Joseph Desch was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1907.
As a young boy, he fell in love with electronics.
The family didn't have a radio, and he'd never heard one.
He went into a department store, and he heard voices coming out of this box, and just figuring
out what that was fascinated him, and that's all it took.
Desch earned a scholarship to the University of Dayton, where he attended preparatory school
and college.
He really liked the brothers he had.
They weren't always able to keep up with him on electronics, but he really enjoyed it down here
While in college, Desch began working nights at Day-Fan Electric, supervising radio testing
and production.
He graduated from UD in 1929, and worked as an electrical engineer for several Dayton companies.
In 1938, the National Cash Register company hired Desch to create
an Electronic Research Laboratory.
NCR president Edward Deeds saw the promise of adding electronics to their mechanical machines.
By 1940, Desch and his colleague, Bob Mumma had developed an electronic calculator
using thyratron tubes.
With World War II raging in Europe, Desch’s lab
was awarded several military contracts.
He worked on a high-speed electronic counter that, unknown to him,
was used in the Manhattan Project.
The United States had not yet entered the war, but German U-boats were mercilessly attacking
American supply ships.
The Navy needed a way to decipher German communications to avoid attacks.
It was hoped that if we could break their code, know where they were going to be, know
what their strategy was, that we could more effectively counter the German U-boats in the Atlantic.
The German navy was using a device known as the Enigma machine.
It was an electromechanical device that scrambled the letters used in the messages sent over radio.
The Enigma machine was literally able to generate billions and billions of potential combinations
of letters that would lead to what looks like a scrambled and almost randomized message.
It was very, very complex and the Germans did not think it could be broken, and that
actually worked to our advantage.
They were so sure that their codes could not be broken that they became really kind of
lazy in using it.
By guessing at the underlying German text, British codebreakers were beginning to have
success breaking the code.
To run through the many possible combinations, they build an electromechanical device called a bombe.
This machine was helping them regularly break codes generated by the 3-rotor enigma.
But when the Germans added a 4th rotor, the number of possibilities became overwhelming.
There was no way to break the code fast enough.
The U.S. Navy wanted to use electronics to build a faster version of the bombe.
They turned to Joseph Desch.
The Navy established the Naval Computing Machine Laboratory in NCR’s Building 26.
The team faced many challenges, and Desch was under tremendous pressure
to develop a working machine.
Because he was of German descent, Desch was watched constantly.
The Navy commander sent to oversee the project lived with Desch and his wife, Dorothy, in
their 2-bedroom house in Oakwood.
He gave a tremendous amount to the war effort, not only in what he created, but it also had
a tremendous personal cost to him.
Early prototypes faced many challenges, and the team worked long hours
trying to overcome obstacles.
The first U.S. Navy bombes were delivered in 1943.
The cryptanalytic bombe that Desch helped build here in Dayton, Ohio, is important because
it's both an electromechanical device and an electronic computing device.
In a way, it sets the stage for the next revolution in the history of computing, which was to
start advancing the idea of a central processing unit, tied to memory.
Here Desch is sort of creating the beginnings of what is the memory bank of the very earliest
computing devices.
The NCR team continued to manufacture and make improvements to the bombe.
As the war progressed, code-breakers began focusing on the war in the Pacific, and the
military goals shifted from defensive to offensive.
He came to understand that if his machines worked, people would die.
Now, it saved American lives too, but nonetheless, his work would be used to target other people.
That weighed very, very heavily on him and he actually did have something of a breakdown
toward the end of the war.
He was really conflicted.
He really had a very strong moral code… it tortured him.
It really did.
Despite his reservations, Desch’s work helped save many lives and expedite the end of the war.
In a secret ceremony in 1947, Desch received the Medal for Merit from President Truman.
In the citation, he wrote, “By his brilliant originality, superb skill and immeasurable
perseverance, he contributed… important technical developments of great significance
in the successful conclusion of the war.”
Joe Desch hung the citation in his family’s home.
But he never told anyone what those technical developments actually were.
After the war, Desch continued to serve as an advisor to the Navy.
His work at NCR resulted in numerous patents, and he continued to be an integral part of
the company until his retirement in 1972.
Joe Desch died in 1987 at the age of 80.
It was only then that his daughter began learning more about her father’s secret work.
In 1990, she visited a Smithsonian exhibit featuring the last remaining bombe.
and it said this was built at NCR on the credits.
It did not have dad's name on it, it didn't say what department had built it, it didn't
say if it was a contract. It was very vague.
I called the Smithsonian, and finally got hold of the woman who curated the exhibit…
She gave me the phone number of somebody at the NSA, which I have since found out you don't do...
When I called there, he answered the phone, he said, "How'd you get this number?"
At that time, the project was still classified.
But starting in the mid-1990s, documents relating to the work in Dayton began to be declassified,
and Debbie began to develop a clearer picture of her father’s work.
Today, the intelligence community recognizes Joseph Desch as a pioneer of American cryptology.
I've encountered people from the National Security Agency and…
When they find out that I'm from the University of Dayton, they always ask me, "Oh, do you
know who Joe Desch was?"
So yeah, Joe Desch is kind of a hero, founding father to them at the NSA.
Seventy years ago, Joseph Desch was recognized for his originality, skill, and perseverance.
But his work was about more than technical accomplishment.
It's not just about machines that worked.
It's not about battles and strategies.
It's ... Men came home from the war and raised families, and there are people, tens of thousands
of people alive today because that machine saved lives.
The University of Dayton Alumni Association is proud to honor Joseph Desch
with its Distinguished Alumnus Award.