The beginning of the Information Age started inauspiciously during 1812 in England. Charles Babbage had drifted off into daydreams, having become tired of the tedious logarithms he was calculating. In the next moment, he would have the idea that would launch the Information Age. This is his story.
Sitting at his desk, he began to wonder: what could happen if you used a machine to do math instead of humans. The spark of insight would send him on a lifelong journey that led to the first mechanical computers 100 years before electronic computers. Moreover, his work would be picked up by later pioneers still within the nineteenth century who would for the first time combine a computing device with the newly-discovered Boolean logic—a momentous event that would lay the foundation of modern computing.
This is the sequel to part one that precedes Babbage, in the age when Computer was a job title held by humans.
Automatons and Almanacs Inspire Babbage
Computation wasn’t just useful for ship captains, artillerymen and bankers. Charles Babbage born in 1791 would find himself caught up in calculating everything from postal rates, to life expectancy, and even conducting an accounting of glass windows breaking. The insight to apply machines to computation may have spawned early in Babbage’s life. As a 10 year old, he was exposed to the burgeoning automaton industry. Babbage was struck by the mechanical automaton toys exhibited by John Joseph Merlin, at the time a famous curator of automatons. The memory left a mark on Babbage so much so that he bought one at auction later as an adult. Babbage also knew of the Jacquard loom, an instrument that would stir the imagination of not just him, but also later pioneers like John Von Neumann.
One evening circa 1812, Babbage found himself lost in thought while looking at a table of logarithms (exactly the kind of tables used to construct The Nautical Almanac from part 1). A colleague walked in and snapped him out of his daze by asking, “Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?” Babbage recalls in his autobiography pointing to the logarithms and replying, “I am thinking that all these tables might be calculated by machinery.”
This singular moment is arguably the beginning of the Information Age. Babbage, perhaps sensing this, wrote to a colleague in 1822:
“I will yet venture to predict, that a time will arrive, when the accumulating labour which arises from the arithmetical application of mathematical formulae, acting as a constantly retarding force, shall ultimately impede the useful progress of the science, unless this or some equivalent method is devised for relieving it from the overwhelming incumbrance of numerical detail.”
By this point, Babbage was well aware of the work De Prony had done earlier in France, and the great cost De Prony endured with his 100 human computers.
So what motivated Babbage and, more importantly, his supporters in the government? On the surface, one would think it was pure cost of computing. Isn’t it why we automate things, to save time and money? That might be just a part of the answer though. In many cases there was even a higher, hidden cost: the cost of an error. Think about it: a minor mistake in calculating latitude might be imperceivable on paper, but deadly in treacherous waters during a storm. Removing the “human element” from the loop cuts this gordian knot.
The First Mechanical Computer
Still in 1822, Babbage would make Difference Engine 0, a sort of “minimum viable product” that could calculate two orders of differences (e.g. x2 + x + 41). Author David Alan Grier writes, “Babbage started with a geared adding mechanism, originally developed by Blaise Pascal in 1643, improved the design, and cascaded the devices so that the results of one addition would be fed to the next.”
In 1823, Babbage secured funding for a larger mechanical computer intended to operate on 20 digit numbers and 6th order differential equations. Ada Lovelace, a colleague of Babbage and arguably the first software engineer recalled, “We both went to see the thinking machine last Monday. It raised several numbers to the 2nd and 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a Quadratic equation.” Lovelace had so many important realizations about early software design that we’ll cover her in a forthcoming edition of Buried Reads Engineering dedicated to her contributions.
Babbage would never successfully build a full scale working Difference Engine 1, and so his grant from the government went unfulfilled. He blamed the failure on the mechanist, and it leaves us wondering how history would be different if he had an eighteenth century hardware savant like Steve Wozniak as a collaborator.
Coming Back to the Problem
Still dreaming of a successful, generalized machine for computation, he designed the Difference Engine 2 by 1849. It was intended to operate on up to 31 digit numbers and 7th order equations. Babbage was beginning to think about an approach beyond just solving differential equations. In his book “The Information”, James Gleick credits Lovelace as being the superior spokesperson above Babbage for the emerging field of computer science:
The science of operations […] is a science of itself and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes.
Babbage would write, “It is the science of calculation—which becomes continually more necessary at each step of our progress, and which must ultimately govern the whole of the application of science to the arts of life.”
How It Worked
The engine worked by hand cranking on one side, while eight cylinders called registers about the height of a human turned against smaller gears to conduct addition. The first 7 registers were for the seven degrees you could solve, and the 8th storing the result. When viewed from the back you can see rotating hooks that look like spinning DNA helixes govern the carrying of digits across columns. The final step used a printer stereotype to print out the result, avoiding any errors from transcription.
Babbage’s work on the Difference Engine was never fully built in his lifetime. In the late 1980s his designs were resurrected and built. You can see a working Difference Engine 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. There is also an excellent video demonstrating its use, as a 5th order polynomial is solved in about 4 crank revolutions by its operator.
Babbage’s Legacy
During Babbage’s life the Difference Engine took physical form in a few prototypes, but was trapped mostly as a set of designs on paper. To hear it from historians like Jame Gleick, “Babbage’s engine was forgotten. It vanished from the lineage of invention.” From their accounting, we are left to believe that Babbage’s ideas would be ignored for 100 years until well into the dawn of electronic computers. Respected mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming teaches a similar line of thought, “The machine was never completed. It died. It was pretty well lost until we built quite a few machines and found out they were anticipated fifty, almost a hundred years, before.”
In fact, there was no “Dark Ages of computing” after Babbage’s death. His work was almost immediately picked up by George and Edvard Scheut, who inspired by Babbage, created a working difference engine in 1843. In yet another example of mechanical computers blossoming after Babbage, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar’s Arithmometer, which was popular and manufactured from 1851 up to 1915.
William Jevons, an English economist and logician, would fawn over Babbage in 1869, “It was reserved for the profound genius of Mr. Babbage to make the greatest advance in mechanical calculation, by embodying in a machine the principles of the calculus of differences.” Jevons proceeded to create a logic piano, combining for the first time Boolean logic with mechanical computing, a crucial leap. Jevon’s work in turn would in turn be discovered and carried on by Allan Maquand and Charles Pierce when they built the first electronic computer around 1890.
Babbage’s work would also guide twentieth century computing pioneers. He influenced computer designer Howard Aiken in the late 1930s; Aiken crucially was an influence on Von Neumann and his computing architecture, which is largely still the design by which computers are built today. We also know that Babbage’s work came up in conversation at Bletchley Park where the Colossus computer—the machine which broke the Gernman Enigma Machine—was built during World War II.
Far from a tragic failure, Babbage, along with Ada Lovelace, are heroic figures in the history of computing and software.
What’s Next
At the same time mechanical computer hardware was taking off, another transformation was underway. The invention of the telegraph was connecting the continental United States and an effort was afoot to link Europe and the U.S. with an ambitious undersea cable. A worldwide telegraphy network would get built before the close of the nineteenth century. Enter your email below to get this story when it’s published.
Credits and More Reading
As was the case in our last issue, James Gleick’s The Information was an invaluable resource. Steven Johnson is a fantastic source for understanding How We Got to Now and also the twists and turns it in How Play Made the Modern World.
Special thanks for Jason Rowley for editing this issue. Besides regularly writing for Crunchbase News, he also writes a newsletter the Rowley Report sampling great reads he comes across. Max Grigorev also helped with both research and writing of this issue.
