"Konrad Zuse" is the correct spelling of the man who, more than any other person, was the inventor of the program controlled digital computer. He also developed the first high level programming language, the
PlanCalculus. Unfortunately for Zuse, his work in Germany in the early 1940s was poorly funded and encountered serious setbacks due to airborne deliveries by British and American strategic bombing missions.
Zuse started in his parents' basement designing relay based calculators. He built the first full scale relay computer, the Z3, in 1941. It successfully performed programmed floating point calculations all day long at a whopping five Hz. Zuse is also known for designing and building a fast binary adder/subtracter with only two relays (four pole, double throw) per bit.
For more on Zuse, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
Why do I know this? In part because I'm designing the Rhea (Relay Hacker Experimental Analysis) language to be used for describing and implementing relay calculators and relay computers. I hope the simulation, complete with graphics, runs faster than five Hz. (Even on a 2 MHz 8080!)
For a recent working physical implementation of a working relay computer, see:
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/