Provided by the Canadian National Exhibition Archives.
By Reece Nations
“Practically everyone knows tic-tac-toe.” — Josef Kates interviewed in 2014.
The halls of the Canadian National Exhibition’s Electrical and Engineering Building were buzzing with excitement on Aug. 25, 1950. Situated on a picturesque piece of land north of Lake Ontario known locally as Toronto’s “Exhibition Place,” its grounds have hosted generations of eventgoers and vendors alike.
When the exhibition first began in 1879, it introduced consumers to eye-opening new advancements in home goods and agricultural innovation. Over two weeks, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to what was then being called the first “Toronto Industrial Exhibition,” setting in motion the groundwork for a national tradition. Patrons were treated to platitudes of dazzling displays, technical and educational demonstrations, and showcases of Canada’s collective national ingenuity.
It was already a symbol of Canadian pride by the time the festivities had to temporarily shutter annual operations in 1942. Its civilian organizers ceded the grounds to the Canadian armed forces as the country’s involvement in World War II escalated. The CNE, reformed in 1947, would demonstrate the communal optimism for national prosperity in the post-war world through its annual exhibitions in the coming decades.
Colloquially called “The Ex,” some of the activities and exhibitions allowed ordinary people to engage with new and emerging technologies for the first time. A few of the most notable early tech staged at the national exhibition over the years included electric-powered train cars in 1883, the phonograph in 1888, the radio in 1922, and the television in 1939. By the late 1940s, synthetics like nylon and various plastics were the latest groundbreaking innovations to be showcased at the CNE.
As the year 1950 rolled around, CNE’s electrical and engineering building flaunted rows of shiny kitchen appliances like the latest stovetops, ovens and refrigerators for patrons to peruse. The latest and greatest automobiles being manufactured at the time were staged in another building on the grounds. Like almost nowhere else in the world, the sights and sounds of the CNE in 1950 were a consortium of human achievements.
But one demonstration in particular truly stole the show on the exhibition’s opening day. Attendees queued up one after another for hours, vying for a chance to challenge an artificial intelligence. One at a time, patrons stood at a podium in front of a 13-foot-tall electronic computing console that housed a three-by-three display. On the podium were nine buttons, each representing a zone on the screen above. A glass display case revealed the machinations within, showing that no person was manipulating any of its responses to the players’ inputs. On a grid of lights, one could be challenged to a game of tic-tac-toe by a computer opponent — innocently anthropomorphized as “Bertie the Brain.”
What was Bertie the Brain?
Playing a relatively universal game, attendees could test their intellectual mettle against the machine on varying difficulty levels. At the lowest, young children could delight in the satisfaction of thwarting the “mechanical brain,” as it was called. At its highest level, however, the mechanical brain was said to be unbeatable by anyone.
Beside the main display a smaller, secondary display would signal if the player had won or if Bertie had won, leaving no room for ambiguity if one was bested. From August 25th through September 9th, Bertie the Brain battled thousands and thousands of CNE attendees one square at a time. By the end of the convention, Bertie — initially thought to be a curiosity sideshow at best — was what people were talking about when they left the grounds.
Danny Kaye, the famous comedic actor known for classic movies like the 1947 film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and his own variety show on CBS, was photographed playing against Bertie by Life magazine. The caption of the photo notes Kaye raising his arms victoriously, but only able to do so after multiple attempts. “THE ELECTRONIC WONDER BY ROGERS MAJESTIC” was emblazoned on Bertie right below where its name was painted on its metal outer casing.
An early example of an electronic digital computing device, Bertie the Brain is thought by some to be the earliest arcade video game.
While its chief purpose ostensibly was to provide enjoyment for the eventgoers, it was also meant to demonstrate the practical capabilities of a special new vacuum tube design dubbed the “additron tube.” The additron and its inventor were the hidden magic behind Bertie’s quick computations, responsible for more sophisticated functions than ordinary thermionic tubes of the era.
Provided by the Canadian National Exhibition Archives.
In his book “The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence,” author John Vardalas explains that the additron’s invention meant computers could implement binary addition’s entire functional input-output table through a single tube. Circuits that were once composed of thousands of vacuum tubes that occupied substantial space and consumed large amounts of electricity were now obsolete. Using the additron in computers meant that one could dramatically reduce the number of tubes needed to achieve computational capacity, thus speeding up the process tenfold.
Then, just as quickly as the groundbreaking device had appeared, it was gone and never seen again. The reasons for its dismantlement and lack of protection in the name of historical preservation is a circumstantial tragedy.
An unsuspecting maker
The person who was principally responsible for Bertie’s creation was Josef Kates, an Austrian immigrant who fled from his home in Vienna when the Nazi regime came into power in the late 1930s. Originally, his surname was spelled “Katz” and he was one of Baruch and Anna Katz’s six children. Josef’s father later changed the spelling of their last name because of antisemitism he experienced throughout his own life. Records show his parents operated a grocery store as well as an importing and exporting business in Vienna before the German invasion in March 1938.
Later in his life, Kates would recall his childhood as an unhappy one — rife with instances of antisemitic intolerance even before he and his siblings watched military vehicles pour in through the streets. Josef and his family made it out just before “Kristallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” which saw Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues razed by authoritarian occupiers and their loyalists. Kates’ mother barely managed to leave the country before the war officially broke out on Sept. 1, 1939.
After the “Anschluss,” or the German annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, Kates would emigrate to England where he and the rest of his family sought refuge from the deadly Nazi oppression. Despite his hopes for a brighter future in new surroundings, Kates would be confronted with more hardship and intolerance due to his heredity. Although he had enlisted in the British military, Kates was forced to live in an internment camp where Nazi sympathizers or spies were indefinitely detained under the pretense of ensuring national security.
Similar practices forced Japanese-Americans into temporary internment encampments in the United States during this time.
Kates would spend two years in the British internment camp before in turn being shipped off to Canada. While there, Kates and other detainees were allowed to study for their high school equivalency education. Though studying in the camps meant he and his peers were forced to jot down notes on spare toilet paper when they ran out of space in their notebooks, Kates eventually learned enough to pass the entrance examinations to attend McGill University in Montreal.
Upon Kates’ enrollment into McGill, he would study matriculation and end up employed by the Imperial Optical Company in 1942. There, he would be responsible for working on precision optics equipment for the Royal Canadian Navy, before leaving two years later to continue his education at the University of Toronto. At U of T, Kates excelled in the fields of mathematics and physics, earning honors degrees while simultaneously supporting himself by working for Rogers Majestic Corporation Limited.
In 1946, Kates’ career as a professional engineer officially began when he started in Rogers Majestic’s radar and radio tube development and manufacturing operations. Before his time at the University of Toronto was done, Kates earned a master’s degree in applied mathematics and a doctorate in physics. Eager to showcase his own capabilities as an engineer, Kates began work at the University of Toronto’s Computation Centre.
Finally, the name he had made for himself in the field of optics was starting to pay dividends, and he had a vision of the tangible impact he could make in the world. Due to his understanding of circuitry, Kates would soon be recruited to collaborate on the most momentous project the centre had undertaken to date — the University of Toronto Electronic Computer, or UTEC, Mark I. The university’s informal “Committee on Computing Machines” issued a report in 1947 that laid the basis for creating a machine like the UTEC Mark I.
Canada’s first computer
Preliminary work had begun on an electronic computing machine to serve the university’s academic and commercial interests around the same time experimental work began in designing circuitry to accomplish its ambitious goals. Kates worked alongside his peer Alfred Ratz as senior design engineers on the project. The men were given a series of specified goals to accomplish — innovate an electronic version of the mechanical-based design of early computing devices and construct an instrument to solve more complex differential computations.
Their first attempts at creating a rudimentary computer memory system heavily depended on thermionic tubes containing neon gas. In 1949, the UTEC team was paid a visit by computer tech pioneer Freddie Williams, who had at this point developed his own novel thermionic valve, the “Williams Tube,” that he suggested was better suited for the device due to its lower energy draw. The Williams Tube, a unique design of a cathode ray tube, represented the world’s first random-access digital storage device.
This random-access memory or RAM data could be stored on cathode ray tubes and efficiently retrieved in any order. Prior to RAM’s advent, only direct-access data storage devices existed. As a form of storage, direct-access data was inherently limited in the speed at which items could be retrieved by the machine because of their arbitrary locations on the recording medium. After its development, RAM was utilized successfully in many of the early computers developed at Williams’ home institution of Manchester University.
In a 1994 interview published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ “Annals of the History of Computing,” Kates recalled Williams’ visit to Toronto as the catalyst to a major breakthrough.
“I believe it was probably early 1949 when Williams visited and outlined his stuff — that was probably the trigger,” Kates said of the encounter. “I don’t think anyone went to Manchester to see what he was doing there. To us, it seemed a real quantum jump from the other technologies we had looked at. It was a pretty obvious way to go. Our innovation was to go to a smaller tube.”
With this revelation, the scientists were forced to reevaluate what was possible in the scope of their limited resources. Their vision for the UTEC Mark I expanded on lessons learned from earlier incursions in scientific computing experiments. Finally, cutting-edge technology was starting to progress far beyond IBM’s punched-card machines and the desk tabulators of the day.
The architecture of the UTEC Mark I could hold enough memory to handle logging up to 512 12-bit integers. Later, a series of subroutine libraries were programmed in binary for single (12-bit), double (24-bit), triple (36-bit), and quadruple (48-bit) length arithmetic. The machine possessed memory functionality and could perform arithmetic functions that each operated simultaneously, a dozen bits at a time.
Each of its instructions was comprised of a three-bit code and a single address. Vardalas in his book details how the hardware designed by Kates and Ratz was enough to continually convince U of T’s Committee on Computing Machines to let them continue their pursuits. Their work was being partly supported by the Canadian military and the country’s National Research Council with promises of advancing civic computational capabilities.
Canada’s computing revolution was finally being realized, and Kates was at the forefront of developing the first functioning electronic computer in the country’s history despite not being far removed from graduate school. UTEC was severely limited in its ability to perform operations but served as an adequate vessel for training early computer practitioners. Ultimately, the UTEC Mark I was never developed beyond a prototype form as the university instead decided to divert its computer project funding towards obtaining a Manchester Mark 1 computer developed by the United Kingdom-based company Ferranti International PLC.
Just when their work was beginning to show true promise in innovating a system for complex computing, U of T chose to buy a more sophisticated device to satisfy its demands. Eventually, the UTEC Mark I was dismantled, and its components were sent to be used in other projects. Later in his life, Kates lamented in an August 2014 interview with Spacing magazine that the fate of UTEC Mark I would similarly befall his most well-known creation — Bertie the Brain.
Bernard Hoffman | Getty Images
He told the publication that the many obligations he had at the time caused the machines’ preservation to fall by the wayside.
“I was going back and forth to [Rogers Majestic] developing this Bertie the Brain, at the same time working at the university on the [UTEC Mark I], and at the same time working on my Ph.D.” Kates said in Spacing’s article. “I was doing three things at a time.”
What Kates learned from the trials of developing UTEC informed Bertie’s inception to some degree. Even the relatively modest functionality of the UTEC Mark I allowed engineers to design a few crude programs for the machine to operate. For instance, they could rig up the machine that allowed them to play games against each other on the device’s CRT display.
Years later, a similar early computer called the “Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator” was developed and created by scientists at the University of Cambridge that could run a program to play games of “noughts and crosses,” or tic-tac-toe, on a visual display that would have been similar to the one the UTEC employed. Envisioned as a workaround to the UTEC Mark I’s computational limitations, Kates invented the additron tube in June 1949.
When he needed a way to exhibit the full potential of his binary adder tube design, Kates started work on a machine that would play a game against humans just as he and his colleagues were able to on the UTEC Mark I. By this point, Kates was already working on his doctoral degree based on the physics of vacuum tubes. When the corporation Canadian Patents and Development Limited, or CPDL, began pursuing patent rights for Kates’ additron tubes in the summer of 1949, it also agreed to facilitate their industrial development.
By Kates’ specifications, CPDL commissioned companies Canadian Westinghouse, Canadian Marconi, and Rogers Majestic to create prototypes. Although efforts to progress Kate’s patent application through the national and international systems were slow going, he was retained as a consultant by Rogers Majestic to assist in progressing binary adder tube research commissioned by the Royal Canadian Navy.
Though the Navy’s research and design contract led to the new development of intricate designs for more sophisticated vacuum tube circuitry, work on the UTEC Mark I ceased due to its stagnating development. Since it had already invested so much in Kates’ binary adder tube design, the executives at Rogers Majestic were resolved to publicize it somehow. This was the impetus for the company asking Kates to build something featuring the additron for Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition in 1950.
The CNE presented an opportunity for the company to familiarize potential buyers with its own aptitude for technological advancement. Suddenly, Kates would later explain, he had an epiphany for an electronic digital computer that could use arithmetic functions to simulate a simple game. After having just had a major hand in creating Canada’s first computer, Kates would begin constructing Canada’s first electronic game-playing machine featuring possibly the world’s first NPC, or non-player character.
“On the UTEC we were actually playing games, so I said, ‘Look, we can build a game-playing machine.’” Kates said in an interview with Spacing magazine in August 2014. “Practically everybody knows tic-tac-toe. I thought it would make a nice exhibit.”
Provided by the Canadian National Exhibition Archives.
Bertie the Brain’s creation was paid for and supported by Rogers Majestic just in time for the exhibition that year. In his book, Vardalas maintains that Bertie’s entire existence was the doomed consequence of Kates’ ambition to design an improved electronic digital computer utilizing his invention. However, just as RAM would render direct-access data storage obsolete, the advent of transistor technology lay around the corner to render vacuum tubes obsolete.
A creation destroyed
Kates later in his life would say he would have made a lot more money as an engineer if the transistor revolution had taken place years later than it did. Not only were Kates’ additron tubes never part of the UTEC Mark I design, they were also never part of any other design besides Bertie the Brain. The process for obtaining patents extended well past the addition of transistors to computing design, marking the end of the vacuum tube’s wider computational significance.
Bertie, like UTEC, was dismantled after the 1950 CNE and its parts were scrapped. The article in Life magazine that would have featured Danny Kaye’s interaction with Bertie was never published for unknown reasons. Kates said that despite the historical significance of the machines, his life was too hectic at the time to safeguard them.
Provided by the Canadian National Exhibition Archives.
“I wish Bertie the Brain and UTEC had been preserved. I was extremely busy, I was multiprocessing in fifteen directions, so I couldn’t worry about preserving things. I wish I had preserved a lot more.” — Kates said, interviewed in August 2014.
Like when his dreams of a mass-produced additron-based computer fizzled, Kates’ ambitions had again gotten the better of him. Despite now being regarded as a novelty and a wonder, Bertie the Brain’s legacy as the forerunner of electronic amusement devices is solidified among video game historians. Kates was not done progressing human-computer interactions as he would go on to become well known in other circles of innovation when he designed the world’s first computer-controlled traffic signaling system for Toronto in 1954.
Kates’ foresight of the implications of advanced computing is a testament to the brilliance of his mind. When he passed away in 2018, he was eulogized as an instrumental force in the evolution of modern computing. Around the time he was working on Bertie, he explained his philosophy on the relationship between people and computers.
“If the computer means the burden of work will be distributed better and results in a higher standard of living, it will be a real contribution,” Kates said in 1950. “If it places increased profit in the hands of one man and created unemployment, we will have accomplished nothing.”
Kates in 1968 joined the Science Council of Canada, a national governmental advisory board comprised of civil servants and scientists. He would serve as the science council’s chairman from 1975 to 1978 and was chancellor of the University of Waterloo from 1979 until 1985. Although Bertie the Brain’s story ends prematurely and disappointingly, the story of Josef Kates’s life was really just beginning — repeatedly propelling scientific advancements for the sake of improving people’s lives.
Remembered as a father, husband and pioneer of his craft, Kates managed to find the happiness that eluded his youth through steadfast dedication to making interactions between people and computers just a little bit more normal.
About Reece Nations
