American Hero: Wen Tsing Chow

This is Week 16 of AsianWeek’s salute to Chinese American heroes, in strategic partnership with Chinese American Heroes, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to documenting the contributions of Chinese Americans to America and the world.

In celebration of our Independence Day on July 4th we will be highlighting some of our veterans and others who have made major contributions to America’s national defense as well as the protection of our liberties and freedom.

We lead off with someone who wasn’t a veteran, but his national defense contribution and contribution to the modern world was extremely important. For many today the Cold War is ancient history, but less than a generation ago, many Americans feared the Soviet Union and their nuclear weapons.

In the early 1950s through the mid 1960s a missile system known as the Atlas F ICBM system was built for America’s own nuclear deterrence. Many scientists and engineers were involved in developing our Atlas F, but one Chinese American computer engineer, trained at MIT, played a very key role. His name was Mr. Wen-tsing Chow and his contribution was in developing PROM (programmable read-only memory) that enabled a guidance computer that took up an entire room in the 1950s to be shrunk down to a few feet and fit inside the nose cone of a missile. Although a military secret until the mid-1960s, the creation of accurate space guidance systems later enabled the accurate deployment of satellite communication systems now used every day to beam news and information instantly across the globe. PROM’s also live on in the computer game machines that many American households own in the 21st Century. Mr. Chow’s subsequent engineering contributions played a major role in all American military missile systems and NASA space programs up to the Space Shuttle.