Page "Magnetic-core memory" Paragraph 3

Frederick Viehe applied for various patents on the use of transformers for building digital logic circuits in place of relay logic beginning in 1947, issued through 1960, and assigned to IBM, working in his home laboratory.

The first application was the Electronic Relay Circuit, revised and called the Memory Transformer.

He was issued a patent for core memory manufacture in 1966.

Independently, substantial work in the field was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, who created the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949.

The name referred to the way that the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control the switching of current in electromechanical systems.

Wang and Woo were working at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory at the time but, unlike MIT, Harvard was not interested in promoting inventions created in their labs.

Instead Wang was able to patent the system on his own.