Bernard Benson

Benson was a fighter pilot during World War II, and later worked on the design of early British missiles. He emigrated to the United States where at Douglas Aircraft Company., in Santa Monica, California, he worked on the Douglas F4D Skyray fighter and various Douglas missiles.[2]

Early in the 1950s, he founded Benson-Lehner Corporation with George F. G. Lehner, a psychology professor at UCLA. Soon after its founding, futurist Donald Prell joined the company as vice president, Application Engineering. The new company was successful, as it filled a niche designing systems that were used to provide data input and output to and from the early computers. The B/L machines semi-automatically read oscillograph and photographic flight test data producing punched tape and IBM punch cards which were then entered into computers. After being processed, the data was then automatically printed on large flatbed graph-plotters. This process automated the formerly manual reading and subsequent hand-plotting of data. B/L plotters soon became the industry standard, and were sold worldwide. After an IPO, the company expanded into the field of high speed photography. Two photo-mechanical engineers, Guy Hearon and Harry Katt, were hired, who designed a series of 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm high speed cameras and accessories. Trade catalogs from the Benson-Lehner Corporation are held by the National Museum of American History Library.[3]

In 1961, Benson was one of the first people to warn against the privacy risks raised by computers, claiming that digital data could one day be fed into a single system, leaving individuals at the mercy "of who or what controls the machine".[4]