Charles Babbage

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Babbage died on the 18th of October 1871 at 1 Dorset Street in Marylebone, London, where he had lived and worked for over forty years. He was 79. Among his papers were designs for engines of brass and iron that could calculate, remember and follow instructions. Not one of his major designs had been fully built.

  Yet some people say he deserves the title father of the computer. How does an inventor earn that name without finishing his machines? What was he trying to build, and what kept stopping him? And what did a mind like his turn to when the machines stalled?

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• 2. Rebel at Cambridge

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  The Times, in its obituary, gave Charles Babbage's birth as the 26th of December 1792. A nephew wrote in to say the year was one earlier. The parish register of St. Mary's, Newington, backed the nephew, recording a baptism on the 6th of January 1792. The accepted date is therefore the 26th of December 1791. His likely birthplace was 44 Crosby Row, off Walworth Road in London, though even that is disputed.

  Benjamin Babbage and Betsy Plumleigh Teape had four children, and Charles was one of them. His father became a banking partner of William Praed in founding Praed's and Company of Fleet Street in 1801. Around the age of eight, Charles was sent to a country school in Alphington, near Exeter, to recover from a life-threatening fever. Poor health later pulled him out of King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes and back to private tutors.

  The Holmwood Academy in Baker Street, Enfield, had thirty students and a library that sparked his love of mathematics. Its head was the Reverend Stephen Freeman. Two more private tutors followed. One was a clergyman near Cambridge, through whom Babbage met the evangelical followers of Charles Simeon. The other was an Oxford tutor who raised his Classics to the level Cambridge required.

  Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1810, already reading Robert Woodhouse, Joseph Louis Lagrange and Maria Gaetana Agnesi on his own. The standard teaching disappointed him. In 1812 he, John Herschel, George Peacock and several friends formed the Analytical Society. He also joined the Ghost Club, which investigated supernatural phenomena. Another was the Extractors Club, whose members promised to free one another if any were committed to a madhouse.

  In 1812 Babbage moved to Peterhouse, where he was the top mathematician. He still did not graduate with honours. He received a degree without examination in 1814, after defending a thesis in the preliminary public disputation that was judged blasphemous. Nobody knows whether the two events were linked. In 1816 Babbage, Herschel and Peacock published a translation of the calculus lectures of Sylvestre Lacroix, then the leading textbook.

  The same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Even so, he lost a teaching post at Haileybury College to Henry Walter in 1816. In 1819 the professorship at the University of Edinburgh went to William Wallace, despite a recommendation from Pierre Simon Laplace.

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• 3. Mechanising Arithmetic

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  In 1812, Babbage sat in his rooms with a table of logarithms that he knew to be riddled with mistakes. It occurred to him that machinery could compute every tabular function. In his day, printed mathematical tables were worked out by human computers, meaning people calculating by hand. Navigation, science and engineering all depended on them. Errors crept in during calculation and again during transcription.

  France had already shown how to organise such labour. In the project run by Gaspard de Prony, three or four mathematicians chose the method of computation. Half a dozen more broke it into simple stages. Eighty computers who knew only addition and subtraction then did the work. Babbage saw mass production reach arithmetic for the first time, and he became convinced that machinery could replace the unskilled labour, faster and more reliably.

  The Astronomical Society of London, later the Royal Astronomical Society, was founded in 1820 with Babbage as an instrumental figure. Its first aims were to standardise astronomical calculations and to circulate data. By Babbage's own account, the society wanted to improve The Nautical Almanac. He and Herschel were asked to oversee a trial recalculation of part of those tables, and the results showed discrepancies. That was in 1821 or 1822, and he placed his idea for mechanical computation on that occasion. Historians still debate the wider context.

  In 1824 the society awarded him its Gold Medal "for his invention of an engine for calculating mathematical and astronomical tables". Babbage had begun work in 1822 on what he called the difference engine. It computed values of polynomial functions, producing a series of values automatically. By using the method of finite differences, it never needed to multiply or divide.

  In 1823 he brought in Joseph Clement to build a prototype. Clement worked to high standards, and his machine tools were elaborate. Under the usual terms of business, Clement could charge for building those tools and would own them. Around 1831 he and Babbage fell out over costs. Parts of the prototype survive at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.

  The first difference engine would have had around 25,000 parts, weighed 15 short tons and stood 8 feet tall. For more than ten years the government paid for the project, to the total of £17,000, until the Treasury lost confidence in him. The finished portion is now in the Science Museum in London. Funding problems and clashes of personality, above all with the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, left the machine incomplete.

  Others tried where Babbage failed. Per Georg Scheutz had written about the difference engine in 1830. After 1834 he doubted that Babbage's plan could be carried out. With his son Edvard Scheutz he pushed through a project of his own. Another Swedish engine was Martin Wiberg's, dated 1860.

  Between 1847 and 1849 Babbage drew up an improved Difference Engine No. 2. The British government declined to fund it. It was finally built from his plans between 1989 and 1991, using nineteenth-century manufacturing tolerances. At the Science Museum in London, its first calculation returned results to 31 digits. Its success showed that Babbage's machine would have worked.

  The printer Babbage designed for the engine was completed by the Science Museum nine years later, in 2000. His were the first computer printers ever designed. The museum has built two engines to the No. 2 plans, and neither is a replica. It owns one. The other belongs to the technology multimillionaire Nathan Myhrvold and went on show at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on the 10th of May 2008.

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• 4. The Analytical Engine

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  After the first difference engine fell through, Babbage designed a more ambitious machine, the Analytical Engine. He hired C. G. Jarvis, a draughtsman who had worked for Clement. The new machine was to be programmed with punched cards, a principle openly borrowed from Jacquard's loom. The cards would control a mechanical calculator that could take the results of earlier calculations as its input.

  Its planned features read like a modern computer. The machine had sequential control, branching and looping. Data and program memory were kept separate, the control unit could make conditional jumps, and a separate unit handled input and output. In principle it would have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete. Babbage wrote a series of programs for it from 1837 to 1840, and the first was finished in 1837.

  The Analytical Engine was never a single physical machine. It was a succession of designs that Babbage kept reworking to the end of his life. On it, more than on the difference engines, his standing as a computer pioneer rests.

  In 1840 Babbage visited Turin at the invitation of Giovanni Plana, who had built an analog computing machine in 1831 that served as a perpetual calendar. There Babbage gave the only public lectures he ever gave about the Analytical Engine. Fortunato Prandi, an Italian exile and follower of Giuseppe Mazzini, acted as interpreter. Luigi Menabrea took notes of the talks.

  In 1842 Charles Wheatstone approached Ada Lovelace to translate a paper by Menabrea, and Babbage asked her to add something of her own. She is credited with an algorithm that would let the Engine calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. She is often called the first computer programmer, though no programming language yet existed. Some scholars dispute how much of the thinking was hers, despite documents in her own handwriting.

  Lovelace also wrote literature supporting the project. Describing the punched cards, she wrote: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."

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• 5. Economy of Machinery

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  In 1832 Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, a book on how industrial production is organised and an influential early work of operational research. It grew from an essay of 1827 on the principles governing machinery in manufactures, which became a contribution to a multi-volume reference work in 1829. The book sold well and reached a fourth edition by 1836. Babbage said it came from observation in factories, British and foreign. The second edition, late in 1832, added three chapters on political economy, including one on piece rate.

  What is now called the Babbage principle concerns the division of labour. Skilled workers, Babbage observed, spend part of their time on tasks below their skill. Splitting the work among several people lets a firm give only the high-skill jobs to high-paid workers and the rest to lower-paid ones. He added that training is a fixed cost, and that standardising tasks brings returns to scale, which favours the factory system.

  Babbage himself noted that Melchiorre Gioia had made the point in 1815. The name came only in 1974, from Harry Braverman. Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management takes the principle for granted.

  He also broke down the cost structure of book publishing. Publishers disliked it, since he exposed how profitable the trade was and named the organisers of its restrictive practices. Twenty years later he attended a meeting hosted by John Chapman against the Booksellers Association, which was still a cartel.

  Karl Marx built on Adam Smith, Babbage and Andrew Ure in arguing that the productivity of the factory system came from combining the division of labour with machinery. Like Babbage, Marx held that manufacturers divide labour for the sake of profit, not productivity. John Ruskin opposed everything that manufacturing in Babbage's sense stood for. John Stuart Mill's economic thinking was also affected, and Babbage's theories are said to have influenced the layout of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

  George Holyoake saw substance in Babbage's detailed discussion of profit sharing, though the idea was ignored at the time. The book was translated into French by Édouard Biot in 1833, and into German the same year by Gottfried Friedenberg.

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• 6. Quarrels and Campaigns

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  In 1830 Babbage published Reflections on the Decline of Science and some of its Causes, a book sharp enough that one biographer observes all his books have a campaigning element. He wrote it out of pique, after his antagonism with Humphry Davy kept him from becoming junior secretary of the Royal Society. It aimed to oust Davies Gilbert as president. That failed, since the Duke of Sussex was elected to succeed Gilbert the same year. Michael Faraday had Gerrit Moll write a reply, On the Alleged Decline of Science in England, in 1831.

  As a broad manifesto, the book worked better. It led to the formation in 1831 of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Mechanics' Magazine labelled Babbage's followers Declinarians. In 1833 the Association set up a statistical section with Babbage as chairman and John Elliot Drinkwater as secretary. A clash with Roderick Murchison led Babbage to withdraw from the Association in 1838.

  From 1828 to 1839 Babbage held the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge. He had failed three times to win it, in 1820-1823 and 1826, and he learned of his success in April 1828 while in Rome. He was not a conventional resident don. He planned to lecture on political economy in 1831, but William Whewell found his reforming programme unacceptable. He never gave a lecture, and he resigned at the end of 1838.

  Babbage twice stood for Parliament as a candidate for the borough of Finsbury. In 1832 he came third of five candidates and missed out by some 500 votes, because two other reformist candidates, Thomas Wakley and Christopher Temple, split the vote. In 1834 he finished last of four. His political views of the 1830s included disestablishing the Church of England and widening the franchise.

  His Saturday evening soirées, held from 1828 into the 1840s, drew prominent scientists, authors and aristocracy. Babbage is credited with importing the scientific soirée from France.

  In 1857 Babbage published a Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows. Of 464 broken panes in one factory, 14 were caused by drunken men, women or boys. In 1864 he wrote Observations of Street Nuisances, tallying 165 nuisances over 80 days. Street music, and organ grinders in particular, drew his special hatred. He wrote of the misery inflicted on thousands and the lost time of intellectual workers. The MP Michael Thomas Bass became a convert to the cause.

  In the 1860s Babbage also campaigned against boys rolling iron hoops, which he blamed for throwing riders when hoops went under horses' legs. In 1864 he was denounced in the Commons for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat and the trundling of hoops."

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• 7. Beyond the Engines

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  Through the Royal Society, Babbage became friends with the engineer Marc Brunel. In 1830 he provided an introduction for Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the proposed Bristol and Birmingham Railway. Around 1838 he carried out studies showing the superiority of the broad gauge used by Brunel's Great Western Railway. That year he also invented the pilot, or cow-catcher, the metal frame on a locomotive's front that clears obstacles from the track, and he built a dynamometer car.

  He also invented an ophthalmoscope and gave it to Thomas Wharton Jones to test. Jones ignored it. The device came into use only after Hermann von Helmholtz invented it independently.

  As early as 1845, Babbage solved a cipher posed as a challenge by his nephew Henry Hollier. In doing so he discovered that enciphering with a keyword leaves the cipher text open to modular arithmetic. During the Crimean War of the 1850s he broke Vigenère's autokey cipher, and the much weaker cipher now called the Vigenère cipher. He meant to publish a book, The Philosophy of Deciphering, but never did.

  His discovery was kept a military secret. Credit went instead to Friedrich Kasiski, a Prussian infantry officer who made the same discovery some years later. Babbage's priority was not established until 1985. Letter frequency had been category 18 of his plan to tabulate the constants of nature, a project meant to cover 19 categories.

  In 1837 Babbage published the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, titled On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation. It answered a series of eight earlier Bridgewater Treatises. He sided with uniformitarianism, preferring a creation governed by a God-given natural law that removed the need for continuous contrivance. He wrote that "there exists no fatal collision between the words of Scripture and the facts of nature", yet he held that Genesis was not meant to be read literally in scientific terms.

  Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation quoted the book extensively. The parallel with his computing machines was made explicit, since a machine could make it plausible that the transmutation of species was pre-programmed. In the same book he proposed his library in the air: "The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered."

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• 8. Afterlife of an Inventor

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  Half of Charles Babbage's brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in London, and the other half is on display in the Science Museum. His autopsy report was discovered in 1983 and later published by his great-great-grandson. According to Horsley, he died of renal inadequacy, secondary to cystitis. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. He had declined both a knighthood and a baronetcy, and he argued against hereditary peerages in favour of life peerages.

  On the 25th of July 1814 he had married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. They had eight children, and only four survived childhood. Georgiana died on the 1st of September 1827, the same year as Babbage's father. The youngest surviving son, Henry Prevost Babbage, later made six small demonstration pieces for Difference Engine No. 1 from his father's designs. One was sent to Harvard University, where Howard H. Aiken, pioneer of the Harvard Mark I, discovered it. Henry's Analytical Engine Mill of 1910 is now in the Science Museum.

  Babbage's name now sits on a crater on the Moon and on the Charles Babbage Institute, an archive and research center at the University of Minnesota. It also marks Babbage Island in Western Australia and the Babbage Building at the University of Plymouth. British Rail named a locomotive after him in the 1990s. The computer and video-games chain Babbage's, now GameStop, took his name too. Totnes put his face on its 5 pound note in 2007, and he appears in the British cultural icons section of the passport redesigned in 2015.

  Fiction has claimed him as well. He appears often in steampunk. Sydney Padua drew The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, an alternate history in which the pair succeed in building the Analytical Engine. The Doctor Who episode "Spyfall, Part 2" features Babbage and Ada Gordon helping the Doctor in the year 1834.

  In 2011, researchers in Britain proposed a multimillion-pound project called Plan 28 to build the Analytical Engine. Because his plans kept changing, they meant to crowd-source the analysis of what should be built. The machine would have the equivalent of 675 bytes of memory and run at about 7 Hz. They hoped to finish it by the 150th anniversary of his death, in 2021.

  Recent advances in MEMS and nanotechnology have revived mechanical computation, with suggested benefits in high-radiation or high-temperature environments. The Economist highlighted this in its black-covered end-of-the-millennium issue, in an article entitled "Babbage's Last Laugh".

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