Young Stephen Hawking built a computer from clock parts and a switchboard
From 1958, a group of St Albans schoolboys, guided by their maths teacher Dikran Tahta, assembled a working computer out of clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other salvaged bits. One of them, nicknamed Einstein despite unremarkable early grades, was Stephen Hawking, who would go on to rethink black holes.
Home life was famously eccentric. After the family moved to St Albans in 1950, meals were often eaten in silence with everyone reading, the house was large, cluttered and neglected, and they drove a converted London taxi. Hawking's father, a medical researcher, hoped he would study medicine; instead the teenager talked him into letting him assemble a record player from cheap parts, an argument that appealed to his father's Yorkshire thrift.
He entered University College, Oxford, at 17 in 1959 and found the work ridiculously easy, leaving him bored and lonely for his first eighteen months. Worried examiners thought him lazy, he told his final oral examiners that a First would send him to Cambridge, while a Second would keep him in Oxford, so he expected they would give him a First. They did, and in 1962 he began graduate work at Cambridge.
At 21, in 1963, he was diagnosed with a slowly progressing form of motor neurone disease that would paralyse him over decades. He pushed on. Inspired by Roger Penrose's theorem about singularities inside black holes, he applied the same reasoning to the whole universe, and his thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes, was approved in 1966. With Penrose he developed the idea that the universe may have begun as a singularity, and he later predicted that black holes should emit radiation, now named after him, a claim that went from controversial to widely accepted by the late 1970s.
From 1979 to 2009 he held the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge. His book A Brief History of Time stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record 237 weeks. Born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, he died on 14 March 2018 at 76, more than 50 years after his diagnosis.
Source: Stephen Hawking
