Charles Babbage is considered the creator of modern computers. A mathematician and 19th century British intellectual, he conceived of a steam driven Difference Engine that could automatically calculate and print error-free mathematical tables. He later developed the idea of the Analytical Engine which could be programmed to make calculations and could store results in a memory unit. Babbage also invented the first automated typesetter for printing the results of computations. Although construction of his calculating machines was never completed in his lifetime, his concepts were used as the basis for the Harvard Mark I Calculator, the prototype of the modern digital computer, built by Howard Aiken in 1944.
Charles Babbage was born on December 26, 1792, in Teignmouth, Devon, England. He was the son of a London banker, Benjamin Babbage, from whom he inherited a sizable fortune, enabling him to devote his life to intellectual pursuits. As a child Babbage suffered several bouts of violent fever that interfered with his early education. He was placed in the care of a clergyman who ran a school in Devonshire, with instructions not to tax his health with too much knowledge. In his early teens Babbage attended a boarding school in London, where he developed a keen interest in algebra. He spent much of his leisure time studying mathematical works, and was especially influenced by Ward's Young Mathematician's Guide, a text he had found in his school library. In 1810 Babbage entered Trinity College at Cambridge University, and soon discovered the knowledge of mathematics he had obtained through self-instruction, which exceeded that of his tutors. Together with a circle of friends Babbage founded the Analytical Society, whose purpose was to promote mathematics. A co-founder was to became a lifelong companion, John Herschel, a noted astronomer. Together, in 1813, they published a translation of LaCroix's Differential and Integral Calculus, accompanied by several volumes of mathematical examples. Babbage graduated from Cambridge in 1814, and the following year wrote several papers on the calculus of functions for the Royal Society of London. In 1816 he was elected a Fellow of the Society.
While at Cambridge, Babbage had begun thinking about the possibility of building a machine that could compute arithmetic tables. In the early 19th century, actuaries, bankers, navigators, engineers, and others relied heavily on published numerical values of mathematical formulas and functions. Errors in calculation and transcription were so common that the tables were often accompanied not only by a list of corrections, but a list of corrections to the corrections. Mechanical calculators had existed since the time of Blaise Pascal, but they worked slowly and were only capable of performing single arithmetic calculations. Babbage designed a steam-driven machine he called the Difference Engine, which could rapidly calculate and automatically print the results of large numbers of mathematical operations. The first version of his Difference Engine was intended to compute values of squares and quadratic functions. It worked on the principle known as the method of finite differences, a technique which employs only addition to determine successive values for polynomial functions. In 1822 Babbage built a prototype that made accurate calculations up to five-place numbers. That same year, with backing from the Royal Society, he convinced the British government to provide funds for building a full-scale Difference Engine, with a capacity to work with numbers up to one million with 20 decimal places. The project, expected to take three years, was abandoned after a decade. Babbage's design called for a series of gear wheels on shafts that would be turned by cranks. The machine was to contain 25,000 die-cast pewter and precision gauged brass and steel parts. If finished, it would have weighed over two tons. Historians speculate its realization may have been beyond the engineering capacity of the era. The project was also hampered by Babbage's constant revisions of design. Construction of the Difference Engine was far from completion when financial arguments between Babbage and his chief engineer brought the project to a halt. By then, Babbage had come upon a better idea.
Babbage's work on the Difference Engine led to the evolution of his new invention, the Analytical Engine. While the former machine was designed to work straight through a computational problem, the latter was designed to make calculations, store the results, analyze what to do next, then return to complete the problem. Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine had four key components: the mill, the card reader, the store, and the typesetter. The mill was the heart of the machine, where the four basic arithmetic operations could be performed with an accuracy of up to 50 decimal places. It received instructions and numerical data from punched cards that were deciphered by the card reader. Babbage borrowed the idea for this input system from the weaving industry, which in the mid-1700s had begun using punched cards as hand-held guides for creating different patterns in cloth. An automatic card reader that controlled a power loom had been invented in 1801 by the French carpet-maker Joseph Marie Jacquard. Babbage's Jacquard cards, as he referred to them, could provide instructions and data not only for the machine's mill, but for the store, a place where numbers were retained in memory for future use. The store consisted of a bank of one thousand registers, each of which could hold a 50-digit number. Finally, after mathematical operations had been performed, the Jacquard cards could instruct the machine to typeset the results for printing.
In 1834 Babbage began an eight-year campaign to convince the government to fund construction of the Analytical Engine, but was unsuccessful. Britain had already spent seventeen thousand pounds on the Difference Engine to no avail. Babbage had contributed a comparable amount of money to the Difference Engine project, depleting most of his personal fortune. In 1848, Babbage drew up plans for a scaled-down version of the Analytical Engine, called the Difference Engine No. 2, but once again was unable to obtain funds for construction. The scaled-down version was finally built, nearly a century and a half later, in honor of Babbage's bicentenary, by the Science Museum of London. It weighed three tons and worked flawlessly.
Although the primary focus of Babbage's intellectual pursuits was his calculating engines, he devoted time to many other areas of scientific and practical interest. He published a paper with Herschel in 1825, on magnetization arising from rotation, and made contributions to the fields of geology, anthropology, and astronomy. In 1820 Babbage helped found the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1831 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1834 the Statistical Society of London. Babbage once descended into the crater of Mt. Vesuvius to research its volcanic activity. He studied glaciers, and suggested a way of learning about past climatic conditions by measuring tree ring growth in fossilized wood. Babbage even designed a colored lighting system for theaters, an idea he reportedly dreamed up while bored during an opera performance. Concerned with economic efficiencies, in 1832 he wrote a pamphlet called "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery." Babbage advised the British postal service, consulted for the British rail system, and was the inventor of the "cowcatcher," the track clearing safety devise that protrudes from the front of a train engine. He ran twice, unsuccessfully, for a seat in Parliament. From 1828 until 1839, Babbage held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, although during his tenure he never taught or lived at the university.
Babbage was widely known in London's social circles, hosting regular Saturday night parties at his home at 1 Dorset Street. He was friends with naturalist Charles Darwin, German naturalist and statesman Alexander Humboldt, and Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, who published articles explaining Babbage's engines and authored the first computer program. Babbage is described as a man who in his final years was embittered and disappointed over the lack of support for his calculating engines. He was critical of the scientific establishment and of governmental funding policies, and published papers on what he described as the decline of science in England. Eventually, Babbage developed a reputation as an eccentric, launching a campaign to ban organ grinders as street nuisances. When he died in London on October 18, 1871, his London Times obituary commented that he lived to be almost eighty "in spite of organ-grinding persecutions."
Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore shortly after he graduated from Cambridge. Their eldest son was Herschel Babbage. Another son, Henry Babbage, attempted to carry on in his father's tradition, presenting a paper on calculating engines to the British Association in 1888, and a year later editing a volume about his father's works.
This is the complete article, containing 1,423 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).
