Alabama native Charles Wilber set world records for the most tomatoes per plant and the tallest tomato plant.
Atanasoff–Berry Computer, First Automatic Electronic Digital Computer (1942)
Clifford Berry at the controls of the ABC, the first machine to use vacuum tubes to do arithmetic calculations. Since it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete, it would be more appropriate to call this machine the first electronic ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit) – which is integrated into every modern processor's design. Conceived in 1937 and designed only to solve systems of 29 linear equations, this 60Hz, 300 tube machine with spinning 3000 bit capacitor memory was built by Iowa State College mathematics and physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff with the help of graduate student Clifford Berry. Key innovations included electronic computation, binary arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative capacitor memory, and a separation of memory and computing functions. Since input to this binary computer could be in decimal, another clever tube minimization measure was the spinning decimal-to-binary conversion drum inspired by and resembling a pinned drum music box, a 1772 invention!
A year later, in 1943 England, the first "programmable" electronic digital machine called the Colossus computer was built in secret using a similar tube-based technology.
