Herman Heine Goldstine (1913 – 2004) built the world’s first big computer (18,000 vacuum tubes!) at the Aberdeen labs during World War II.
But the serendipitous placement of the young mathematician in a lab that needed maximal calculations almost didn’t happen. As Goldstine recalled, in a much-later interview:
I got notification to go into the Army in July something of 1942, and I was sent to the Air Force in Stockton, California. …I got orders to leave Stockton from the Adjutant General [to go work on math at Aberdeen], and simultaneously I got orders from the local post to proceed to I’ve-forgotten-where on the way to Japan or some eastern place.
I called the commanding general, and he said, “Which do you want to do? ” I said, “I want to take the Aberdeen post.” And he said, “Well, the orders from the Adjutant General in Washington obviously take precedence over the orders from a post adjutant in some fort in Stockton, California.” “Son” he said, ”if I were you, I would get out of the camp, if you’ve got an auto,” he said, “I’d get in the auto, and start driving. Let the paper work catch up later on, because otherwise you’ll just have an impossible time.” So I got in the car and drove east.
Goldstine’s interviewer Albert W Tucker was not only a great eliciter of other people’s stories, he was also a great story-teller himself–Tucker invented the Prisoners’ Dilemma “story” to make a game theory paradox more accessible. If you enjoy reading scientists’ stories first hand, I recommend the many interviews Tucker did for Princeton’s math history project.
For more Goldstine stories, I recommend the recent Biographical memoir (pdf file) in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, June, 2006.