Re: Computer science - when was the first resistor made

Electrical resistance is defined as of resistance of motion of electrons through a material. This property of materials and the first experiments explicitly on electrical resistance were conducted by a former student of Alessandro Volta, Georg Simon Ohm, in 1826. This is why the unit of resistance is called the Ohm. He discovered that some materials slowed down, or resisted, the movement of electricity. He found out that there was a relationship between the amount of electricity in a circuit, the movement of electricity through the circuit and the resistance of the circuit. As part of his study he built the first resistors explicitly to be used for that purpose and so can be thought of as the inventor of the resistor.

The first use of a resistor in a computer was when the first computer was built. There is some dispute actually when this actually was but the accepted time frame is 1944-1945 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first true all-purpose electronic computer was being built. However, in the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, John Atanasoff and a graduate student named Clifford Berry began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Before his computer could be completed, Atanasoff was called away in 1942 to work for the Navy. Iowa State never filed for patents, and his computer was left abandoned in a storeroom. This is probably the first use of a resistor in a computer.