Samuel Hawks Caldwell (January 15, 1904 – October 12, 1960) was an American electrical engineer, known for his contributions to the early computers.
Early life and education
Caldwell enrolled at MIT in 1921, where he completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. His M.Sc. thesis was entitled Electrical characteristics and theory of operation of a dry electrolytic rectifier (1926). In his doctoral studies he worked on analog computers with Vannevar Bush, developing the Differential Analyzer. His Sc.D., advised by Bush, was entitled The Extension and Application of Differential Analyzer Technique in the Solution of Ordinary Differential Equations (1933).
In 1934, he joined the faculty of the electrical engineering department as an assistant professor.
World War II and Later Work
During World War II, Caldwell was a chief within the fire control section of the National Defense Research Committee. For his work during WWII, he earned a Medal for Merit, the Naval Ordnance Development Award, and the King's Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom from Great Britain. At the time, the Medal for Merit was the highest civilian honor granted by the United States.
After the war, he led the MIT Center of Analysis, where he reluctantly gave way to digital computing by initiating the Rockefeller Electronic Computer (RED) and supporting the Project Whirlwind. The centre closed around 1950, after which Caldwell continued as a faculty member, being the advisor to both David A. Huffman (1953) and Edward J. McCluskey (1956).
In 1959, Caldwell published a paper describing his work on the "Sinotype," which was one of the first efforts at typesetting and compositing the Chinese language with a computer. This program, which converted keystrokes into characters, has been described as the first instance of autocomplete.
Publications
William H. Timbie and Henry Harold Higbie and Caldwell, Essentials of alternating currents, Wiley, 1939 Electrical Engineering Research at M.I.T. : an appreciation MIT, 1948 Analog and special purpose computing machines 1949 (xviii+686 pages)