An Wang

An Wang: From Patent to Fortune

An Wang sold a single patent to IBM in 1955 for $500,000, a sum that would let most inventors retire comfortably. He used it instead as seed capital, and by the time Forbes ranked America's wealthiest people in 1984, the man who had arrived in Boston nine years earlier owning almost nothing was worth an estimated $1.6 billion, the fifth-richest person in the country.

A Physicist Displaced by War

An Wang was born February 7, 1920, in Shanghai, China, to a father who taught English and a homemaker mother. He earned a degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1940, amid the disruption of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and immigrated to the United States in June 1945 to pursue graduate study at Harvard University, where he completed a Ph.D. in applied physics in 1948. It was at Harvard's Computation Laboratory, working under the pioneering computer builder Howard Aiken on the Mark IV machine, that Wang found the problem that would define the rest of his career.

Solving Memory Before It Had a Name

Early computers needed a way to store information that could be written and read reliably without losing data, and the technology available in the late 1940s was slow and unreliable. Working with fellow researcher Way-Dong Woo, Wang co-invented what became known as the "pulse transfer controlling device," a technique that let magnetic cores be read from and written to in rapid succession without erasing or corrupting their state — the key engineering breakthrough that made magnetic core memory a practical technology for computers. The device, patented as U.S. Patent No. 2,708,722, became the invention the National Inventors Hall of Fame would later cite as his defining contribution, describing magnetic core memory as technology that "became essential for early computer development." When Harvard scaled back its computer research funding in 1951, Wang left to strike out on his own, and in 1955, after building his own company, he sold his core memory patent rights to IBM for $500,000 — a payday that gave him the working capital to grow the business he had already started.

Building Wang Laboratories

Wang founded his engineering company as a sole proprietorship in June 1951, financing its early years partly by selling a one-third stake to the Warner & Swasey Company, and incorporated it in 1955 with his Shanghai schoolmate Ge-Yao Chu as Wang Laboratories. The company's early products included desktop electronic calculators with digital displays; its 1965 LOCI machine, one of the pioneering desktop computing devices of its era, offered a keyboard resembling an adding machine's but with the novel ability to generate logarithms at a single keystroke, an early step toward what the National Inventors Hall of Fame calls office automation. The company found its largest commercial success after pivoting to word processing in 1974: by 1976 Wang had introduced a multi-user, display-based word processor built on Zilog Z80 processors that became the dominant product in its category, installed in offices worldwide before the rise of the IBM PC and Microsoft Word reshaped the market. Wang Laboratories also built the Wang 2200 minicomputer and the Wang VS multiuser business computing system. The company grew from roughly $1 million in sales in 1964 to $27 million with 1,400 employees by 1970, and by 1989 employed more than 30,000 people, chiefly around its Massachusetts headquarters, with Wang serving as chairman and chief executive throughout.

Philanthropy and Public Recognition

Wang funneled a significant share of his fortune into Massachusetts institutions: he founded the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, which operated until 1987; contributed $4 million toward an ambulatory care center at Massachusetts General Hospital; and funded the restoration of Boston's Metropolitan Theatre, subsequently renamed the Wang Theatre in his honor. He endowed professorships at Harvard, Brown, and Boston Universities, and a Lowell, Massachusetts middle school carries his name. He received the Medal of Liberty in 1986, an honor given to naturalized American citizens who have made outstanding contributions to the country, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1988, two years before his death. At his death he held more than thirty-five computer-related patents.

Death

An Wang died of cancer on March 24, 1990, in Massachusetts, leaving behind his wife, Lorraine Chiu Wang, whom he had married and with whom he raised three children in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and a company that would struggle with the transition from dedicated word processors to general-purpose personal computers in the years immediately following his death.

Why An Is Called a Genius

Wang's claim to the word runs through two distinct achievements rather than one: a genuine, patented engineering breakthrough in magnetic core memory that solved a problem central to making digital computers practical, and then a second, less celebrated talent for building and running one of the largest technology companies in America off the back of that patent and successive product bets. The National Inventors Hall of Fame's citation is unambiguous about the first: Wang's pulse transfer controlling device was a foundational contribution to early computer memory, credited to him and co-inventor Way-Dong Woo specifically, not a broader team. Wang himself was characteristically modest about the label, reportedly remarking that "success is more a function of consistent common sense than of genius" — a businessman's deflection that undersells the genuine technical originality of the core memory patent while fairly describing the discipline that let him turn one invention into a Fortune 500 company. The honest complication is that the invention itself was co-credited with Woo, and Wang's decades of subsequent business success, while remarkable, rested more on shrewd product timing — calculators, then LOCI, then word processors — than on further landmark inventions of the same caliber.

Legacy

Magnetic core memory has long since been superseded by semiconductor memory, but for roughly two decades it was the dominant way computers stored working data, and Wang's patent sat at the center of that technology's spread through the industry. Wang Laboratories itself, once one of the largest employers in Massachusetts and a fixture of the word-processing era, did not survive the personal computer's rise intact, filing for bankruptcy in 1992 — a reminder that even a fortune built on genuine invention can be undone by the next wave of the technology it helped create.

Achievements

• National Inventors Hall of Fame — 1988
• Educated at Harvard University, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Shanghai High School
• Worked as physicist, inventor and businessperson