Diebold, John Theurer

(b. 8 June 1926 in Weehawken, New Jersey; d. 26 December 2005 in Bedford Hills, New York), computer scientist and futurist who was among the first to encourage major corporations to automate systems, store records electronically, and install computer networks.

Diebold was the younger of the two sons of William Diebold, an attorney, and Rose (Theurer) Diebold. His brother, William, would become the director of economic studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, a private think tank. Diebold grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey, attending local schools there. His parents fostered his creativity by allowing him to possess a menagerie of pets, collections of historical and scientific objects, and a research laboratory. The family went on educational trips together, including to Europe in 1937.

Diebold was accepted at Swarthmore College during World War II. After his freshman year he entered the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, in King’s Point, New York, where he completed courses in shipping management and in technical and industrial engineering. In 1944 and 1945 Diebold served on the SS Shooting Star, performing convoy duty in the Atlantic. He received a BS in engineering in 1946 from the Merchant Marine Academy. Upon being discharged from the service, he returned to Swarthmore, receiving a BA in economics in 1949.

Diebold next continued his education at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. While there, he was assigned to lead a student group project investigating automatic control mechanisms in manufacturing. His team’s report, “Making the Automotive Factory a Reality,” became the beginning of his own work in the field of automation. He received an MBA in 1951, and on 22 November 1951 he married Doris Hackett, with whom he would have one child before the couple divorced. His research was published in 1952 as Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory, in which he described how programmable devices could revolutionize the day-to-day operations of businesses. Diebold is credited with popularizing the word “automation,” a simplified version of “automatization,” though he acknowledged the earlier usage by D. S. Harder, an executive at the Ford Motor Company.

While writing his first book, Diebold worked as a junior consultant for the management consultant firm Griffenhagen & Associates both in New York and in Chicago. In 1954 he started his own consulting firm, John Diebold & Associates, because he was fired for advocating the use of computers. He and his wife worked without capital for a year to establish their credentials as experts in the field of automation, as bolstered by Diebold’s book Automation and by three articles published in the Nation, a weekly journal, in 1953. Diebold was involved in starting a magazine called Transactions on Automatic Controls in 1954, to which he contributed a monthly column.

Diebold’s consulting firm grew as major corporations engaged its services. The offices moved from Weehawken to New York City, and the firm grew further as it absorbed other firms. Over time Diebold opened offices in Los Angeles; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago as well as in Europe. His clients included DuPont, General Electric, International Business Machines, Westinghouse, and Xerox Corporation as well as the U.S. Department of Defense, the State of California, and the governments of Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Jordan, and Venezuela.

In 1960 Diebold testified at hearings before the Subcommittee on Automation and Energy Resources of the congressional Joint Economic Committee. He urged the formation of a national policy to promote and effectively use technological developments, warning that the United States would lose its worldwide economic leadership role if it failed to take advantage of technological achievements. Diebold felt that the fear of mass unemployment resulting from automation was unwarranted, as he believed that new and better jobs would be created through the production of advanced technology.

When Diebold formed his consulting company in 1954, approximately one hundred computers existed worldwide. By the end of the 1960s, some 25,000 computers were in existence. Diebold fully believed that computers and other information systems could reshape society, and he assisted cities and foreign countries in using them to manage budgets, to compile government data, and to supervise public services and welfare. In 1961 the company now known as the Diebold Group developed a way to link account records at Bowery Savings Bank in New York. Thus, accounts were immediately updated to reflect both deposits and withdrawals, and this information was made available to tellers. Customers could then bank at any branch of that bank, and other banks soon hired the Diebold Group to install similar systems in order to compete. A data network established at Baylor University Hospital, in Texas, eliminated paperwork in accounting, inventory, payroll, and purchasing, and medical records and statistics were made available to researchers. Other institutions soon created similar systems.

Some of Diebold’s ideas were too advanced for the time. In 1963 Diebold told newspaper editors about “input keyboards” and “editing consoles,” which would replace typewriters and carbon paper, and in 1968 he proposed a national system of electronic funds transfers in 1968 to Chase Manhattan Bank—envisioning several technologies that are now common. In the audience for that presentation was Paul Volcker, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve. In addition to the Diebold Group, Diebold started the investment firm John Diebold Inc. in 1967 to finance computer leasing. After selling the Diebold Group in 1991, he focused on the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, a research group he had founded in 1968 to promote broad, technology-based reform.

Other books by Diebold include Beyond Automation: Managerial Problems of an Exploding Technology (1964), Making the Future Work: Unleashing Our Powers of Innovation for the Decades Ahead (1984), and The Innovators: The Discoveries, Inventions, and Breakthroughs of Our Time (1990). The American Management Association and Praeger published his papers. He was interviewed by many prominent television personalities, including Johnny Carson, and appeared on the cover of popular newsmagazines, such as Time. Diebold also served on the boards of many well-known companies, such as Mead Johnson and Prentice Hall, and was decorated by the governments of Italy, Germany, and Jordan. Diebold divorced his first wife and later remarried; he had two children with his second wife, Vanessa. Diebold died from esophageal cancer at his home in New York.

Diebold was a visionary who preached about automation when most people had not even heard of the concept. His original idea had come from watching automatic anti-aircraft fire control during World War II and thus wondering about the possibility of automatic factories. Overall, he is remembered as a creative thinker and a futurist who was able to attend to the birth of his dreams.

Obituaries are in the New York Times (27 Dec. 2005) and Los Angeles Times (30 Dec. 2005).

Sheila Beck