1833 and... Charles Babbage

Last week Mr Dixon set the political scene in 1833, and today Miss Cordiner spoke about the technological scene. Her talk is below:

1833 was a very significant year for Computing, despite the fact that the modern computer was not developed for another 100 years or so.

Charles Babbage, born in 1791, is known to many as the ‘Father of Computing’ as he designed the ‘Analytical Machine’ which the basic design of a computer follows. More of that later.

Babbage was a mathematician and an engineer of the most extraordinary caliber; he went to Trinity College Cambridge in 1810 where he quickly teamed up with John Herschel and George Peacock to set up the Analytical Society, due to dissatisfaction with the level of Mathematics teaching at Cambridge.

Babbage wanted to quantify everything – he was fanatical about facts and data, ranging from measuring the heartbeat of pigs, the amount of wood a man would saw in 10 hours, and tallying up 165 “nuisances” over a period of 80 days for a report on “Observations of Street Nuisances”. It is no surprise that he was one of the leading figures of the founding of what is now the Royal Statistical Society!

His interest was not merely in the sphere of Mathematics; those more literary-minded of you, may be interested to hear that when he heard the couplet: in Tennyson’s “The Vision of Sin”:

Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born

he wrote to the poet saying:

“I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

Every minute dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born

I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre."

However, of most interest to me, and those interested in the development of computing, is his life’s dream to create a mechanical calculating machine, which would eliminate human error in mathematic calculations, while speeding up the process considerably.  When at Cambridge as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, he writes himself:

“... I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" to which I replied "I am thinking that all these tables" (pointing to the logarithms) "might be calculated by machinery. "

And here we see something Babbage had in common with John Napier, who 2 centuries earlier discovered and published a book on logarithms, from his home in Merchiston Tower, where our School was later to be founded.  Babbage published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000 in 1827.  Another Edinburgh link is that because of his Mathematics skills he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1820.

His first attempt at creating a machine to perform calculations was the Difference Engine, which could calculate to six decimal places, but he soon began planning for 20 decimal places.  The Government of the time gave him funding to create this machine in 1823, but the expenses got out of hand, and during 1833 Babbage made the drawings for the ‘Analytical Engine’.  In 1834 he proposed to the Government that he wanted to cease work on the Difference engine, because of this new, better idea, despite the Government having put £17000 into the project, and having invested a similar amount of his own money.  Funding did indeed stop, and his Analytical Engine was not constructed.  What he described in detailed drawings, though, was a machine remarkably similar in logical components to a modern day computer.

The Oxford English dictionary, defines a computer as:
an electronic device capable of storing and processing information in accordance with a predetermined set of instructions.

Babbage’s machine was mechanical rather than electronic, but it was later proved capable of fulfilling the role of a computer.  Crucially, it was automatic, and programmable, which is different from any device which had gone before it.  It could deal with conditional statements, branching and looping (Second Form – that is just like the ‘forever’ and ‘ifs’ you have been learning in scratch!)

It may be of interest that by 1833 we had telescopes, microscopes and steam engines.  We had clocks and automatic calculators; shampoo and false teeth!  We had bifocals, but no contact lenses (1887).  We had steamboats, locomotives and lawn mowers, but not yet combine harvesters (1834) or airplanes (1903).  Telegraphs and typewriters were under development, but fax machines (1843) and telephones (1870) were yet to come.  For the home, soon to be invented were refrigerators (1834), sewing machines (1836) and vacuum cleaners (1869).

So to his Analytical Engine, the forerunner of the computer.  For those who have studied, or are studying for your ECDL, you will be familiar with this diagram which shows the basic features of a computer system, and Babbage’s Analytic engine is the first time that these all came together.

He had input, through the use of punched cards, which meant that calculations could vary each time the machine is used.  These punched cards were main method of input for computers right up until the 1980s when the Personal Computer became widespread and keyboards and mice became the norm.

For processing, Babbage had a separate central processor (‘the mill’) where arithmetic processing was performed, and memory (‘the store’) where numbers and intermediate results could be held – a fundamental feature of the internal organization of modern computers.

For output, Babbage designed a printer which supported line-wrapping, variable column and row width and programmable output formatting – these features were designed as his main purpose for the machine was to create mathematical tables. The pictures here show the printer, built to Babbage’s exact specification, by the London Science Museum in the year 2000.  It weighs 2.5 tonnes and consists of 4,000 separate parts.

Although Babbage never built an operational, mechanical computer, his design concepts have been proved correct, with the London Science Museum creating his Difference Engine in 1991. It is estimated that if the Analytical Engine had been built it would have stood about 4 and a half metres high, with the mill diameter of 2m and the store of 3-6m – the whole machine would easily fill this Memorial Hall – so it is understandable that back in the 1830s Babbage had difficulty creating it.

Babbage finally received the news from the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1842, that the project would be abandoned, having been advised that it was ‘worthless’; indeed Prime Minister Robert Peel ridiculed the machine.  However, he was not the only one to think computers had no future – even in 1943 Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM said: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.", and Ken Olson the President and founder of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) said in the year I was born (not that long ago!): “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Babbage felt differently, confident his machine would one day exist; furthermore he once said that he would give up the rest of his life if he could live for only three days 100 years in the future – such was his confidence that computers would become a life-changing reality. His designs have proved that it was possible, even in his time, but politics and poor planning prevented it from becoming a reality. 

Last week Mr Dixon concluded by wondering if Thomas Chalmers would have held up William Wilberforce as an example to the first Merchiston boys, suggesting he would be an excellent model for the development of your own character and philosophy.  While Babbage may be held up as an intellectual and visionary, his lack of social grace, impatience, rude and bossy approach was the greatest impediment he faced when trying to secure funding; had he been more amenable, it is possible that the politicians may have been more willing to take the risk of investing in him further!

However, after his death, a committee appointed by the British Association to report upon the feasibility of the Analytical Engine reported:

... [it is] their opinion that its successful realisation might mark an epoch in the history of computation equally memorable with that of the introduction of logarithms...

Even this was, it is now clear, an underestimate, as the construction of modern computers, logically similar to Babbage’s design, have changed the whole of mathematics, and, I might dare to suggest, even the whole world.

Previous story in this series - 1833 & William Wilberforce