Charles Babbage
Babbage, Charles

    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)