Technology & Engineering
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage was a 19th-century English mathematician and inventor known as the "father of the computer." He designed the first automatic mechanical computer, known as the Analytical Engine, which laid the foundation for modern computers. Babbage's work revolutionized the field of computing and his concepts continue to influence technological advancements today.
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eBook - ePubElectric Dreams
Computers in American Culture
- Ted Friedman(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- NYU Press(Publisher)
Babbage worked on his Analytical Engine from 1834 to his death in 1871, but never completed the machine. He died a bitter, unappreciated man.Babbage is a problematic figure in the historical memory of computing culture. He’s been dubbed the “father of computing,” or sometimes “the grandfather of computing.” Today the largest computer museum in the United States is titled the Charles Babbage Institute, and a national software chain calls itself Babbage’s. In England he’s hailed as one of the country’s great inventors. The bicentennial of his 1791 birth was celebrated with museum exhibitions, commemorative postage stamps, and, as we shall see, a successful attempt to build a working difference engine.5 In a sense, Babbage invented the computer, since he developed a set of ideas that would ultimately see fruition in the twentieth century as what we now know as the computer.But Babbage never successfully built his own machines, and no inventors followed in his footsteps. In fact, his work, now so widely hailed, was rediscovered too late to influence the development of the computer in the twentieth century. His writing was still obscure when the first digital computers were built in the 1940s. Most pioneers of the era, such as J. Presper Eckert and William Mauchly, have confirmed that they’d never heard of Babbage when they worked on ENIAC and UNIVAC, the machines widely considered to be the first true computers.6Harvard’s Howard Aiken, who developed another early computer, the Mach IV, was one of the few scientists of the time who did know something of Babbage’s work. As a result, whiggish historians of technology have been quick to detect a direct lineage. The introduction to one collection on computing in 1953 claimed, “Babbage’s ideas have only been properly appreciated in the last ten years, but we now realize that he understood clearly all the fundamental principles which are embodied in modern digital computers.”7 More recent scholarship, however, has complicated this story. I. Bernard Cohen’s detailed study of the relationship between the work of Babbage and Aiken concludes that “Babbage did not play any seminal role in the development of Aiken’s own ideas about machine architecture.”8 In fact, the Mark I “suffered a severe limitation which might have been avoided if Aiken had actually known Babbage’s work more thoroughly.”9
eBook - PDF- Richard S. Rosenberg(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
As useful calculating devices were developed, the impetus grew to refine and improve them in order to carry out even more complicated computations. Leib-niz himself raised the banner for the relief of drudgery through technology. Also the astronomers surely will not have to continue to exercise the patience which is required for computation. It is this that deters them from computing or correcting tables, from the construction of Ephemerides, from working on hypotheses, and from discussions of observations with each other. For it is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor or calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used. (Emphasis added.) 20 54 Criticism and History Charles Babbage: The Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine Over the next century a number of refinements took place in the basic calculator, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that a generally successful calculator became available. Charles Babbage (1792-1871), a most remarkable man—mathematician, in-ventor, and initiator of scientific management—flourished in this period. Undoubtedly, he deserves the title father of the computer. Ironically, his story is one of generally unfulfilled ambition. In 1821, he became interested in building a Difference Engine to automate the calculation of algebraic functions by using successive differences. A story describes the mo-ment of its inception. Apparently Babbage was checking some calculations with John Herschel (the son of Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus) when Babbage re-marked, I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. Herschel simply replied, It is quite possible. (Steam was the major power source of Babbage's time.) In 1836, before his Difference Engine was completed, Babbage conceived of a much more powerful, general purpose computer that he called the Analytical Engine.
eBook - PDFThe Computing Universe
A Journey through a Revolution
- Tony Hey, Gyuri Pápay(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Correct calculations were only part of the problem however, since the copying and typesetting of the results were equally error prone. In order to eliminate these errors, Babbage designed his machine to record the results on metal plates that could be used directly for printing. By 1822 he had built a small working prototype and made a proposal to the Royal Society that a large, B.1.4 Charles Babbage (1792–1871) was the son of a wealthy banker. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and was the leader of a radical group of students that overthrew the negative legacy of Isaac Newton’s approach to calculus on mathematics in England by introduc- ing new notation and mathematical techniques from France and Germany. Babbage is now known for his pioneer- ing work in computing, but he was also a prolific inventor. Among other things, he invented the ophthalmoscope, a cowcatcher, the seismograph, and a submarine propelled by compressed air. However, Babbage’s computing engines were never completed, and he died a disappointed man. The Computing Universe 12 full-scale Difference Engine be built. As a result of his proposal, Babbage was encouraged to seek funding from the U.K. government, and he eventu- ally received what was then an unprecedented offer of ₤1,500 in financial support. To give some idea of how this amount compares in today’s prices, Doron Swade in his book on the Difference Engine states that “A gentle- man in 1814, for example, could expect to support his wife and a few chil- dren in modest comfort on an income of ₤300 a year.” 11 So in 1822, this represented a very significant investment by the government. The full-scale engine would need thousands of precisely engineered gears and axles. Babbage therefore had to begin the project by spending a great deal of time with his skilled engineering draughtsman, Joseph Clement, devising and designing better machine tools capable of produc- ing hundreds of identical parts.
eBook - ePubA History of Artificially Intelligent Architecture
Case Studies from the USA, UK, Europe and Japan, 1949–1987
- Danyal Ahmed(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
https://archive.org/details/androidsjacquetd00carr/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater . Photographs by Jean-Jacques Luder. All rights reserved. Used with permission from Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel – Suisse [Museum of Art and History, Neuchâtel, Switzerland].Charles Babbage (1791–1871) was an English polymath – a mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. He commenced his Difference Engine No. 1 in 1823, and its construction was abandoned in 1842 (Figure 1.5 ). He defines his difference engine in a letter to the Astronomical Society of London as a piece of machinery, or an engine, that with the application of a moving force computes any of the tables required for astronomical and mathematical purposes.18 The engine was capable of computing the numbers as fast as any assistant or calculator could write them down. The engine was comprised of a small number of different parts that were repeated frequently. It is interesting to note that Babbage presented this machine as to perform one of the lowest operations of human intellect of “intolerable labour and fatiguing monotony of a continued repetition of similar arithmetical calculations.”19 He argued that a gentleman employed by the publishers of a valuable collection of mathematical tables for correcting the press was being paid the amount of just three guineas a sheet, “a sum by no means too large for the faithful execution of such a laborious duty.”20 Although Babbage was utmost confident regarding his contrivance, he sought the support of the president of the concerned society and scientific friends who examined it, as he said:I am aware that the statements contained in this Letter may perhaps be viewed as something more than Utopian, and that the philosophers of Laputa may be called up to dispute my claim to originality. Should such be the case, I hope the resemblance will be found to adhere to the nature of the subject rather than to the manner in which it has been treated.21A woodcut print showing a portion of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1.Figure1.5Source: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Long-man, Roberts, and Green, 1864 ), frontispiece, accessed January 5, 2023, https://archive.org/details/TO00961792_TO0324_62184_000000/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater
eBook - PDFVictorian Technology
Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine
- Herbert Sussman(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Babbage’s effort to mechanize thought in his Engines was celebrated as exemplifying the technological progress of the age. Important visitors, including Charles Dickens and Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, flocked to Babbage’s house to admire the completed parts of the Difference Engine. In 1834, Dionysus Lardner, the science correspondent of The 46 Victorian Technology Edinburgh Review, wrote, ‘‘A proposition to reduce arithmetic to the do- minion of mechanism—to substitute an automaton for a composition—to throw the power of thought into wheel-works could not fail to capture the attention of the world.’’ 24 On presenting the gold medal of the Astronomi- cal Society to Babbage in 1825, the president of the society lauded the Dif- ference Engine: ‘‘Just as the artisan has been furnished with commands of power beyond human strength, joined with precision surpassing any ordi- nary attainment of dexterity, [the calculating engine] substitutes mechanical performance for an intellectual process; and that performance is effected with celerity and exactness unattainable in ordinary methods.’’ 25 Yet it must be noted that for all the anticipations of the modern computer in the Ana- lytical Engine, the actual history of the electronic computer shows that its inventors did not look back on upon Babbage’s plans, which became known only after the innovative work on the modern computer in the mid-twentieth century. VICTORIAN SCIENCE FICTION Both Lovelace and Babbage imagine the Victorian thinking machine as a newly developed form of intelligent life. Lovelace sees the Analytical Engine as a ‘‘mechanism’’ that can ‘‘combine together general symbols, in succes- sions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link … between the opera- tions of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.’’ 26 Babbage felt that working with the Ana- lytical Engine would be communicating with an entity endowed with mind.
eBook - PDF- Maurice V. Wilkes(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Morgan Kaufmann(Publisher)
P A R T O N E History This page intentionally left blank E S S A Y O N E Charles Bahha£e—The Great Uncle or O n 26 December 1791, just over 200 years ago, Charles Babbage was born, son to a rising banker, at his father's home not far from a famous inn, the Elephant and Castle, in London. Some three months earlier Michael Faraday had been born, son of a blacksmith, a few hundred yards away Faraday's researches on electromagnetism and other subjects singled him out in his own lifetime as one of the most original and productive experimental physicists of the nineteenth century Charles Babbage was not in the same class, and his present fame as an ancestral figure in the history of computers is a result of the spectacular success of the digital computer in our own day However, this fame is well deserved; although his practical achievements were limited, he was the first to see clearly what might be achieved by the mechanization of computational processes. Babbage had no immediate successor, and it was not until the first digital computers were working in the middle of the present century that people began to take a renewed interest in his ideas. The fact that there is no direct line of development from Babbage to the present day Computing Essay One ■ m-r-Λ » r * · t t · Charles Babbage, late in life. This woodcut appeared in the Illustrated London News on 3 November 1871, shortly after Babbage's death. (Courtesy of Charles Battage Institute, University of Minnesota.) has led Doran Swade, Curator of the Computing and Control Collections at the Science Mu-seum in London, to suggest that Babbage is not to be regarded as the father or grandfather of computing—he is more of a great uncle. — 4 — C h a r l e s Babbage— The G r e a t Uncle of C o m p u t i n g ti Ine Difference Engine B abbage's first idea was not, in fact, a very good one, although he would never admit it.
- James W. Cortada(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- Greenwood(Publisher)
1 (1990): 62-67. Origins of Modern Computing 21 The leading authority on Babbage argues that the subject of the article is difficult to deal with in the history of science and debates I. Bernard Cohen (a leading historian of science) on the subject. 118 Jones, Glyn. "The Life and Times of a Computing Pioneer," New Scientist no. 1775 (June 29, 1991): 33-36. The article is a brief account of the life of Charles Babbage and about his engines. Jones is a science writer and his article is illustrated. 119 Kean, David W. "The Author of the Analytical Engine," Datamation 12, no. 1 (January 1966): 37-46. This surveys the work of Babbage and his peers with analytical engines, based on Babbage's notes. 120 Kean, David W. "The Countess and the Computer," Datamation 19, no. 5 (May 1973): 60-63. Presents correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace concerning horse betting, specifically on how to beat the odds. 121 Lindgren, Michael. Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johan Midler, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Sheutz. Trans, by Craig McKay. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. A beautifully illustrated monograph, this is the best single source on 19th century difference engines. It is based on extensive research. 122 Miller, Gordon. "Charles Babbage and the Design of Intelligence: Computers and Society in 19th-century England," Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 10 (1990): 68-76. This is one of the first articles on Babbage to attempt to place him in the mainstream of other scientific and cultural events in Great Britain, rather than simply focusing on how his devices were designed and partially built. 123 Sinderen, Alfred W. Van and Williams, Michael R. "Happy Birthday M. Babbage," Annals of the History of Computing 13, no. 2 (1991): 125- 139. This is a collection of extracts from letters by Babbage and his friends, revealing insights into the feelings and ideas of the inventor.
eBook - ePubComputers, Curriculum, and Cultural Change
An Introduction for Teachers
- Jr. Provenzo, Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Arlene Brett, Gary N. McCloskey(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Analytical Engine . Although theoretically sound, both machines were mechanically flawed. Even the most carefully machined gears and cogs were not precise enough to undertake massive calculations. Although Babbage’s machine was functional, it would need electrical switching systems before it could work on a practical basis.Links to Information on Charles Babbage http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/babbage.html Charles Babbage Biography http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.htmlDetail of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine Number 1 illustrated in Passages From the Life of a Philosopher published in 1864.Augusta Ada Byron (1815–1952)
Augusta Ada Byron (1815–1852), more widely known as Ada Countess of Lovelace, is among the most famous figures in the history of computing. The daughter of the 19thcentury English poet Lord Byron, she was a gifted and largely self-taught mathematician. In 1833, when she was only 18 years old, she met the scientist and inventor Charles Babbage. Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, is widely considered to have created the first modern computer. Realizing Byron’s talent, he asked her to assist him in his work. This eventually led to Byron publishing a set of notes in 1843 in Richard Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs series, which included a set of instructions for programming the Analytical Engine and speculations about its possible applications and use in mathematical computation, artificial intelligence, and music.Byron’s work is considered a major contribution to the development of modern computing. In 1980, the U.S. Department of Defense named a computing language “Ada” in her honor. The Ada Project (TAP), a World Wide Web site on women in computing, is also named after her. To learn more about her visit:Ada Lovelace http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.htmlDigital:
eBook - PDF- Peter Harman, Simon Mitton(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Babbage also launched the Statistical Section of the Association, and developing from it the London Statistical Society, later the Royal Statistical Society. In 1838 he made a pioneering operations research study of Brunel’s wide-gauge railway. In 1840 and again in 1841 Babbage made presentations of the Analytical Engines to groups of natural philosophers in Italy. In 1847 he put aside work on the Analytical Engines and used the techniques he had developed while working on the Analytical Engines to prepare a new design for a Difference Engine. During the following years Babbage worked on a wide range of subjects and invented the opthalmoscope and the system of occulting lights later adopted for use 92 anthony hyman in lighthouses. Babbage also worked extensively on cryptography, pioneering mathematical cryptography and apparently running a private Bletchley Park for his friend Beaufort at the Admiralty. In 1851 he published an entertaining account of the origin of the Great Exhibition. In 1857 Babbage returned to work on the Analytical Engines, seeking to make manufacture sufficiently inexpensive to build an Analytical Engine himself. In 1864 Babbage was instrumental in securing the passage to a Bill to curb the activities of street musicians who had become a public nuisance. Also in 1864 Babbage published his felicitous biography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. Charles Babbage died in 1871 and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery. (R.) Anthony Hyman, MA, Ph.D., was born in London in 1928 and was educated at Dartington Hall School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He worked for the ITT on early transistors, making a diffused transistor with his own hands in 1951. He carried out basic research on elemental linear polymers, and later worked on computer research for English Electric Leo Computers. He became a free-lance computer consultant and historian of science.
eBook - PDFThe Science of Computing
Shaping a Discipline
- Matti Tedre(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Chapman and Hall/CRC(Publisher)
There was a great need for improved accuracy and reduced workload in making those tables. 10 Babbage had witnessed the severe problems with producing mathematical tables by mathematicians, typesetters, and computers ( computers at the time were people who did computations 11 ). Babbage thought of breaking down computational tasks into operations simple enough to be done by a machine. Babbage’s first vision was the Difference Engine , a special-purpose machine that was designed to tabulate values of polynomial functions. Babbage was not the first to propose the idea of mechanizing the calculation of differences—it was suggested already in the late 1700s. 12 But Babbage was the first one to design and seriously start to build such a machine. In 1823 the British gov-ernment accepted Babbage’s project because of the valuable results it would produce, especially for calculating nautical tables for the Navy. By mechaniz-ing Newton’s method of divided differences, the Difference Engine would also be able to produce tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions. 13 Babbage’s work on the Difference Engine did not go as smoothly as he had expected. Technical issues, family issues, staffing issues, and health issues took their toll on the work. While working on the numerous modifications of the already late Difference Engine, however, Babbage came up with a much grander vision—a general-purpose machine whose operation could be changed by changing its set of instructions. Babbage’s new Analytical Engine would consist of memory (“the store”), an arithmetic unit (“the mill”), and a sort of a microprogram control unit (“the control barrel”). 14 The Analytical En-gine plans embodied what nowadays would be called sequential execution, conditional branching, and looping—the three control structures sufficient for writing any program. 15 Had the Analytical Engine been built, it would have been the first digital, programmable, general-purpose computer.
eBook - ePubComputable Universe, A: Understanding And Exploring Nature As Computation
Understanding and Exploring Nature as Computation
- Hector Zenil(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- WSPC(Publisher)
The final strand, communications, has its own rich traditions – language, semaphore, telegraphy, telephony, and so on. Though it plays a crucial role in the convergence that underpins the ‘information age’, it is of less immediate concern here. 18 2. Automatic Computation A towering figure in the history of automatic computation is that of Charles Babbage, whose designs for vast calculating engines rank as one of the startling intellectual achievements the 19th century. We find in his work practically all the core ideas of modern general-purpose digital computing. Babbage’s epiphany is captured in the well-known vignette in which, in 1821 in London, he and John Herschel were checking astronomical tables calculated by human computers. Dismayed at the number of errors he recounts that he exclaimed ‘I wish to god these calculations had been executed by steam’. 25 The appeal to steam can be read as a metaphor for the infallibility of machinery as well as for the idea of mechanised production as a means of solving the problem of supply. The ‘unerring certainty of mechanical agency’ 27 would ensure error-free tables as and when needed. Babbage devoted much of the rest of his life to the realisation of mechanised calculation. That tabular errors were the jumping off point for Babbage’s work on automatic calculating machines is well evidenced. However, history appears to have transmuted this initial stimulus into an abiding motive that informed the rest of his work. There are understandable reasons for this as a recent analysis shows. 38 It is sufficient here to offer a corrective: that while errors in tables feature in Babbage’s articulation of benefits, this was one consideration amongst many. It is clear from his early writing that the mathematical potential of the engines as a new technology for mathematics preoccupied him and transcended the pragmatic benefits to table making
eBook - PDF- Aharon Yadin(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Chapman and Hall/CRC(Publisher)
This is done by starting with the value of f (0) and then adding this value to all objects: Set 1 12 24 54 102 168 252 354 474 612 = … , , , , , , , , The required value ( f (8)) is given at the ninth location (since the set starts with object 0). Although Babbage planned the differences engine, he never built it. His son Henry con-tinued the work and built a device using parts found in his father’s laboratory. However, it took an additional 150 years to fully complete the device by using better production tech-nologies and better building materials. Several devices were built, all based on Babbage’s original drawings. Babbage himself realized that the “real” solution for a computing device cannot be implemented using the differences engine, so he abandoned this idea and started working on an analytical engine. Although the analytical engine idea did not proceed beyond the drawing board, the principles expressed (a processing unit, a control unit, memory, input and output devices) are the cornerstones of modern computers. The analytical engine as designed by Babbage had a 1000-cell memory, each cell capable of storing up to 50 digits. To allow better memory utilization, the analytical engine included a mechanism for writing out some of the cells for creating additional space for new numbers. This idea is widely used by most of the general-purpose computers utilizing virtual memory and various storage devices. However, the most important aspect of the analytical engine was the understanding that the machine should be able to execute various programs and not just the one it was designed for. This understanding, which later led to the development of programming languages, is one of the unique characteristics of computers. By separating the software or the executed programs from the hardware, computers and computer-based devices can be made to assume various different roles.
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