Charles Babbage was a British mathematician and inventor, who designed and built mechanical computing machines on principles that anticipated the modern electronic computer. Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire, UK to a Devonshire family of wealth and leisure. (Microsoft Encarta, Babbage) He died on October 18, 1871 in London, England at the age of eighty. He was the son of Benjamin Babbage, a wealthy London banker. (History of Computers) In 1814 he married Georgiana Whitmore, from a landowning Shropshire family, together they had eight children in their thirteen years of marriage. Only three of their children survived to maturity, they were their three sons Herschel, Dugald and Henry. Four of the children died in infancy or early childhood and their only daughter surviving to her late teenage years. Goergiana Babbage died in 1827 at the young age of thirty-five. (Moseley, Pgs. 52-53) In the 1820's Babbage began developing his Difference Engine and in the 1830's began developing his Analytical Engine but by the 1880's Charles Babbage was known primarily for his reform of mathematics at Cambridge.
As a youth Charles Babbage was his own instructor in math, especially algebra which he was very fond and he was very well read in the continental mathematics of his day and much of early education was completed under private tutors. (Charles Babbage Institute) He entered Trinity College in Cambridge in 1810 at the age of nineteen and received his MA in 1817. During his years at Trinity College he found himself very advanced in mathematics even more advanced than his tutors and appalled by the condition of the mathematical instruction at Cambridge helped organize the Analytical Society. The object of the Analytical Society was to introduce developments from the European continent into English mathematics and it also played a major role in weakening the grip of blind Newton worship at Cambridge University as well as Oxford University. (Wilson, Pgs. 321-322)
The idea of mechanically calculating mathematical tables first came to Babbage around 1812 or 1813. Later he made a small calculator that could perform certain mathematical computations to eight decimals. Then in 1823 he obtained government support for the design of a projected machine with a twenty-decimal capacity. Its construction required the development of mechanical engineering techniques, to which Babbage of necessity devoted himself. (Britannica, Babbage)
In 1816 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London and played a prominent part in the foundation of the Astronomical Society in 1820, later named the Royal Astronomical Society. It was about this time in Babbage's life that he first acquired the interest in calculating machinery that became his consuming passion for the remainder of his life. (Wilson, Page 321-322)
Charles Babbage recognized that among the most common calculating devices, the mathematical, celestial and navigation tables are full of errors and leading to the loss of ships. While studying at Cambridge University he suggests that it should be possible to compute the table entries using a steam engine. This desire became the theme of his life and he began to design the Difference Engine for the purposes of computing the entries in navigation and other tables. He later applied to the British Government for assistance and receives what may have been the first government grant for computer research, an event that is repeated a hundred years later in the United States to help build the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. (The 1800s) The Difference Engine was an early computerlike mechanical device designed by Babbage in the early 1820's. He had underestimated the many difficulties that his endeavor would encure. Alot of the precision machine tools that were needed to shape the many wheels, gears, and cranks of the engine did not exist. Babbage and his many craftsmen had to design each of them and the constant delays worried the government and the financial support was tied up in red tape. (Wilson, Pgs. 321-322) Although never completed by him, the Difference Engine was intended to be a machine with a twenty-decimal capacity capable of solving mathematical problems. The concept of the Difference Engine was enhanced by Babbage in the 1830's in the design of his more famous Analytical Engine, a mechanical precursor of the electronic computer.
Ten years later Charles Babbage had second thoughts about the Difference Engine, realizing that is was a special purpose machine capable of only a single operation. Abandoning this line of work temporarily, he designed the Analytical Engine that had the basic components of a modern computer and has led to him being described as the "Father of the Computer". (The 1800s) The Analytical Engine is a mechanical device that was designed to combine arithmetic processes with decisions based on its own computations. His plans embodied most of the basic elements of the modern digital computer for example a punched-card input/output medium, arithmetic unit memory in which to store numbers and sequnetial control. His work in the development of the Analytical Engine was aided by Augusta Ada Byron, also known as Lady Lovelace. She was the daughter of the Lord George Byron, a famous poet and Annabella Milbanke Byron. Many people consider her to be the first person to actually program a computer. (Britannica, Lovelace) The United States Department of Defense named a computer language after her in 1975. ADA was developed by Jean Ichbiah and is also used for business applications. The Analytical Engine was never completed, largely because precision techniques for fabricating metal parts to close tolerances had not yet been developed, his ideas were far ahead of the technology of his day. The Analytical Engine contained complicated gear and lever systems which could not be built. Babbage's invention was forgotten until his writings were rediscovered in 1937. (Britannica, Babbage) The Analytical Engine included five features crucial to future computers:
In 1847 he returned to his plans for the Difference Engine and completed twenty-one drawing for the construction of the second version but still did not complete the manufacturing himself. In 1991 British scientists built Difference Engine No. 2, accurate to thirty-one digits, to Babbage's specifications. Also in 1991, on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth, the Science Museum of Kensington, England, built a copy from his drawings, only to find a small number of very obvious errors. To overcome the suggestion that Babbage was unable to complete his maching because the technology of the era was insufficient, the museum carefully used only techniques available in the mid 1800's and built a copy that operated correctly. After his death, his son Henry Orevost built several copies of the cimply arithmetic unit of the Difference Engine and sent them to various places around the world, including Harvard University to ensure their preservation. In October of 1995, one of those copies was sold by Christies in London, on behalf of descendants of Charles Babbage in New Zealand to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia for appraximately $200,000. (The 1800s)
Throughout his life Babbage worked in many intellectual fields typical of his day and made contributions that would have assured his fame irrespective of the Difference and Analytical Engines. Prominent among his published works are:
Despite his many achievements, the failure to construct his calculating machines and in particular the failure of the government to support his work, left Babbage in his declining years a disappointed and embittered man.
Babbage tolerated music in its more exquisite forms, but he absolutely abhorred street musicians. He wrote "Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied", with some seriousness in Observations of Street Nuisances in 1864, "receive street music with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum time". Letters to the Times and the eventual enforcement of "Babbage's Act", which would squelch street nuisances, made him the target of ridicule. Babbage calcualted that twenty-five percent of his working power had been destroyed by street nuisances, many of them intentional. (Charles Babbage)
The public tormented him with things such as a never ending parade of fiddlers, Punch-and-Judys, stilt-walkers, fanatic psalmists and tub-thumpers. Some of his neighbors hired musicians to even play outside his windows. Other people willfully annoyed him with worn-out or damaged wind instruments. During one eighty-day period he counted one-hundred and sixty-five nuisances. One brass band played for five hours with one a brief intermission. Another blew a penny tin whistle out his window toward Babbage's garden for a half an hour daily for many months. (Charles Babbage)
Babbage received more ridicule when he went outside. Children constantly followed and cursed him along with adults but at a distance. Over a hundred people once sulked behind him before he could find a constable to disperse them. Even when he was on his deathbed, the organ-grinders ground implacably away. Very few people actually knew who Charles Babbage was when he died. Only one carriage, the Duchess of Somerset's, followed in the burial procession that took his remains to Kensal Green Cemetary. The Royal Society printed no obituary and the Times ridiculed him. (Charles Babbage)
Even though Babbage was ridiculed by alot of his neighbors, he was a splendid host. The Duke of Wellington cam to call and so did Charles Dickens. He talked shop with Sir Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the Wheatston bridge for measuring electrical resistance; with Joseph Whitworth, whose rifle canon with hexagonal bores were brought by the Confederate States of America and used with deadly accuracy on Union troops and with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the giant iron ship Great Eastern. (Park, pgs. 20-23)
Charles Babbage was an inventor, philospher, politician, music hater, and industrialist in his life. He could of accomplished much if he was in the presence of todays technology.