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“Geniuses at War” by David Price Wins 2022 IEEE Middleton Prize
In Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age, David A. Price draws upon recently declassified sources to tell the dramatic story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computer. This work enabled decryption of the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age,
In recognition of Price’s skill in exploring and explaining key episodes in the early history of computers and of WWII British operations in codebreaking, the IEEE History Committee selected Geniuses at War as the eighth non-fiction history of technology book to receive the IEEE William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award.
The William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award, established in 2014 by a gift from the estates of longtime IEEE leader William W. Middleton and his wife Joyce F. Middleton, recognizes the author of a book (published within the previous three years) in the history of an IEEE-related technology that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience. It carries a prize of US$2,000.
Past recipients of the Middleton Award include:
- 2015, W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton University Press)
- 2016, Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster)
- 2017, Megan Prelinger, Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (Norton & Co.)
- 2018, Marc Raboy, Marconi: The Man who Networked the World (Oxford University Press)
- 2019, Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Simon & Schuster)
- 2020, Lillian Hoddeson and Peter K. Garrett,The Man Who Saw Tomorrow: The Life and Inventions of Stanford R. Ovshinsky (MIT Press)
- 2021, Martin Collins, A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age, (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018)
