- "Babbage" redirects here. For other uses, see Babbage
(disambiguation).
Charles Babbage FRS (26 December
1791 – 18 October 1871) was an
English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who originated the idea
of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the
London Science Museum. In 1991 a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the
19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the
Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an
astonishingly complex device for the 19th century.
Birth
The birthplace of Charles Babbage is disputed, but he was most likely born in 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England. A
blue plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event. There
was a discrepancy regarding the date of Babbage's birth, which was published in The Times obituary as 26 December 1792. However, days later a nephew of Babbage wrote to say that
Babbage was born precisely one year earlier, in 1791. The parish register of
St. Mary's Newington, London, shows that
Babbage was baptized on 6 January
1792.[1]
Charles's father, Benjamin Babbage, was a banking partner of the Praeds who owned the Bitton Estate in Teignmouth. His mother was Betsy Plumleigh Babbage née Teape. In 1808, the Babbage family moved into the old
Rowdens house in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby St.
Michael’s Church.
Education
His father's money allowed Charles to receive instruction from several schools and tutors during the course of his elementary
education. Around the age of eight he was sent to a country school in Alphington near
Exeter to recover from a life-threatening fever. His parents ordered that his "brain was not to
be taxed too much" and Babbage felt that "this great idleness may have led to some of my childish reasonings." For a short time
he attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, but his health forced him back to private tutors for a time.
He then joined a 30-student Holmwood academy, in Baker Street, Enfield, Middlesex under Reverend Stephen Freeman. The academy had
a well-stocked library that prompted Babbage's love of mathematics. He studied with two more private tutors after leaving the
academy. Of the first, a clergyman near Cambridge, Babbage said, "I fear I did not derive from
it all the advantages that I might have done." The second was an Oxford tutor from whom Babbage learned enough of the Classics to
be accepted to Cambridge.
Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1810. He had read extensively in Leibniz, Lagrange, Simpson, and Lacroix and was seriously disappointed in the mathematical instruction available at
Cambridge. In response, he, John Herschel, George
Peacock, and several other friends formed the Analytical Society in 1812.
Babbage, Hershell and Peacock were also close friends with future judge and patron of science Edward Ryan. Ultimately, Babbage and Ryan married sisters.[2]
In 1812 Babbage transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was the top
mathematician at Peterhouse, but failed to graduate with honors. He instead received an honorary degree without examination in
1814.
Marriage, family, death
On 25 July, 1814, Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St.
Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. His father did not approve of Babbage marrying without being economically stable
[citation needed]. The couple lived at 5 Devonshire
Street, Portland Place, London.
Charles and Georgiana had eight children[3], but only
three — Benjamin Herschel, Georgiana Whitmore,and Henry Prevost — lived to adulthood. Georgiana died in Worcester on 1 September, 1827 - Charles' father, wife, and at least two sons all died in 1827.
Babbage died on 18 October, 1871, and is buried in London's Kensal Green
Cemetery. He lived for 79 years.
Design of computers
Babbage sought a method by which mathematical tables could be calculated mechanically, removing the high rate of human error.
Three different factors seem to have influenced him: a dislike of untidiness; his experience working on logarithmic tables; and existing work on calculating machines carried out by Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz. He first discussed the principles of a calculating engine in a letter to Sir
Humphry Davy in 1822.
Part of Babbage's difference engine, assembled after his death by Babbage's son, using parts found in his laboratory.
Babbage's engines were among the first mechanical computers, although they were not actually completed, largely because of
funding problems and personality issues. He directed the building of some steam-powered machines that achieved some success,
suggesting that calculations could be mechanized. Although Babbage's machines were mechanical and unwieldy, their basic
architecture was very similar to a modern computer. The data and program memory were separated, operation was instruction based,
the control unit could make conditional jumps and the machine had a separate I/O unit.
Difference engine
-
In Babbage’s time numerical tables were calculated by humans called ‘computers,’ meaning "one who computes." Much as a
conductor is "one who conducts." At Cambridge he saw the high error rate of this human-driven process and started his life’s work
of trying to calculate the tables mechanically. He began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute
values of polynomial functions. Unlike similar efforts of the time, Babbage's difference engine was created to calculate a series
of values automatically. By using the method of finite differences, it was possible to
avoid the need for multiplication and division.
The first difference engine was composed of around 25,000 parts, weighed fifteen tons
(13,600 kg), and stood ft ( m) high. Although he received ample funding for the project, it was never completed. He
later designed an improved version, "Difference Engine No. 2", which was not constructed until 1989-1991, using Babbage's plans
and 19th–century manufacturing tolerances. It performed its first calculation at the London Science Museum returning results to
31 digits, far more than the average modern pocket calculator.
Printer
Babbage designed a printer for the second difference engine which supported line-wrapping, variable column and row width, and
programmable output formatting.
Analytical engine
-
Soon after the attempt at making the difference engine crumbled, Babbage started designing a different, more complex machine
called the Analytical Engine. The engine is not a single physical machine but a
succession of designs that he tinkered with until his death in 1871. The main difference between the two engines is that the
Analytical Engine could be programmed using punch cards, an idea unheard of in his time. He
realized that programs could be put on similar cards so the person had to only create the program initially, and then put the
cards in the machine and let it run. The analytical engine was also proposed to use loops of Jacquard's punched cards to control a mechanical calculator, which could formulate results based on the
results of preceding computations. This machine was also intended to employ several features subsequently used in modern
computers, including sequential control, branching, and looping, and would have been the first mechanical device to be
Turing-complete.
Ada Lovelace, an impressive mathematician and one of the few people who fully understood
Babbage's ideas, created a program for the Analytical Engine. Had the Analytical Engine ever actually been built, her program
would have been able to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. Based on this work,
Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer. In 1979, a
contemporary programming language was named Ada in her honour. Shortly
afterward, in 1981, a satirical article by Tony Karp in the magazine Datamation described the Babbage programming language as the "language
of the future".
Modern adaptations
While the abacus and mechanical calculator have been replaced by electronic calculators using microchips, the recent advances in MEMS and
nanotechnology have led to recent high-tech experiments in mechanical computation. The
benefits suggested include operation in high radiation or high temperature environments.
These modern versions of mechanical computation were highlighted in magazine The
Economist for their special "end of the millennium" black cover issue in an article entitled Babbage's Last Laugh . The article highlighted work done at University of California Berkeley by Ezekiel
Kruglick. In this Doctoral Dissertation the researcher reports mechanical logic cells and architectures
sufficient to implement the Babbage Analytical engine (see above) or any general logic circuit. Carry-shift digital adders and
various logic elements are detailed as well as modern analysis on required performance for microscopic mechanical logic.
Other accomplishments
In 1824, Babbage won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical
Society "for his invention of an engine for calculating mathematical and astronomical tables".
From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical Society in
1820 and the Statistical Society in 1834. However, he dreamt of designing mechanical calculating machines.
“... 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. "
In 1837, responding to the Bridgewater Treatises, of which there were eight,
he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the
Creation", putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making
laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with
ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book is a work of
natural theology, and incorporates extracts from correspondence he had been having with
John Herschel on the subject.
Babbage also achieved notable results in cryptography. He broke Vigenère's
autokey cipher as well as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigenère cipher today. The autokey cipher was generally called "the undecipherable cipher", though owing
to popular confusion, many thought that the weaker polyalphabetic cipher was the "undecipherable" one. Babbage's discovery was
used to aid English military campaigns, and was not published until several years later; as a result credit for the development
was instead given to Friedrich Kasiski, a Prussian infantry officer, who made the same
discovery some years after Babbage.
In 1838, Babbage invented the pilot (also called a cow-catcher), the metal frame
attached to the front of locomotives that clears the tracks of obstacles. He also constructed a dynamometer car and performed
several studies on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway in about 1838. Babbage's eldest son, Benjamin Herschel Babbage, worked as an
engineer for Brunel on the railways before emigrating to Australia in the 1850s.
Babbage is also credited with the invention of standard railroad gauge, uniform
postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, the
heliograph, and the ophthalmoscope
Babbage only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. He came last in the polls.
Eccentricities
Babbage once counted all the broken panes of glass of a factory, publishing in 1857 a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the
Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows": 14 of 464 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys". His distaste for commoners
("the Mob") included writing "Observations of Street Nuisances" in 1864, as well as tallying up 165 "nuisances" over a period of
80 days; he especially hated street music. He was also obsessed with fire, once baking himself in an oven at 265°F (130°C) for four minutes "without any great discomfort" to "see what
would happen." [citation needed] Later, he arranged to be lowered into Mount Vesuvius in order to view molten lava for himself. [citation needed]
Quotations
| “ |
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.[4] |
” |
Commemoration
Babbage has been commemorated by a number of references, as shown on this
list. In particular, the Babbage crater, on the Moon, and the Charles Babbage Institute, an information
technology archive and research center, were named after him. The large Babbage lecture theatre at Cambridge University, used for undergraduate science lectures, commemorates his time at the
school
Publications
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
References
- ^ See the discussion of Babbage's birth year here for
documentation.
- ^ Wilkes (2002) p.355
- ^ See here for more information.
- ^ Babbage, Charles (1864) Passages from the Life of a Philosopher,
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, Chapter 5, page 67. ISBN 1-85196-040-6
External links
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