A building at Iowa State University is known as the Durham Computation Center. Most likely, most of the students don’t even notice it as they walk by. The world’s first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, was built right here in Ames, Iowa, in the basement of the Physics Building, around 1939. There is a copy of that computer inside. Just that fact should be enough to turn people off. The machine that made the digital age possible wasn’t made in Silicon Valley. A math and physics professor named John Atanasoff and a graduate student named Clifford Berry built it at a land-grant university in the middle of the Midwest.
That’s not a small note. It was confirmed by a federal judge in 1973, who said that Atanasoff was, in fact, the person who invented the electronic digital computer. But Iowa State University never became the name that everyone talks about when they talk about where modern computers came from. It’s kind of funny that a university that was founded on the idea of making knowledge useful and easy to get holds one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.
What Iowa State is about, though, goes back a long time before computers. In 1858, the school opened as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was one of the first land-grant institutions in the country when Iowa accepted the terms of the 1862 Morrill Act. This meant that the university was supposed to offer higher education to farmers, engineers, and working people, not just the wealthy. That idea that college should be useful and easy to get to is still a big part of everything Iowa State does.
The first campus was built on 648 acres that were bought for just over $5,000. These days, the school is in Ames on 2,000 acres and has more students than any other school in Iowa. With eight colleges, you can study anything from business to engineering to veterinary medicine. There are about 80 doctoral programs and more than 100 bachelor’s degree programs. The farm is a long way away.
It’s easy to forget how long the research history goes back because the university doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Iowa State helped with the Manhattan Project during World War II. Frank Spedding and Harley Wilhelm came up with what is now known as the Ames Process, which is a large-scale way to make high-purity uranium metal. Iowa State provided one-third of the uranium that was used in the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in history. In 1945, the university won the Army/Navy E Award for Excellence in Production. It is still the only university in the country that has a research lab run by the U.S. Department of Energy on campus.
It’s hard not to notice how seriously Iowa State takes its physical environment when you walk through the central campus. The 20-acre central lawn was named a “medallion site” by the American Society of Landscape Architects. One architect thought it was one of the twenty-five most beautiful college campuses in the country. The 1899-built Campanile still stands out against the skyline. The National Register of Historic Places has a list of many buildings. There’s a permanence to this that feels earned rather than done.
Iowa State’s sports teams, called “Cyclones,” play in the Big 12, which the school helped to create. The university’s connection to Division I sports gives it a public profile that some research-only schools don’t have. The sports, on the other hand, feel like an extra layer on top of something deeper, not like the thing that holds everything together.
Still, it’s worth wondering if Iowa State gets the national attention it deserves. Most likely not. Universities that make contributions that are quieter and more steady are often overlooked in favor of universities that make contributions that are louder. But a digital computer, a uranium process, and decades of research in agriculture and engineering point to a university that has been doing important work for a long time without wanting anyone to know.
