¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

Babbage: Architect of Modern Computing

This week London’s Science Museum opens an exhibition commemorating
the 200th birthday of Charles Babbage. The first of two articles reviews
Babbage’s life and times; the second focuses on the exhibition’s star attraction,
a mechnaical calculator that Babbage designed but never got around to building

Charles Babbage, 200 years old in December, was born in a house among
green fields where the Elephant and Castle, a concrete mini-town in south
London, now glowers. The farthest you could travel in a day depended on
the strength of your horse. When he died 79 years later, England was veined
with railway lines, and the trains could reach 75 miles per hour between
cities of slums and factories. He should have been the lodestar of that
great revolution, but all too often he was its butt, a target for ridicule
in aristocratic society.

Babbage devised the principles of modern computing and tried endlessly
to produce ‘Engines’ that would compute and print mathematical and navigational
tables for the world of commerce and industry growing all around him. He
also invented the ‘cow catcher’ for trains – a frame designed to brush cattle
to one side of the track, the flashing lighthouse and the speedometer, and
devised techniques for operational research (applying objective criteria
to decision making). Using his mathematical genius, he improved the safety
of Brunel’s railways. Although Babbage was a laissez-faire liberal, he saw
the limitations of the simplistic worship of market forces and he understood
the need for government, science and technology to get along together for
the benefit of all.

Since the Western allies had to reinvent the computer and operational
research in order to win the Second World War, you might expect to find
a monument to Babbage among the eyeless stone idols that stand in our major
cities today. There isn’t one. But it does appear that 200 years after he
was born he is going to get something like his due. There has been a special
issue of commemorative postage stamps featuring Babbage and his inventions.
From this week, visitors to the Science Museum in London will be able to
see Babbage’s Difference Engine No 2 – for the first time, one of his Engines
has been built (see ‘Calculated gambling to Babbage’s design’, this issue).
And next week, there will be a symposium in Cambridge on Babbage and Michael
Faraday, who is also 200 years old this year. For a British technologist
this is, at last, something akin to the kind of festival put on for artists
at the National Gallery or Royal Academy.

Babbage was a man of great charm, vitality and good health. He got on
well with women – one of whom devoted herself to being his publicist although
she was a wealthy young countess – and his male friends included Faraday,
Charles Darwin, Joseph Whitworth, William and John Herschel, Marc and Isambard
Brunel and George and Robert Stephenson. Until he lapsed into misanthropy
later in life he seems to have been the sort of person you felt better for
meeting. He was certainly quick tempered and combative too, publicly labelling
the president of the Royal Society, Davies Gilbert, a fraud and then wondering
what all the fuss was about. His contemporaries in science and engineering
took him very seriously indeed; it was the social set, the chattering classes
of their day, who mocked his work.

Babbage was a Cambridge mathematician who settled down in London with
his wife Georgiana in the 1820s, living on a private income provided by
a grudging father who was a rich banker. Babbage did not lack money throughout
his life. When he began work on his machines he was well aware that there
had been simpler calculators going back more than a century. Babbage’s Difference
Engines were designed to compute tables of numbers by the method of finite
differences, and then to print out the tables as they were computed. He
was convinced that inaccuracies in contemporary mathematical and navigational
tables provided sufficient reason for his work.

The first Difference Engine Babbage conceived – before even the earliest
steam trains were running – was very much more subtle and advanced than
any other calculator to date. In its day, the machine was as complex and
demanding a piece of work as a present-day aerospace project would be to
us. (Significantly, Babbage later invented something very like today’s aircraft
black boxes: he intended them to be installed in every train to show its
speed and motions on the track in case of collisions; there were no takers.)

In the Difference Engine, numbers were held on the machine in columns
of toothed wheels and the whole process worked by someone turning a mangle-sized
handle. The Engine was of course a mechanical device because the days when
electronic pulses would do the job were still more than 100 years off. Babbage
mentioned steam, but he never coupled it to his Engines. With this start,
and with the further ideas that he had, Babbage had established the basic
principles on which today’s computers work. It is for this achievement that
he was honoured by such great English 20th-century pioneers as Alan Turing,
who published a theory of how a numerical computer should work in 1936.

Babbage had commissioned the drafting of the designs for his computing
machines. Marc Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great railway
pioneer, recommended him to an engineer named Joseph Clement, whose lathe
lived in the kitchen. However much they irritated one another, Babbage and
Clement formed a powerful team and Clement’s workshop became one of the
renowned centres for precision machine tools.

The range of Babbage’s interests was enormous, enough to detract from
the complete devotion that his Engines required. He was offered a job in
life assurance (his father was always fussing over his lack of a proper
job) because of his mathematical mind, but he turned it down in favour of
Difference Engine No 1. All the same, he studied assurance deeply and wrote
an analysis of life assurance companies that began: ‘In exposing the disgraceful
practices which prevail at some assurance offices . . . I feel that little
more is requisite than by rendering these practices known, to make them
universally condemned!’ That was Babbage at his most characteristic and
attractive: fearless and free.

In 1827 Babbage was devastated by the death of his young wife in childbirth
and of one of their sons. He had toured England with her before she died,
and after it he toured Europe to try to recover.

Babbage often dropped in on many northern and southern European workshops,
talking to their owners and workers as freely as possible, though commercial
secrecy was already counting heavily against free disclosure. At this time,
he also threw in his lot with the parliamentary reform movement that culminated
in the Reform Bill of 1832. Babbage established himself as a leader of the
science reform movement and as an applied economist by the publication of
a book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.

As he recovered from his bereavement, Babbage began to hold soirees
at his London home in Dorset Street, first for a few friends but gradually
for London society. They became glittering events in which his gifts of
friendship and personal charm radiated across the company – a company that
would come to deride him as his failure to finish his Engines and his quarrels
with the prime ministers of the day became known. He was also elected Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, but in 11 years of office gave not
a single lecture.

His next book, Reflections on the Decline of Science and its Causes,
was another polemic. It had three main aims: to remove Gilbert as President
of the Royal Society because of his despotism and for falsifying the minutes;
to reform the society itself; and to reform science in England. Babbage
believed science must be diffused through society and he wanted to begin
with the schools and universities: ‘A young man passes from our public schools
to the universities ignorant, almost, of the elements of every branch of
useful knowledge.’

Babbage had become a man of affairs in a fairly short time, but he still
clung to his aspirations for the Engines. Engine No 1 was not complete before
he began to design Engine No 2, which was to be lighter, easier to make
and faster than its predecessor. By 1848 Babbage had started on the third
Difference Engine, again never finished.

Undoubtedly his crowning intellectual achievement was to be the Analytical
Engine. Like the modern computer, it had a separate store for holding numbers
and a ‘mill’ for working on them; a control and operations section; and
a punched card system that served as a program for input and printed output.
The idea of feeding the results back into the machine to be further worked
on was the hallmark of one of the 20th century’s major intellectual achievements
– the concept of the electronic stored program computer. Babbage got the
idea from Joseph Jacquard’s looms. These avoided the use of skilled weavers
by using a string of cards punched with holes that were attached to a rotating
block over the looms. Where there were holes, threads could be picked up
by hooks to be woven automatically into the patterns. The insight was marvellous
– ‘the Engine eating its own tail’ were Babbage’s words for his application
of the idea.

Babbage was to have another associate in his pursuit of the Analytical
Engine – a young woman who was to arouse almost as much controversy down
the years as the Engines themselves. She was Augusta Ada Byron, daughter
of the poet Lord Byron, whose mother, Lady Noel Byron, was to bring to a
tragic end the perfectly harmless relationship between the two.

When Ada first met Babbage she already knew something of the Difference
Engines’ history. To strengthen her knowledge she went to a series of lectures
on them, her mother in attendance, and they then went on a tour of industry
in the Midlands. Ada went to more of Babbage’s parties and strove to educate
herself with tutors in mathematics so that she could understand the Engines
more completely. There is no doubting her determination, in a hostile climate,
to learn to do something useful with her life. In Victorian times this was
customarily limited to the acquisition of a rich husband. Ada saw to that
too, and in 1835 she married Lord King, who became the Earl of Lovelace
in due course. He was as dull and worthy as Babbage was exciting and unpredictable.

The more mathematics Ada learnt the more she yearned to learn in order
to work with (never for) Babbage. In time, they became close friends. In
1840 he went to Turin to hold a series of lectures on the Analytical Engine
to a group of Italian philosophers and scientists. A young Italian military
engineer, Captain Luigi Menabrea (later prime minister of a united Italy)
took on the job of writing a paper on the Engine, which was published in
Geneva a year later. Because she had offered to help, Babbage suggested
that Ada should translate the paper from French into English so that it
could be published in England. Her translation was excellent and she added
a series of footnotes interpretating what Manabrea had written.

Some indication of Babbage’s opinion of her work can be seen in the
fact that he suggested to her that she recast her footnotes as an article
or booklet to be published in its own right. By this time the paper was
at the printer and Ada reacted violently to Babbage altering the course
of action to which she had agreed. She also caught him altering some of
her sentences, and Byron’s daughter was not standing for that.

Her explanatory notes have caused continual ripples of controversy that
rock computer historians to this day. Do they constitute original work in
mathematics that amplifies Babbage’s own work? Or are they merely descriptive
and without originality? Babbage himself supplied, tantalisingly, only part
of the answer. Writing to a friend, Charles Wheatstone, he said ‘ . . .
the selection (of examples) was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic
working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to
the numbers of Bernoulli which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace.
This she sent back to me for an amendment having discerned a grave mistake
which I had made.’ The derivative school of thought argues that Ada was
just a publicity agent for Babbage’s work; she could certainly turn a nice
and useful phrase: ‘The Analytical Engine weaves Algebraic patterns, just
as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’

Babbage leaves no final opinion of Ada’s work, but it is obvious from
their correspondence that he thought very highly of her ability and her
character. We shall never know how original her mind was. It is enough to
pause to think of the obstacles piled against knowledge at the time: because
of her sex Ada could not even correspond directly with the publisher – the
intermediary she used was probably Wheatstone. She was supposed to be the
decorative provider of heirs to the Lovelaces and to the Byron family fortune
when her mother died, but she was much more than that. She gladdened Babbage’s
rather sad later life and resolutely helped him as much as she was able.

By her early thirties, Ada had become addicted to alcohol, to opium
and to betting on horse racing. When she took a lover, John Crosse, he belonged
to the turf and spent her money on horses to the extent that she had to
pawn her jewels – some of them twice over. Her demonic mother drove her
to distraction: cancer of the cervix did the rest. When Babbage went to
see the dying Ada, Lady Byron forbade him entry to the house. She intercepted
and destroyed his letters to Ada. Babbage must have felt her death almost
as keenly as the loss of his wife, son and daughter. But whatever else,
she left behind the most complete account of the Analytical Engine available
today.

Babbage had always looked upon the Engines as instruments for advancing
the sophistication of science and industry. In 1835 he wrote to an American
admirer: ‘You will be able to appreciate the influence of such an Engine
on the future progress of science – I live in a country which is incapable
of estimating it.’ In fact, one prime minister, the Duke of Wellington,
saw to it that Babbage had considerable help from the state. Babbage was
granted £17 000, estimated to be near £1 million in today’s
money. To that extent the Engines were recognised as a public project in
advanced technology. But of Wellington’s successors, Lord William Melbourne
was useless and Robert Peel actively hostile. Benjamin Disraeli was the
last chancellor to refuse funds, and although Joseph Whitworth, by now a
world leader in machine tools, made an offer to build an Analytical Engine,
it would still need government help and Babbage saw no hope of gaining such
support. He took the view that his work so far had repaid the government
through the advanced machine tools it had generated. But he was living in
a culture that was increasingly alienating itself from the sources of its
wealth ‘ . . . the third generation makes the gentleman’ was the saying
that symbolised the flight of the nouveau riche from their origins in Birmingham
or Manchester.

Babbage still had influential friends, but he gathered more and more
influential enemies. He was denied a place in the Great Exhibition of 1851
and his flashing lighthouse won American backing only after he had exhibited
it upstairs in his own house. Nonetheless, he was offered a knighthood and
membership of the Privy Council – eminent people appointed to advise the
sovereign, including all Cabinet members of the day – both of which he turned
down. Charles Dickens, a friend, is supposed to have based the Office of
Circumlocution in Little Dorrit on Babbage’s experience with government.

We are left asking: why is Charles Babbage regarded as a failure? The
answer is not simple. Lack of public funding was part of it: Babbage certainly
spent a lot of his own money on the Engines and was entitled to expect better
public support because they were a national project. But he was also an
inventor who could not stop himself inventing for his own good. Matthew
Boulton’s famous part-ship with James Watt, the steam engine pioneer, was
successful because the entrepreneur stopped Watt from inventing at will.
Boulton made Watt sit down to design and make something that could be sold.
Like many before and after him, Babbage was just too fertile with ideas
and dissipated his genius instead of focusing it.

Babbage sank into old age complaining of the advance of socialism. He
became famous not for his Engines but for his tetchy campaigns against street
beggars and musicians. Clear-sightedly, he foresaw the decline of England
and the rise of Germany and the US. He declared that he had never had a
completely happy day in his life and he died aged 79 in 1871, his genius
already eclipsed.

Glyn Jones is a science writer and film maker.

Further reading: Charles Babbage Pioneer of the Computer by Anthony
Hyman. Published by Oxford University Press, 1982. Ada, A Life and a Legacy
by Dorothy Stein. Published by MIT Press, London and Massachusetts, 1985.
Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, edited by Philip and Emily
Morrison. Published by Dover Publications, New York, 1961.