game.

An Unbiased Approach

Johnson’s system didn’t use punched cards. Instead, he came up with a simple paper form where kids could answer test questions by filling in little circles using a soft-leaded pencil — a number 2 pencil. And it’s almost sure that you’ve done just that many times yourself. It was Rey Johnson who invented the system to record the answers, and score them.

Page 1 of Johnson’s patent for his test grading machine. (Image: USPTO.gov)

And where did he send his idea? To IBM! Yet after they showed Dr. Wood the description Johnson sent, company executives …rejected the solution. But Dr. Wood was friends with Thomas Watson, and called him to tell him his team made a huge mistake in rejecting Johnson’s idea. Watson not only stepped in and bought the rights to the entire system, he also hired Johnson to help to develop it into a workable machine that could be used by school systems everywhere.

No one was more surprised than Johnson, who later said “I only thought of it as strictly a lazy teacher’s gimmick.”! IBM salesmen even warned Watson that the machine would never make money. Watson’s retort: “Who wants to make money out of education?”

That shows Watson’s own Uncommon Sense, and how short-sighted his salesmen were: there were a lot of other applications that could use such a system. For instance, my ballots for elections come in the mail. Coloradans like me vote by filling in little circles, except the system was modified to use pen marks, not pencil, so it can be clear the vote hasn’t been altered by anyone.

Think

You might be aware of Thomas Watson’s personal motto, which was spreading around IBM around that time: “Think.” He clearly understood the value of thinking, and his faith in Johnson paid massive dividends, and not just because the refined version of Johnson’s system, the IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine, which they introduced to the world in 1936, sold so well in the 1930s. The descendants of that machine are still being used today!

The IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine. It’s the size of a small desk: the area on the left is for the operator’s chair. (Photo: IBM archives)

Home Run

Obviously, Johnson’s machine was a hit, and he continued working in IBM’s research lab, where he invented other things for the company. He did so well that in January 1952, Watson asked Johnson to do something truly radical: to open a research lab that was far enough away to be independent of IBM managers’ constant oversight, and where he was allowed to hire whatever researchers he wanted.

Johnson was asked to work on two different fronts: spend half time on “non-impact” printing, and half time on …anything else he wanted! Johnson went to San Jose, California — which you might recognize is now a major part of “Silicon Valley,” recruited engineers, leased and renovated a building, and was up and running by that July with a staff of 30.

One of the rules Johnson established for the lab was, it was considered a critical part of every engineer’s job to provide consultation and assistance to any other engineer in the lab when requested — an environment of cooperation, not competition.

Getting Beyond Punch Cards

Now remember that IBM was hugely invested in punched cards: it was the basis of a highly profitable business sector. The cards were stored in what they called “tub files” — huge trays with tens of thousands of cards that could be fed into early computers to analyze data. But imagine how slow that was: if you wanted to analyze the data they held, someone had to go to the tub files and pull out the specific cards needed by hand, and feed them into a computer, which itself would take some time. An IBM salesman in San Francisco took Johnson’s researchers into the field where they could see customers using this system and fully understand how inadequate it was.

By January 1953, just a year after Johnson was assigned to head west, and only six months after he assembled his team, he was highly focused on a specific solution to that problem. And what he and his team came up with was a major leap in innovation. They called it RAMAC, or the “Random Access Method of Accounting Control.” And what the heck was that? A stack of spinning disks coated with the same sort of material used in magnetic tape, but — thanks to the disks spinning around and read/write heads that moved back and forth on a thin cushion of air, it didn’t have to unwind the whole reel of tape to get something at the other end.

Johnson showing the disk platters. They were proud of the accomplishment: the RAMAC system had a window in it so operators could see them. (Photo: IBM Archives)

Does that sound somehow familiar? That’s right: Johnson invented the hard disk drive. That first RAMAC system could hold and process an incredible 5 megabytes of information or, as IBM put it, the equivalent of 64,000 punch cards! To make it even more efficient, RAMAC had another innovation: buffer memory. It was a modest start: the buffer was just 100 characters. The unit meanwhile was huge and weighed nearly a ton.

But IBM actually kept RAMAC a secret at first; by the time they announced it to commercial customers in September 1956, they had already installed several RAMACS for the military. The first commercial unit sold, in 1957, was to automaker Chrysler, who put it into its MOPAR division — their parts subsidiary — to keep track of inventory so they could order parts in when needed, rather than when they realized they were running out of something.

And by the way, IBM didn’t sell the RAMAC, it leased it — for $35,000… per year. $35,000 in 1956 is the equivalent to more than $322,000 today, but it was worth it to buyers because it saved them so much more in more efficient data processing.

Loading up the first RAMAC for delivery, 1956. (Photo: IBM archives)

But Rey Wasn’t Done Yet

Just those two inventions would constitute huge success for anyone’s career, but Johnson was far from being tapped out. In the 1960s he was working with Sony, and observed how hard it was to thread videotape into a machine for playback. Johnson, looking at that with the eyes of a schoolteacher, thought it would be too hard for kids to possibly do that, and thought if it was easier, it could lead to “video textbooks.” So he first cut the one-inch tape down to a half inch, since that would allow high enough quality, and then packaged it all into a cartridge that could self-thread into the playback machine.

Which means Johnson invented the videocassette, too.

By the time he retired from IBM in 1971, Johnson held more than 90 patents, and after his retirement, he kept inventing, including the microphonograph used in Fisher-Price’s “Talk to Me Books” — which went on to win the Toy of the Year award. In 1986, Johnson was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Ronald Reagan. Johnson died September 15, 1998 from melanoma at age 92, but his innovations will live on for generations.

Mr. Johnson may have been a small town schoolteacher with a college degree that had nothing to do with engineering or technology, but he had something more important that colleges can’t grant to any student: Uncommon Sense. IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson had it too, overruling his own executives to bring not just Johnson’s test scoring machine into the company, but Johnson himself, leading not just to billions of dollars in revenues, but whole new industries and ways to do business.

You just can’t sell someone short because they don’t have an impressive job title or Ivy League college degree. It’s what they do that really counts.