catflap.org Online Dictionary Query

  Charles Babbage
       
           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)