Abstract
The public demonstration of a Russian-English machine translation system in New York in January 1954 – a collaboration of IBM and Georgetown University – caused a great deal of public interest and much controversy. Although a small-scale experiment of just 250 words and six ‘grammar’ rules it raised expectations of automatic systems capable of high quality translation in the near future. This paper describes the background motivations, the linguistic methods, and the computational techniques of the system.

1. Introduction
On the 8th January 1954, the front pages of the New York Times and other major American newspapers (New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times) carried reports of the first public demonstration of a computer for translating languages. Reports were syndicated in many provincial newspapers, and articles about it appeared in the following months in popular magazines (Newsweek, Science, Science News Letter, Discovery, Chemical Week, Chemical Engineering News, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical World, Computers and Automation, etc.) It was probably the most widespread and influential publicity that machine translation (MT) has ever received,2 and it was undoubtedly the first non-numerical application of the newly invented ‘electronic  brains’ that most people had heard of. Translation itself was a largely unknown ‘art’ and the prospect of a machine capable of ‘deciphering’ foreign languages was exciting. The demonstration raised expectations of fast and easy international communication in a world that had already become divided by confrontations and misunderstandings between the United States and the Soviet Union.