Memory and Reality

Saw somewhere a description of a study of how well Americans remember their Presidents.  The bottom line was that we remembered the first 4, Lincoln/Johnson/Grant; FDR and not the ones in between.  The explanation was that memory is refreshed by usage--if we don't have occasion to recal Polk, we won't remember him.

That makes sense I guess, but there's also another phenomenon going on; the accumulation of true and not so true memories around certain figures.  It's something of a geological provision, some figures are built up and some torn down.

As it happens, there seems to me to be an example in A.O. Scott's review today of the new biopic on Alan Turing.  Turing is a figure who is becoming more and more prominent, partially for good reasons--his contributions to the theory of computing and to British code-breaking in WWII--and partially for understandable reasons: his homosexuality and tragic fate.  But IMHO he's getting props which are undeserved as well.  Scott writes:

" There are lines of dialogue that sound either anachronistic or — it may amount to the same thing — prophetic. It is thrilling and strange to hear the words “digital computer” uttered a half-century before any such thing existed,.... [emphasis added]

This puts him 50 years ahead of the game which isn't true.  The first mention of "digital computer" in Google ngrams is in 1940, which  is roughly when the first digital computers were being built, perhaps 4 years after Turing's big publication. There's controversy over the definitions here, but the bottomline is several people were working in the field.  But 100 years from now Turing will be remembered as the inventor of the computer just as Edison is remembered as the inventor of the light bulb.