Major General G M Barnes

Life and Career of Major General Gladeon Marcus Barnes

His Army career was in research, he was a ballistics and ordnance expert and rose to high office for his development work particularly during WWII.

In 1938 he became the Chief of the Research & Engineering Office of Ordnance. After the war he was appointed Chief of the Research & Development service Office of Ordnance

General Devers had been involved with the Ordnance Department in designing the famous ‘Sherman Tank’. The first Heavy Tank …60 tons was built for the U. S. Army at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Eddystone. It was formally presented by the Vice President of the Company, William Henry Harman to the then Brigadier General Gladeon Marcus Barnes, Army Ordnance Dept. on Dec. 8^th, 1941. The tank was armed with a 75 mm ( 3") cannon in the turret.

General Devers, having worked with and knowing the brigadier, chose Gladeon Barnes as a member of his research team engaged in observing the effectiveness of U.S. weaponry in the Mediterranean Theatre of War from December 1942 to January 1943.

At the formal dedication ceremony on February 15^th, 1946, just before pressing a button that set the ENIAC to work on a new set of hydrogen bomb equations, Major General Gladeon Barnes spoke of “man’s endless search for scientific truth.” In turning on the ENIAC, he said he was “formally dedicating the machine to a career of scientific usefulness.” Barnes, like many others in the aftermath of World War II, failed to find irony in the situation: that the “scientific truth” the ENIAC began to calculate was the basis for ultimate weapons of destruction.

In a ceremony in 1996 to mark the 50^th Anniversary of the ENIAC project, Vice President Al Gore praised Gladeon Marcus Barnes and his team for the work they had done for the future of mankind.

THE ENIAC PROJECT

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator

Army Ballistics Research Laboratory goal:

automate ballistics calculations

differential analyser: one month per table

Mauchly and Eckert

Chief designers, had worked with differential analyser Moore School of Engineering University of Pennsylvania

1943: Mauchly proposed ENIAC

von Neumann mathematician involved near ENIAC project’s end

Los Alamos atomic bomb lab consultant heavy computational demands

The finished machine (1946) basketball-court size

18,000 vacuum tubes

140 kilowatts

forced-air cooling system

plugboard programming

cost: $500,000

severe reliability problems

50 percent down-time

The hydrogen bomb simulation first problem solved

on ENIAC Von Neumann’s suggestion.

Left to Right: J. Presper Eckert, Jr., Chief Engineer; Professor J. G. Brainerd, Supervisor; Sam Feltman, Chief Engineer for Ballistics, Ordnance Department; Captain H. H. Goldstine, Liaison Officer; Dr. J. W. Mauchly, Consulting Engineer; Dean Harold Pender, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania; General G. M. Barnes, Chief of the Ordnance Research and Development Service; Colonel Paul N. Gillon, Chief, Research Branch of the Army Ordnance Research and Development Service.

^{U.S. Army Photo" entitled}

^{"ENIAC OFFICIALS", from the archives of Mrs. Kay Gillon.}