Charles Babbage
26, 1792 – October 18, 1871) was one of the most original
and
innovative thinkers of his time. He almost deserves the
title
“Father of Computing” that some have hung on him. This
splendid
Victorian eccentric was born at a time England was
rushing madly
towards industrialization. Unlike his contemporary
Charles Dickens, who wrote so passionately of the evils and misery brought on
by the industrial revolution, Babbage saw only its promise in predicting and
controlling the definite order of the universe. He was the leading advocate of
the systematic application of science to industry and commerce. His interest in
compiling accurate mathematical and astronomical tables led him to design a
mechanical computer or “difference machine”
which would both perform calculations and print the
results.
Because of practical and financial difficulties neither
this machine nor a subsequent “analytical engine” was completed. Nevertheless
he is considered a computer pioneer for his contributions to the basic design
of the computer through his Analytical engine, which possessed all the
essential logical features of the modern general-purpose computer. There is no
direct line of descent from Babbage’s work to the electronic computers invented
in the 1930s and 1940s as his work had been forgotten. In 1991 British
scientists completed Difference Engine No. 2 built to Babbage’s specifications,
one month before the 200th anniversary of his birth. It weighs 2.6
tons and consists of 4000 separate parts.
Babbage was born at Teignmouth in Devonshire, London, the
son of a prosperous banker and his wife. As a child he displayed a keen
interest in knowing how things worked. As he recalled, “My invariable question
on receiving a new toy, was, ‘Mama, what is inside it?’” At Forty Hill School
in Enfield, Middlesex he showed a passion for mathematics but a dislike of the
classics. He studied at home with an Oxford tutor before attending Trinity
College, Cambridge, but graduated from Peterhouse in 1814 and received an MA in
1817. He found that he knew more mathematics than his teachers and concluded
that English mathematics was lagging far behind Continental standards. British
mathematics was still suffering from the Newton-Leibniz controversy. On the
continent mathematicians used the differential notation of Leibniz for the
derivative, while English mathematicians clung to Newton’s clumsy fluxional
notation. With George Peacock and John Herschel, Babbage established the Analytic
Society, which campaigned to introduce the Leibniz notation in England to
supplant that of Newton. To facilitate this the trio translated S.F. Lacroix’s Sur le calcul différentiel et
intégral into English.
Realizing that his friends were better mathematicians,
Babbage didn’t compete for honors at Cambridge, which led to Herschel being the
first Wrangler and Peacock the second. Babbage moved to London where he wrote
two major papers on functional equations. He questioned the organization and
usefulness of learned societies, criticized the unprogressive ones, including
the Royal Society, to which he was elected a fellow (1816). He helped establish
new ones such as the Astronomical Society (1820), the British Association
(1831), and the Statistical Society of London (1834). From 1828 to 1839,
Babbage held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at
Cambridge (a position he did not seek, once held by Sir Isaac Newton and
currently by Stephen Hawkins). During his 12-year tenure, Babbage never gave a
lecture or did any teaching of any kind. Despite having an abiding interest in
pedagogical reform he had too many interests to find time to teach.
Babbage was drawn to the problem of the number of errors
introduced into astronomical and other calculations through inaccuracies in the
computation of tables. To deal with this, he spent much of his life in an
attempt to build his two calculating machines. The “difference engine” was
intended for the calculation of the lengthy tables needed for navigation and
astronomy. It was called a Difference Engine because the mathematical principle on which it was based
was the method of finite differences.
It functioned by repeated addition performed by trains of
gear wheels. In 1823 the government agreed to grant funds for the enterprise,
but as Babbage kept coming up with new innovations so that the process that was
supposed to take three years dragged on to ten, the government finally withdrew
its financial support.
Babbage’s better idea was the revolutionary Analytical Engine. If he had been successful in building
it, his machine would have been the first general-use programmable computer. It
would not be limited to solving one particular mathematical problem, but to
perform a range of operations. Loops of punched cards were to control an
automatic calculator, which could make decisions based on the results of the
previous computations. The cards would be similar to the loops of Jacquard
punched cards used in weaving with the Jacquard loom [Figure 10.9]. The
Analytic Engine was designed to be driven by steam and had it been built would
have been the size of a locomotive with thousands of intermeshing clockwork
parts. It was to have “a library of its own,” in which 1000 numbers each of 50
digits were to be stored. The machine was meant to use several features
subsequently found in modern computers, including sequential control,
branching, and looping. Babbage never was able to build the Analytical Engine, not because the principal was wrong
but because the project was too ambitious to be realized with the limited
mechanical devices available at the time.
Babbage’s
unfinished version of the difference engine, and the drawings for the complete
machine are located in the Museum at King’s College in London and in the
Science Museum, London. The assembled portion is about one-seventh of the
complete engine. Babbage’s major ally in the analytic engine project was Ada
Byron, Lady Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron. She engaged in a life-long
correspondence with Babbage about the analytical engine. In 1843 she wrote an
article that not only gave descriptive, analytical, contextual, but
metaphysical information about the engine.
Babbage had an extraordinary range of achievements to his
credit. He dabbled in cryptanalysis, probability, geophysics, astronomy,
altimetry, ophthalmoscopy, statistical linguistics, meteorology, actuarial
science, and the use of tree rings as historic climatic records. He compiled
dictionaries for word-puzzlers, constructed a multipurpose surgical pump, and
studied the transmission of light signals and submarine navigation on the
diving bell. He pioneered lighthouse signaling, wrote a consumer
guide to life assurance, proposed “black box” recorders
for monitoring the conditions preceding railway catastrophes, developed mathematical
code breaking, advocated decimal currency, highlighted the neglect of science
and the status of scientists, and recommended the use of tidal power as a
source of energy once coal reserves were exhausted. His other inventions
included the cowcatcher for railroad engines, the dynamometer, an instrument
for measuring the mechanical power of an engine, the standard railroad gauge,
uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals,
and heliograph ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of
the eye.
Babbage made significant contributions to political
economy. In his On the
Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) he pioneered the field now known as operations research, the scientific analysis of business
problems aimed at giving managers information that will allow them more
effectively to run their businesses. Babbage offered a highly original
discussion of the development of production technology. His views on the effect
of the development of production technology on the size of factories were
fundamental to Karl Marx’s theory of capitalist socio-economic development. For
25 years, Babbage was a leading figure in London society, with hundreds of
Europe’s leading intelligencia gathering at his home to share ideas. He
certainly earned his reputation as an eccentric. He nurtured an almost
pathological hatred of organ grinders, which he wrote about with great
seriousness in“Observations of Street Nuisances” in 1864. He had a fascination
with fire, once submitting to being baked in an oven at 265 degrees Fahrenheit
for five or six minutes without any great discomfort. Helooked into biblical
miracles and calculated the chance of someone rising from the dead as one in 1012. Wishing to
quantify everything, he proposed to the Smithsonian Institution that an effort
be made to produce “Tables of Constants of Nature and Art,” to contain all the
facts which could be expressed by numbers in the various sciences and arts. He
offered some of the measures he had taken, including the heartbeat of a pig and
the breath of a calf. Babbage’s autobiographical Passages from the Life of a
Philosopher (1864) relates the
crucial role of one of the key figures in the period in which Britain
established itself as the most industrialized country in the world. In his
autobiography, he wrote that in the creation of new tools he was guided by the
principle that “inquiry should not be made whether that which is a defect as
regards the object in view may not become a source of advantage in some totally
different subject.” Although a sociable and gregarious man who possessed a fine
sense of humor, as he grew older the death of his father, his wife Georgiana
Whitmore and two of his children combined with his frustration over his
calculating machines turned him into a disappointed and embittered man. He died
at his home on October 18.
1871.
As long as one is not the target of their abuse one can
appreciate the eccentricities of great men. Someone remarked that Babbage was
the mathematical Timon of his time, as he hated mankind in general, Englishmen
in particular, and organ grinders most of all. In his obituary, the Times of London reported that he had lived to almost
eighty “in spite of organ-grinding persecutions.”
Quotation : “Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all".
= Charles Babbage
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