Close to two centuries ago, Charles Babbage designed the world’s first general-purpose programmable computer.
Like the great Michael Faraday, Babbage was born in 1791 – the two were born less than a mile apart. Babbage’s family was wealthy, Faraday’s poor. What they had in common, in addition to their London birthplace, was a love of hard work and their relentlessly inquiring minds.
The year 1791 was notable not only for the births of Babbage and Faraday: it also marked the first performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the founding of Washington as the United States of America’s capital city.
In 1834, Babbage had a brilliant insight: he visualized a programmable computer. More than a simple calculating machine, this computer could solve all manner of complex problems. Babbage called it the Analytical Engine.
Babbage’s colleague Ada Lovelace envisaged that the computer could work on any problem that could be expressed in the form of numbers: hence the Analytical Engine could work with words or even compose music.
She translated an article about the Analytical Engine written by the Italian mathematician Menabrea into English. Her extensive explanatory notes were three times longer than the original article:
Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose… pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
Unfortunately for Babbage his idea was too early by at least seven decades. It was not until 1904 that Ambrose Fleming, a fervent Christian like Babbage, heralded the electronic age with his invention of the thermionic diode.
Undeterred by practical difficulties, Babbage drew up designs for his programmable computer. Rotating metal cogs rather than spinning electrons were the basis of his doomed Analytical Engine.
Babbage was a polymath – an intellectual jack-of-all-trades – whose brilliant insights went far beyond computer science. Intellectually, his first and last love was mathematics. At boarding school he particularly wanted to study algebra, but there was too little time in the school day. Later he wrote:
I proposed to one of my school-fellows, who was of a studious habit, that we should get up every morning at three o’clock, light a fire in the school-room, and work until five or half-past five. We accomplished this pretty regularly for several months.
In 1810, at age 18, Babbage became an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile Ludwig van Beethoven was composing Für Elise. Despite Ada Lovelace’s prediction that a computer might compose music, even today none has ever written music to rival Beethoven’s.
By the time he started at Cambridge, Babbage had already taught himself mathematics to a relatively high level. He grew disillusioned with Cambridge’s mathematics courses, and largely ignored the official curriculum and lectures.
Babbage was sociable and enjoyed the company of his many undergraduate friends at Cambridge, including the budding astronomer John Herschel, but he left the university with an undistinguished degree. Babbage had been expected to perform superlatively in the honors examinations, but he didn’t take them. This happened in the wake of an oral examination in which he defended the proposition that God is a material agent. The examiner described Babbage as blasphemous. The result was that Babbage took no further examinations.
After leaving Cambridge, Babbage published mathematics research papers at a rate of about one a year.
In 1822, at age 30, he began to design and construct the Difference Engine, a machine which could manufacture numbers dictated by rules written by a programmer. Babbage intended that his machine would produce mathematical tables – such as trigonometric and logarithmic tables – free from the human errors that plagued them at the time.
In 1824, at age 32, he was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal for his Difference Engine, although a fully working engine was never built.
A difference engine built in modern times according to Babbage’s plans. Photo by Jitze Couperus from Los Altos Hills, California, USA.
The cog wheels in a very small section of the difference engine. Photo by Carsten Ullrich
Likewise, although he had hundreds of blueprints of the Analytical Engine and its working parts drawn, Babbage could not persuade the British government to fund its construction. Regardless of this, Babbage continued working on designs and refinements. Had he secured the funding it required, there is no doubt he would have made it work.
British machine engineering took massive strides forward as a result of Babbage commissioning shops to build parts of both his Difference and Analytical Engines.
A small part of the Analytical Engine. Babbage commissioned this to be built to demonstrate the feasibility of the entire computer. Image by Bruno Barral (ByB).
Babbage, Joule, and Dalton
Did You Know?
To make ends meet, John Dalton, pioneer of chemical atomic theory had to tutor students privately in his old age.
James Joule, who established the equivalence of mechanical and thermal energy, was one of these private students.
Although Babbage never secured government funding to build his Analytical Engine, he was sufficiently saddened by Dalton’s parlous situation to argue for and secure a government pension for the great chemist, who began receiving it at age 67.
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Further Reading
Further biographical details about Charles Babbage from FamousScientists.org
Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
Charles Babbage
Passages from the life of a philosopher
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green; London; 1864
Anthony Hyman
Charles Babbage, pioneer of the computer
Princeton University Press; Princeton; 1982
Neil Champion
Charles Babbage
Heinemann Library; Chicago; 2001
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Difference Engine
Photo by Jitze Couperus from Los Altos Hills, California, USA.
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London Science Museum’s replica Difference Engine closeup
Photo by Carsten Ullrich
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London Science Museum’s section of Analytical Engine
Photo by Bruno Barral (ByB)
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