Jewish Invention Myths: The Computerized Automated Drafting Machine

One of the reasons I like to address the various ‘jewish invention’ myths is because in so doing I often learn quite a lot of specific information about the true – and almost always Western European/North American – origins of a lot of the ideas, inventions and concepts that have created the modern world.

Hence when I see a jew credited with ‘inventing’ something then I tend to immediately check it, because nine times out of ten it is absolute nonsense and/or there is some intellectual dispute as to their priority.

A good example of this the Computerized Automated Drafting Machine which Pam Karp credits to the jewish inventor and businessman Joseph Gerber (1) who allegedly first created it in the early 1960s. (2)

A Computerized Automated Drafting Machine is basically an early version of what we’d call today ‘Computer-Aided Design’ (or CAD for short) whereby a computer assists the designer in making the technical design drawings necessary as accurate as possible, because accuracy is at a premium in this industry for obvious reasons (after all you want to be able to fit the right amount of seats in say your aircraft and not have to lessen that number because somebody couldn’t quite draw straight).

The problem with this is that it simply isn’t true since the first control system for a CAD interface was actually developed in 1957 by Patrick Hanratty and called ‘PRONTO’, (3) while the first Computerized Automated Drafting Machine called ‘Sketchpad’ was invented in 1961 at MIT by Ivan Sutherland. (4)

As David Weisberg explains:

‘Most histories of the CAD industry credit Ivan Sutherland with developing the first interactive graphic system for engineering design and drafting. His project, which also started in 1961, was called SKETCHPAD and was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT. Sutherland used the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Lab, a huge machine that was one of the fastest systems then in existence. While Tim Johnson expanded upon Sutherland’s work to produce three dimensional data models and graphic images, the work at Lincoln Lab was never intended to end up as a commercial product.’ (5)

Joseph Gerber isn’t even mentioned by Weisberg!

Why?

Because Gerber in truth didn’t invent anything new per se; he just built a version of what Hanratty and Sutherland had already created a year or two later and then commercialized and profited from it.

So no Joseph Gerber didn‘t invent the Computerized Automated Drafting Machine: Patrick Hanratty and Ivan Sutherland did!

References

(1) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388

(2) Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gerber#Drafting,_electronics,_and_CAD

(3) https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/patrick-hanratty-and-manufacturing-consulting-services

(4) https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/the-first-commercial-cad-system

(5) Ibid.