John Mauchly and Presper Eckert designed and built the first digital, electronic computer. Mauchly and Eckert met by chance in 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. They soon developed a revolutionary vision: to use electricity as a means of computing - in other words, to make electricity "think." Ignored by their colleagues, in early 1943 they were fortuitously discovered and funded by the U.S. Army, itself in urgent need of a machine that could quickly calculate ballistic missile trajectories in wartime Europe and Africa.