Charles Babbage Lecture

Charles Babbage Charles Babbage is, in many ways, the reason for Steampunk. The Difference Engine by Gibson & Sterling put Babbage’s work out there on display, and since that was the gateway for many readers into the Steam-genre, It’s fair to say that Babbage had a hand in making all of this happen. And that’s most remarkable because the guy was a total failure at what he was attempting to do. It’s not just that he couldn’t make a working computer in the 1800s, but it was that he never achieved his major goal: to overhaul the complete system of mathematics. This talk is probably going to go about 40 minutes, will focus on Charles Babbage the person, his engines, him in fiction and why the guy was really one of the truly great jackasses in all of history. Let’s start with the guy. Charles Babbage was born in late 1791 in London on Waltham street. This means little. His father was a banker, which meant that he had money. This allowed Babbage to get good school from an early age, though he ended up getting bounced to a country school after he got a fever. The reasoning? His parents declared that ‘his brain was not to be taxed too much.” Babbage said that this may have led to both his eagerness towards innovation and his ‘Childish reasonings’ as he put it. He bounced between schools, he’d find himself getting ill and then they’d bring him home to be tutored. He was a whiz at math. This was discovered pretty early on at his stay at the Holmwood Acaedmy. After that, he was given a couple of tutors. These guys helped him on the way, but Babbage himself said that he had not made the best use of the tutoring because he was lazy. If he had gotten a 20th century report card, it surely would have read Fails to Live up to his Potential. One of his tutors gave him enough study in Classics that he was accepted to Cambridge. By this point, Babbage was nearly out-stripping his tutor at Maths and was even doing some forms of basic engineering. He was also an angry little cuss, something that was quickly noted by his classmates when he was off at Cambridge. He was also especially well-read in the 17th Century mathematician and philosopher Leibniz. A great many of the theories and advances that Babbage would make later in life are directly traceable to Leibniz. At Cambridge, Babbage found himself unsatisfied with the quality of Mathematics, so he, John Herschel and George Peacock set up the Analytical Society in 1812. The group changed its name to the Cambridge Philosophical Society and it still exists today. The group was responsible for the introduction of Leibnizian symbology to Cambridge. So, that’s how that got started.

Herschel, by the way, was Babbage’s equal in almost every area and his superior in many others. Perhaps he’s far less celebrated than Babbage because he was not a raving bastard. More on that in a minute. Babbage went into Porterhouse Cambridge in 1812 and was easily the top mathematics guy there. Even though he was the top Math Dude, he graduated with only an honorary degree without examination. During his time at Cambridge, and certainly afterwards, Babbage was interested in the pioneers of mechanical calculation, specifically Leibniz, Blaise Pascal, and Wilhelm Schickard. He started serious discussing the matters of mechanical computation in 1822, though he had done some studies in the matter as early as 1817. Babbage was a purely scientific mind, receiving a number of medals and citations over the years. He helped to found the Royal Astronomical Society as well as the Statistical Society. He was active in cryptography, breaking several well-known ciphers, including the Vigenere’s autokey cipher. This was a big deal at the time. He wrote for many of the best known journals of the day. He was also an inventor, inventing not only calculating systems, but the Cow catcher for Locomotives, the opthamoscope and even developed a system for the delivery of mail that was far more efficient than the established system. Babbage also wrote some seminal papers. His work On the Economy of Machine and Manufacture described the division of labor and how work can be divided among workers with specific skills. A lot of this lead to the first significant study of scientific management and was even criticized by Karl Marx, which means that he must have been doing something right. He did a number of studies and designed a car for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s locomotive system. There were a number of other papers that were far less significant, but also show a bit of Babbage’s personality. Babbage wrote a study which he published called a Table of Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows which took a look at the causes of the breaking of glass windows in a factory owned by a friend of his. There were 464 broken panes, 14 of which were caused by drunken men women or boys. The followed that with a classic Observations of Street Nuisances. He counted up 165 nuisances over a period of 80 days, and what’s funny about that is most of nuisances were street musicians. He hated street musicians. I mean hated them. Here’s a quote: It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.. He even wrote to a guy name of Alfred Tennyson in response to his poem "The Vision of Sin". Babbage wrote, "In your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads, Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.

... If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]: Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born. Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry." That was the kind of guy he was. It was around 1822 that Babbage started designing the Difference Engine. JH Mueller proposed a Difference Engine in 1786, but failed to find funding. His somewhat detailed proposal was described in a book which Babbage certainly would have had access to. Still, the details weren’t enough to simply go out and get parts made and put them together. He failed to get funding. Babbage had connections throughout academic circles and in society, leading him to be taken much more seriously. Babbage’s plans were very detailed and were bleeding edge. They required incredibly precise milling and it was on the very edge of what was possible. Babbage had one of the top forge-men in England. The plans for individual parts were incredibly precise and the usage meant hardened pieces, so it was very expensive. That was OK, because Babbage had money. In addition to his own cash, of which he used a considerable amount, Babbage got grants and stipends from various groups, the most important of which being the Royal Astronomical Society who gave him 1500 pounds to build the thing. Babbage hated the then standard methods of mathematics. For nearly every major mathematic process there were large books full of tables. If you needed to figure out a Sine function, there was a book that listed all the values that had been computed, mostly by hand. These books had massive problems, as a single mistake in computation would propagate throughout the entire table, making every calculation after it incorrect. Usually, it was simply a mistake in typesetting that led to a single mistake that did not necessarily propagate, but it also didn’t help matters at all. Babbage, who worked with many of these kinds of tables, wanted a way to create a machine to do the work of computing and typesetting these books of tables so they would be without error. He is famously thought to have said ‘By God, I wish these calculations had been done by steam!’. By Steam, at the time, meant by machinery, not actually by steam, so the entire basis of the Steampunk movement is based on a misunderstanding. Much like the Electorial College. The Royal Astronomical Society was probably the largest single user of the most different kinds of tables, so they had a very good reason for wanting to have a working Difference Engine. Babbage used much of his own money to convert a room in his house

into a workshop. Babbage also hired a fellow named Joseph Clement to oversee the manufacturing. Clement was probably the world’s foremost expert on these processes so he didn’t come cheap. He also did not take no guff from no one. Babbage spent much of the next ten years climbing the ladder towards respectability, but also wallowing in frustration. His father and two of his children died within the space of a year and the pressure of getting the engine built led to Babbage being extremely depressed and stressed, which is bad for a guy who was irritable and bitter much of the time. John Herschel said that he should take a long, relaxing trip into the heart of Europe, which Babbage did. And, like any tourist with a lot of money and a bunch of time, he toured Universities and studied industry in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. He became better acquainted with the techniques and requirements to build the Difference Engine. During his time away, several things happened. Before he left, he had received several new grants of funding from several sources, though a lot of it came from the Royal Astronomical Society. This led to people questioning if he was blowing the money in Europe instead of putting it towards the Engines, and since Babbage wasn’t around to throw his magnificent parties where he’d show his latest progress, people were beginning to think that the Engine would actually be useless. Also at this point, Babbage was named to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, a post held by Isaac Newton in the past and a guy in a wheelchair named Hawking in the present. Babbage thought of turning it down because he was tiring of bureaucracy, but he was convinced to take it. Herschel was Babbage’s biggest defending and there were few voices in the Sciences who were more influential than John Herschel. This got some but not all the heat off of Babbage and allowed his work to continue. Until he pissed off the wrong guy. Babbage built what could be seen as one of the first Clean Rooms in the history of computing. It was two-stories, fifty feet long with a glass ceiling for lighting since any of the traditional lighting methods would leave residue. It was dust free and sealed with a triple seal entry, requiring stops in two vestibles which would open, allow you to enter, the first door close and then the next would open. It was a very paranoid design, but successful. Clement refused to move his operations to the workshop, partly because a number of the pieces required for the manufacturing of the Engine were huge and could not be moved, and secondly because who would want to be so near to that psychopath Babbage. Clement raised his rate, saying that he would need more money since he’d be constantly trekking between his warehouse and the workshop. Babbage said that he should go to the Royal Treasury and draw his salary directly from them. Clement, knowing that getting anything out of the treasury could be a massive chore refused to go along with the plan and quit. Babbage is said to have unleashed a quite un-gentlemanly tirade upon being told of the matter.

The Difference Engine had cost some 23000 so far and had led to no complete machine. Not even a significant enough portion where it could easily be demonstrated. He still threw regular open houses where people would drop in and see what he was up to, but they were no longer the hot ticket. Clement held on to drawings and pieces, eventually retuning the drawings, but later melting the pieces and the specially designed tools he’d had made for the project. In 1842, the government officially put the Difference Engine on the Do Not Resesitate list. During the times when he would talk or give demonstrations about the Difference Engine. Here’s one of Babbage’s most famous quotes- On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. The problem really was with how Babbage was presenting the Engine. He made it sound as if it was infoulable, so some confusion is completely understandable. The thought was that it was human error in the typesetting that caused most of the problems with the tables (which is true) so the misunderstanding should have been completely obvious. Even while the Difference Engine was failing like a American Car Company, Babbage was thinking of something much bigger. As early as 1833 he was working on the design of what he called an Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine would have been much more general than the Difference Engine. While the Difference Engine could be used for a wide variety of problems that could be solved through the series of Differences, the Analytical Engine would be much more general, able to solve any sort of mathematical problem. He designed a system where the output could be fed back into the input, leading to ‘it’s eating it’s own tail’. He designed a Mill, where the math was actually done, analogous to today’s modern CPU, and a Store, which would be like today’s memory. The operations were fed in by a system that used cards much like the Jacquard Loom. He designed the hell out of that card reader and it is one of the finest examples of Victorian far-seeing technology, even more impressive than the early FAX machines. There were some issues. One, folks had been burned before by Babbage’s great idea and ineffectual management style. Second, the sheer scale of the project was huge. There were 500 design drawings detailing a machine that would be more than 25 feet long and huge and costly and require more metal than would be used in five locomotives. The cost would be even more. The 23K that was spent on the Difference Engine could have purchased ten Locomotives! He approached Sir Robert Peel, the Firsst Lord of the Treasury, and he got turned down, though they offered him a Knighthood instead, which Babbage refused. It was in 1842 that Federico Luigi published a paper in Italian about the Analytical Engine. I believe he saw the plans first hand, though others have said he was merely writing out of second-hand knowledge. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, translated the paper. She was already a friend of Babbage’s and was the first person in

England to really grasp what Babbage was going on about. Babbage suggested she add notes to the accompany the paper. A series of letters between Babbage and Lovelace resulted in seven significant notes which totaled more than 3 times the length of the original piece. Ada brought up a few good points about the operation of the machine and the ways in which it might be programmed so it could serve as a general Algebraic machine. She understood how a computer could be used as a symbol machine, a term she coined in one of her letters. This does not, under any circumstances, make her the first computer programmer. Yes, she understood the ways in which a computer could be programmed, but never wrote a program, never really suggested a concrete method in which the machine could be programmed, and really only put out a very general portion of the thought. In the same way we would have to consider DiVinci the father of the helicopter, despite the fact that his design, while theoretically feasible, would not have flown. Equally unsuccessful with the Analytical Engine, Charly took a stab at the Difference Engine again, this time using the knowledge he gained from the Analytical Engine. The Difference Engine Two was a much more compact design, and Babbage very smartly made no effort to build it. He simply put together a complete design. A design that would not have worked, but a design nonetheless. Here’s the thing: in a letter, Babbage said that in the published designs (almost all of his designs were published through various entities), he had added a few ‘catches’ as he called them, to prevent his plans from being stolen and completed. Though he said this, he did not record what they were. This becomes important when the Science Museum in London did their Difference Engine. The Science Museum’s Difference Engine was not the first one ever made. A father and son team named the Scheutz managed to build a few smaller difference engines, having thought that Babbage had actually completed his so they wanted in on the action. Their Engine was inferior due to a simpler design that didn’t have error protection. There were others made, but none of them were successful. This does tend to suggest that Babbage’s efforts were really in vain because they would have made little impact, but on the other hand, everyone else had managed to make Difference Engine were outside of the mainstream and with a celebrity like Babbage the Engines would have been taken much more seriously, so it’s a toss-up. A Team led by Doron Swade undertook the challenge to build the DE 2 using technologies that would have been available to Babbage’s people at the time. There was an idea to use the actual equipment of Joseph Clement, but this was quickly abandoned. The first step was to do a CAD drawing of the machine and to test it out. This easily showed that Babbage’s drawings, as they were presented, would not have been able to produce a working machine. The knowledge that there were catches meant that they could easily brush these aside, including one so simple, the discontinuation of a camshaft that made the entire machine’s motion possible, would have been easily caught in

the building process. But the question remains, were the half-dozen or so design flaws intentional or not? Was it a combination of factors? Who knows. The Science Museum put it together to celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Babbage’s birth. The spent two years putting it together and it ended with a lovely device that stands in the Science Museum even today. In 2000, the Science Museum undertook the task of building the printer Babbage had designed. This was a big task and they managed to complete it in less than a year. Mircosoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold decided he wanted one for his livingroom. He contracted the Science Museum to build a second Difference Engine specifically for him. Doron Swade was on the team again, even though he was working at the Computer History Museum, and that led him to arrange for the Difference Engine to spend a couple of years at the Computer History Museum (which is where I work). I’ve got a funny story. I was at the Science Museum in London a few weeks before it was shipped over to the Museum. I walked up to it and saw that the case had been removed from the original Engine that the Museum had built. They had some cones around the exhibit and a guy was standing next to one of them. I went up and told him that I was from the museum in California and he said ‘Oh, so you must know Doron.” And pointed to the side where Doron, my boss at that moment, who was working on the second engine, which somehow I had not noticed. I walked over and got to chat with Doron as he demonstrated it. I looked around. “Is there a really long Cam Shaft anywhere around?” I asked. Doron asked why, and I said I wanted to try and create the Victorian Internet. Doron laughed. These are not the only difference engines that have been made either. A fellow named Tim Robinson is a master of Meccano, what we call Erector Set here in the States. He has managed to build large computing devices such as Differential Analyzers and Analog Computers, which I believe tell you when the next good issue of Analog will arrive, likely some time in the far distant future. He’s built a complete Difference Engine of Meccano and a section of the Analytical Engine. There are also folks who have created Difference Engines out of Lego. The plans are on-line in various places. So, what did Babbage manage to do? He tried to make the first computer that would be nearly Turing complete. While no significant portion was built during his lifetime, Henry Provost Babbage, Charles’ son, built several models and sent them to institutions around the world. One of them ended up at Harvard, where it was seen by a certain Mr. Howard Aiken, who had studied Babbage a fair bit and used much of that knowledge to design his early calculating Engines such as the Harvard Mark 1. That set off a series of innovations by Harvard, which led IBM to get into the Electronic computer business and that led this that and the other thing. Babbage’s works were popularly rediscovered in the 1970s, largely due to the work of the London Science Museum and the Computer Museum in Boston.

As an end to this talk, I’ll say that Babbage, and most of organized medical study, believed that the brains of inventors and the scientifically minded were very different than normal brains, so he agreed to have half of his brain removed and kept by the Royal College of Physicians. It’s on display there today after a stint where it was on display at the London Science Museum. It’s pretty big.