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Charles Babbage was one of the key figures of a great era of British history.
Born as the industrial revolution was getting into its swing, by the time
Babbage died Britain was by far the most industrialized country the world had
ever seen. Babbage played a crucial rôle in the scientific and technical
development of the period.
Although born in London, Babbage came from an old Totnes family, and
retained close links with the region all his life. The West Country, with its
mining and engineering was particularly important in the early stages of the
industrial revolution, and from the extraordinarily wealthy Totnes region, with
its port at Dartmouth, came also Newcomen and Savery, pioneers of the steam
engine.
Babbage went up to Cambridge in 1810 and with some friends effected the
crucial introduction of the Leibnitz notation for the calculus, which
transformed mathematics in Cambridge and thus throughout Britain.
In 1814 Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore, from a landowning Shropshire
family. Her half brother, Wolryche Whitmore, was the M.P. who rose year after
year in the House of Commons to move the repeal of the Corn Laws. He was also
a leading member of the Political Economy Club, and played an important part in
Babbage's life.
Babbage's greatest achievement was his detailed plans for Calculating
Engines, both the table-making Difference Engines and the far more ambitious
Analytical Engines, which were flexible and powerful, punched-card controlled
general purpose calculaters, embodying many features which later reappeared in
the modern stored program computer. These features included: punched card
control; separate store and mill; a set of internal registers (the table axes);
fast multiplier/divider; a range of peripherals; even array processing.
It has often been asked whether Babbage's Engines would have worked if
they had been built. This may not be an entirely meaningful question: much
can go wrong during such a project, while on the other hand new solutions may
be found to any problems which might appear during construction. However the
question can be put slightly differently: would it have been technically
feasible for, say, Babbage and Whitworth to construct an Analytical Engine
during the 1850s?
Twenty five years ago, after a careful investigation, Anthony Hyman and
the late Maurice Trask formed the opinion that construction of Babbage's
Engines would have been quite possible. The problems were financial and
organizational, but technically the project in itself was perfectly feasible.
They proposed a plan. :first construct DE2 (the Second Difference Engine; then,
if wished DE1, or a version of DE2 with `travelling platforms'; and finally a
complete Analytical Engine, probably following plan 28A.
After much work by many people, and particularly by Dr. Allan Bromley, a
team at the Science Museum led by Doron Swade built a complete version of
DE2. It was a triumphant success, vindicating Babbage's technical work.
However, the far more ambitious task of constructing an Analytical Engine
remains to be undertaken.
Besides the Calculating Engines Babbage has an extraordinary range of
achievements to his cr: he wrote a consumer guide to life assurance;
pioneered lighthouse signalling; scattered technical ideas and inventions in
magnificent profusion; developed mathematical codebreaking (Prof. Franksen has
plausibly suggested that Babbage ran a private Bletchley Park for the British
government in the middle of the +19th century).
Babbage was also an important political economist. Where Adam Smith
thought agriculture was the foundation of a nation's wealth; where Ricardo's
ideas were focused on corn: Babbage for the first time authoritatively placed
the factory on centre stage. Babbage gave a highly original discussion of the
division of labour, which was followed by John Stuart Mill. Babbage's
discussion of the effect of the development of production technology on the
size of factories was taken up by Marx, and was fundamental to Marxist theory
of capitalist
socio-economic development. A case can also be made that Babbage had an
influence on William Stanley Jevons, and was thus also a pioneer of marginal
value theory. However, the latter remains to be proved.
For twenty five years Charles Babbage was a leading figure in London
society, and his glorious Saturday evening soirées, attended by two or three
hundred people, were a meeting place for Europe's liberal intelligencia.
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