1910-1995

German engineer who built the world's first binary calculating machine—the Z1—in 1938. Zuse completed his degree in civil engineering, and began his career as a design engineer in the aircraft industry. In the 1930s he set out to build a computer that utilized a binary set of numbers, allowed for automatic arithmetical calculation, and had a high memory capacity. In 1938 he completed the Z1, and in 1941 produced the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical computer. His subsequent Z4 design was used at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical Institute until 1955.