University of Manchester

What the university is

The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England. It counts 1824, the year the Manchester Mechanics' Institution was founded, as its official foundation year, and it took its present form when UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester merged on 1 October 2004.^[1][6] It marked its bicentenary in 2024.^[6]

From a legacy to a civic university

Owens College, the forerunner of the university, began with a legacy left by the industrialist John Owens in 1846.^[6] Its John Owens building, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, was completed in 1873.^[6] Mechanics' institutions, of the kind founded in Manchester in 1824, were set up to give working people evening instruction in scientific and technical subjects, and they are one of the roots of today's technical colleges and universities.

In 1880 Owens College became the first constituent part of the Victoria University, England's first civic university.^[6] In 1883 John Henry Reynolds converted the Mechanics' Institution into the Manchester Technical School.^[6]

The Manchester Baby

The university's best-known contribution to computing belongs to its Victoria University of Manchester period. The Manchester Baby — the Small-Scale Experimental Machine — was built there by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.^[2][1] The university calls it the world's first electronic stored-program computer.^[1][6]

The point of a stored-program design is that instructions sit in the same memory as the numbers being worked on, so a new problem can be loaded into the machine instead of being built into its wiring. That is the arrangement general-purpose computers still follow. The Baby was an experiment rather than a product; its commercial derivative, built by Ferranti, became the first electronic computer marketed as a standard product, delivered to a customer in February 1951.^[2]

Turing and the imitation game

Alan Turing was appointed a reader in the mathematics department in September 1948 and given the nominal post of Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory.^[2] He had moved to Manchester in 1948, where he became deputy director of the Computing Machine Laboratory, and remained there until his death in 1954.^[3]

While at Manchester he published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in Mind in October 1950, proposing the imitation game now known as the Turing test.^[4][5] The test replaces the question "can machines think?" with an operational one: a human judge holds a text conversation with an unseen partner and tries to tell whether that partner is a person or a machine. It became the reference point for later arguments about machine intelligence, both for and against.

Research and instruments

Manchester's later record includes work recognised with Nobel prizes in several fields. Sir William Arthur Lewis was appointed to a chair at Manchester in 1948 and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979.^[6] Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov first isolated graphene at Manchester in 2004, and they received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.^[6] The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank, the university's radio observatory, was completed in 1957.^[6]

Where it sits in the history

The institution's history runs from a merchant's bequest and a mechanics' institute for working adults, through the first electronic stored-program computer, to graphene. Its computing episode is unusually concentrated: the machine that ran the first stored program and the author of the imitation game were in the same laboratory at the same time.^[2][3] That combination is why the university is treated as one of the birthplaces of modern computing rather than only as a large civic university.