Batman and Robin were always ahead of the curve on technology — but then, so were their enemies, one of whom anticipated the prevalence of computers.
As early as the 1940s, in The Man with the Automatic Brain! (Batman 52, April-May 1949), the macrocephalic Thinker gave Batman some real trouble by using huge computers hidden in his mountain lair.
“In April-May 1949, on board the pleasure yacht Carolina during its gala maiden voyage, Vicki (Vale) snaps a photograph of Bruce Wayne as he apparently topples over a railing into the sea,” noted comics historian Michael L Fleisher. “Actually, however, the falling figure in Vicki’s picture is only a dummy, and the apparent drowning of Bruce Wayne is part of Batman’s elaborate plan to defeat the Thinker, ‘one of the most fiendish criminals of our time.’”
“Batman’s most immediate problem is that the Thinker has fed every known fact about Batman into one of his four electronic ‘automatic brains,’ and it is therefore only a matter of time before the machine matches these facts against every single citizen of Gotham City and discloses the vital secret of Batman’s dual identity.”
Batman’s hoax eliminates Bruce Wayne from consideration, although it leads to the added complication of getting Alfred Pennyworth charged with murder. But the Thinker’s four electronic brains prove to be no match for Batman’s human one.
Later, of course, Batman himself would rely on a computerized crime file in the Batcave.
Another Thinker, Clifford Devoe, began bedeviling the Flash in 1943. The Fantastic Four would face a human computer called the Mad Thinker in their 15th issue (June 1963). And Batman himself fought a completely different Thinker in 1947.
In the real world, 1949 was the year computers learned to talk to each other over the phone through a device for transmitting radar signals developed by Jack Harrington’s group at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center. The “modem” modulated digital data into sounds, and demodulated received sounds into digital data. (MODulation plus DEModulation equals MODEM).
Also that year, the London Times quoted mathematician Alan Turing as saying, “I do not see why it (the machine) should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms. I do not think you even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”
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