C. Bradford Sheppard was an American working as a radio engineer for Hazeltine Electronics during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. Sheppard, who worked on

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

in the design office, wished to fight

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

in the armed forces but was turned down by the US Army due to blindness in one eye. He then asked

Soviet intelligence This is a list of historical secret police organizations. In most cases they are no longer current because the regime that ran them was overthrown or changed, or they changed their names. Few still exist under the same name as legitimate police fo ...

to arrange

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

citizenship for himself and his family so that he could join the Soviet army. When the Soviets made clear he would not be allowed to fight he broke off all contact. Soviet intelligence assigned Sheppard the cover name MASTER or MASTER CRAFTSMAN. After World War II, C. Bradford Sheppard was part of the original Eckert & Mauchly team of electrical engineers who designed and built the first digital computers, notably the

ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first Computer programming, programmable, Electronics, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was ...

EDVAC EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. It was built by Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with ORDVAC, it was a successor to the ENIAC. ...

, and

UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and ...

machines. In particular, he invented some of the first digital delay systems, also known as digital memory, which was based on sending sound waves down a mercury-filled cylinder. C. Bradford Sheppard was one of the teachers in the original

Moore School Lectures ''Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic Digital Computers'' (popularly called the "Moore School Lectures") was a course in the construction of electronic digital computers held at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrica ...

, given during the summer of 1946. It is trivial to demonstrate that C. Bradford Sheppard was not a Soviet spy, as the Soviets never held information on the digital computers he helped develop as part of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. These allegations were part of the infamous McCarthy campaign and were rebutted by Mauchly himself when a hearing was eventually afforded him.

Venona

The following messages decrypted by the

Venona project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, u ...

reference Sheppard: *1589, 1590 KGB New York to Moscow, 30 September 1943 *886 KGB New York to Moscow, 22 June 1944 *943 KGB New York to Moscow, 4 July 1944

References

*Isaac L. Auerbach J. Presper Eckert, Robert F. Shaw and C. Bradford Sheppard, "Mercury Delay Line Memory Using a Pulse Rate of Several Megacycles, " Proceedings of the l.R.E., Aug. 1949, pp. 855. *John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, ''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). {{DEFAULTSORT:Sheppard, C. Bradford American people in the Venona papers