Charles Babbage
Babbage, Charles
(băb`ĭj), 1792–1871, English mathematician and inventor. He devoted most of his life and expended much of his private fortune and a government subsidy in an attempt to perfect a mechanical calculating machine that foreshadowed present-day machines. He was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He wrote Tables of Logarithms (1827) and an autobiography (1864).Bibliography
See biographies by M. Moseley (1970) and D. Halacy (1970).
Charles Babbage
(1)Charles Babbage
(person)Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth,Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA fromCambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Enginethrough funding from the British Government. In 1827 hepublished a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000. In 1828he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics atCambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 hefounded the British Association for the Advancement of Scienceand in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures andMachinery". In 1833 he began work on the AnalyticalEngine. 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, occultinglights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and theheliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphersand lock-picking.
[Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September1994].
Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work withmachines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels ofabstraction, fell into a trap familiar to toolsmithssince, as described here by the English ethicist, LordMoulton:
"One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to thecelebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was faradvanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever.He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I sawparts of the original Calculating Machine, which had beenshown in an incomplete state many years before and had evenbeen put to some use. I asked him about its present form. 'Ihave not finished it because in working at it I came on theidea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that itwas capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was somuch simpler that it would have taken more work to completethe Calculating Machine than to design and construct the otherin its entirety, so I turned my attention to the AnalyticalMachine.'"
"After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room,where he showed and explained to me the working of theelements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could seeit. 'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit uponan idea of doing the same thing by a different and far moreeffective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed onthe old lines.' Then we went into the third room. There layscattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any workingmachine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, andreceived the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but Iam working on it, and it will take less time to construct italtogether than it would have token to complete the AnalyticalMachine from the stage in which I left it.' I took leave ofthe old man with a heavy heart."
"When he died a few years later, not only had he constructedno machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympatheticscientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he hadleft behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was thateverything was too incomplete of be capable of being put toany useful purpose."
[Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, andgrowth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorialvolume" (London, 1915), p. 1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage"Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", MartinCampbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994),p. 34].
Compare: uninteresting, Ninety-Ninety Rule.