In 1871, the Times newspaper was at a loss to explain the achievements of the ‘late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.’ beyond noting that it suspected there was something important about the two inventions – the difference engine and its proposed successor the analytical engine – for which he was being commemorated two years after his death. ‘It is difficult, perhaps’, wrote the obituarist, ‘to make the nature of such abstruse inventions at all clear to the popular and untechnical reader’. Of the analytical engine, the first design for a general-purpose computer, ‘all that can here be said of the machine is that process of addition automatically performed is at the root of it.’ The article also mentions the circumstances in which the project was abandoned, its drawings and plans consigned to the archives of King’s College London, where they bear ‘silent witness to great hopes dashed to the ground’.
As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
The piece, which by today’s understanding of Babbage’s influence over the history of computing is a lengthy exercise in damnation by faint praise, goes on to mention that out of his 80 volumes of published works there are few worthy of the general reader’s attention. The ‘best known of all’ is the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise that argues the case for the mutual compatibility of Christianity and mathematics. Another is The Decline of Science: ‘both the title and the contents of which give us reason to believe that its author looked somewhat despondingly on the scientific attainments of the present age’.
In which case, it would hardly have surprised Babbage that the true significance of his life and works as mathematician, inventor, philosopher and mechanical engineer would not be appreciated fully until more than a century later, when a working model of the Difference Engine built from his plans confirmed that the design was viable.
Daguerreotype of Charles Babbage by Antoine Claudet (public domain) – Public domain / Wikipedia
Today, Babbage is routinely considered the ‘Father of Computing’. As his biographer Doron Swade notes in The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, the English polymath’s ‘struggle’ was to lead him from ‘mechanical arithmetic to the entirely new realm of automatic computing – a strange new land in which he was the first inhabitant.’
Although both facts are the subject of dispute, Charles Babbage was born on Boxing Day in 1791 close to London’s Elephant and Castle, Southwark, South London (then part of Surrey). Son of a wealthy banker, the young Charles was a sickly child who attended Holmwood Academy (which had a library that nurtured his early love of mathematics) and Totnes School. He also had private tutors, one of which helped him to attain a level in classics that would lead to his acceptance at the University of Cambridge. On arrival at Trinity College, according to Swade, Babbage (who was already familiar with contemporary mathematics) was disappointed to find the Cambridge curriculum outdated, and in 1812, along with John Herschel and George Peacock, formed the Analytical Society. That same year he switched to Peterhouse College where, despite being the best mathematician, he graduated untroubled by honours after receiving his degree without examination in 1814.
In B.V. Bowden’s Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines (1953), one of its contributors explains how Babbage, while still at Cambridge, started to think about automating the production of mathematical tables; a conceptual breakthrough that was to be the genesis of the difference engine: ‘In 1812 he was sitting in his rooms in the Analytical Society looking at a table of logarithms, which he knew to be full of mistakes, when the idea occurred to him of computing all tabular functions by machinery.’ Central to navigation, mathematics, science and engineering, such tables had been to date compiled by hand and were prone to transcription and calculation error. Ten years later, he started work on a machine intended to mechanically compute values of polynomial functions.
To build the prototype, Babbage hired the talents of British engineer and industrialist Joseph Clement who was to work on the project for a decade, despite a fractious relationship existing between the two men (caused largely by intellectual property issues and disputes over costs). Even with funding by the government (who gave him £1700 in 1823 to start the project) the machine was never completed. Had it been – parts of it can be seen today in Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science and London’s Science Museum – it would have been 8 ft tall, comprised 25,000 parts and weighed many tons. On 5 June 1832, Lady Byron (wife of the poet Lord Byron) attended one of Babbage’s famous Saturday night soirées where, with her daughter, she inspected a one-seventh scale model of the ‘thinking machine’, recalling that it ‘raised several Nos. to the 2nd and 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a Quadratic equation’. Her daughter was the mathematician Ada Lovelace.
Impression from a woodcut of Babbage’s Difference Engine No 1 – stock.adobe.com
In Babbage’s mind the problem with the difference engine, finished or otherwise, was that it was a single-purpose mechanical calculator; that purpose being the production of tables. By 1837 Babbage had described its more complex successor – the analytical engine – that included both a ‘store’ (in modern terms memory) and a ‘mill’ (CPU) to perform arithmetic operations. The Computer History Museum credits this arrangement not only as the first design for a Turing-complete general-purpose computer, but also as being of a structure that was essentially the same as ‘that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era’. Input was to be provided to the machine in the form of punched cards (that already existed in textile production technology such as the Jacquard loom), while for output the machine would have a printer, curve plotter and a bell.
Following encouragement from the influential inventor Charles Wheatstone, in 1843 Lovelace published her annotated translation of Italian military engineer (and later Prime Minister of Italy) Luigi Menabrea’s description of Babbage’s machine, in which she wrote: ‘The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’ It is for this work – in particular her extensive additions that included a proposed method of calculating Bernoulli numbers using Babbage’s innovation – that Lovelace has been recognised (although not universally) as the first computer programmer.
Despite the British Association for the Advancement of Science recognising the analytical engine as ‘a marvel of mechanical ingenuity’, in 1878 (seven years after Babbage’s death) the organisation recommended against constructing it on the basis that it was impossible to set a budget for it, as well as doubting that the machine would function correctly were it to be built. For the next few decades Babbage’s son Henry continued his father’s work and by 1910 the engine was able to compile a faulty list of multiples of π (pi). It was not until 1991 that Babbage’s vision was finally vindicated. This was when the London Science Museum built a complete and working specimen of Babbage’s Difference Engine No.2 – a design that incorporated elements of the analytical engine – using materials and engineering tolerances that would have been available to Babbage, thus ‘quelling the suggestion that Babbage’s designs could not have been produced using the manufacturing technology of his time.’
While Babbage is perhaps inevitably remembered in the digitalised twenty-first century for his fundamental work at the dawn of computer science, he is also celebrated for having made notable contributions in other areas. In the field of engineering, in 1830, while working for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, he proposed the anti-derailment locomotive-mounted device called the cowcatcher (or pilot) that deflects obstacles lying on the running surface. In 1847 he invented the first instrument for looking into the eye (the ophthalmoscope), although unsuccessful early demonstrations meant that he lost interest in his innovation. In cryptography, during the Crimean War in the 1850s his work on ciphers, that resulted in the breaking of Vigenère’s autokey cipher, was long kept a military secret.
Babbage also helped rationalise the British postal system by conducting research leading to the Uniform Penny Post in 1840, and the issue of the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black. He made improvements in lighthouse signalling, built the first railway maintenance dynamometer car and compiled the first reliable actuarial tables, providing scientific data for life insurance companies. He was also involved in the founding of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as becoming (with Charles Dickens) a figure of ridicule over his distaste for buskers, as set out in the pamphlet ‘Observations on Street Nuisances’.
Charles Babbage died in at home in Dorset Street, Marylebone, where there is a black plaque that reads in part: ‘mathematician and pioneer of the modern computer’.
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