Charles Babbage

person The british inventor known to some as the "Father of

Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the

computer through his Analytical Engine. His previous

Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for

the production of mathematical tables.

Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth,

Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814

and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from

Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine

through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he

published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000. In 1828

he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at

Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he

founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science

and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and

Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical

Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London.

He died in 1871 in London.

Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer,

standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting

lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the

heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers

and lock-picking.

[Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September

1994].

Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with

machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of

abstraction, fell into a trap familiar to toolsmiths

since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord

Moulton:

"One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the

celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far

advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever.

He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw

parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been

shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even

been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'I

have not finished it because in working at it I came on the

idea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that it

was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so

much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete

the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other

in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical

Machine.'"

"After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room,

where he showed and explained to me the working of the

elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see

it. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon

an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more

effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on

the old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There lay

scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working

machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and

received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I

am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it

altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical

Machine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave of

the old man with a heavy heart."

"When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed

no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic

scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had

left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that

everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to

any useful purpose."

[Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and

growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial

volume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage

"Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin

Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994),

p. 34].

Compare: uninteresting, Ninety-Ninety Rule.

(1996-02-22)