Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage was a 19th-century English mathematician and inventor known as the "father of the computer." He designed the first automatic mechanical computer, known as the Analytical Engine, which laid the foundation for modern computers. Babbage's work revolutionized the field of computing and his concepts continue to influence technological advancements today.
7 Key excerpts on "Charles Babbage"
eBook - ePub- Morgen Witzel(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Charles Babbage (1792–1871) Mathematician, scientist and economist, Charles Babbage is hailed as the inventor of the modern computer. That alone has earned him a place in the management hall of fame. Much of what we now do in management relies utterly on Babbage’s invention, so much so that often we cannot remember how things were done in the pre-computer age. But also, far ahead of his time, Babbage argued that business should be conducted according to scientifically based principles, and that science had an important role to play in the management of business enterprises. Thus historians of management consider him to be a forerunner of the scientific management movement, which began in the USA two decades after Babbage’s death. Babbage was born on 26 December 1792. There is some dispute over the place of birth, with the village of Teignmouth in Devon being most commonly cited; though the nearby town of Totnes is sometimes mentioned, and the London suburb of Walworth is also cited in some sources. His father was a prominent banker who maintained homes in both Devon and London. (To complete the confusion, his date of birth is also sometimes given as 1791.) Babbage himself was educated at schools in Devon and then in the London area. He had a natural facility for mathematics, and it is said that he taught himself algebra at an early age. In 1811 he went to the University of Cambridge, where he excelled at mathematics to the point where by the end of the first year he had exhausted the knowledge of tutors, and from then on pursued his own researches. Graduating from Peterhouse College in 1814, Babbage moved to London where he became prominent in scientific circles. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1816, and in 1820 with a university friend, John Herschel, founded the Astronomical Society; he served as an officer of the society for some years thereafter...
eBook - ePubMaximizing Benefits from IT Project Management
From Requirements to Value Delivery
- José López Soriano(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...He was an eccentric man of questionable character, but he spent much of his life working to build and complete his extremely complex machinery with a purpose that was not always understood in his time. He attempted to produce an instrument that would enable the automated processing of information, a concept that was not entirely appreciated, leading to the machine being known popularly as the “madness of Babbage.” If this visionary scientist had completed his machine, it would have allowed data to be input using punched cards, a memory unit or data storage, an arithmetic unit or mill that would produce the required calculations and operations, and a unit data output process based on a printing system. Control over operations would have been based on sequential control by a program with a calculation accuracy of up to 20 digits. In other words, Charles Babbage had designed a prototype of the modern computer that contained all the elements considered essential based on the technology concepts that continued in use until the 1970s. Babbage was a century ahead of his time, but this only served to earn him the inconvenience and problems implicit in his social environ at that time. Another generally recognized contribution to the current state of information technology and knowledge management was the work of Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron, the famous romantic poet), a collaborator of Charles Babbage. It was in honor of Lady Lovelace that the ADA programming language developed by the Department of Defense of the United States of America was named. She was a woman ahead of her time but saw her gender stop her from having the recognition and prestige she deserved. Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician, who managed to correct some of the errors contained in the work of Charles Babbage. She also invented a new and original alternative approach to the design of the necessary programs using punch cards...
eBook - ePubHistory of Engineering and Technology
Artful Methods
- Ervan G. Garrison(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...14 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE COMPUTERS To date, the electronic digital computer represents man’s most complex device. 1 He has never before, or since, produced a device where the probability of failure had to be so low (1 in 10 14 for 12 hours operation time), unless it is space capsules and shuttles with all their attendant computers. The development of the computer traces back, historically, to the first use of mechanical devices or “engine” for mathematical calculations. Gottfried Leibnitz developed a “Leibnitz Wheel,” in 1673 which performed the four basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Blaise Pascal had earlier, 1642–1644, built a machine that added and subtracted. Leibnitz’s device performed the operation of multiplication automatically by repeated additions, Leibnitz’s theme was to free men from the slavery of dull but simple tasks. Charles Babbage (1791–1871) continued Leibnitz’s theme in constructing an automatic digital computing machine. Babbage’s “Difference Engine” was not largely utilized because of the technology and engineering of his age was not adequate for the tolerances needed in the machine’s gears and wheels. 2 By 1833, Babbage had given up on his machine. In essence, Babbage’s device was used to calculate polynomial equations up to degree 6. It was not a general purpose machine but at this time the production of tables for other’s use was a valid task for many mathematicians and the like. Babbage constructed an “Analytical Engine” which was general in nature. It operated with two sets of cards, one that prescribed or set the machine for the particular formula and the second set with the specific variables to be operated upon. The Analytical Engine was thus of two parts — first, a “store” and second, a “mill.” Here with just a little imagination we can see early analogues of the modern computer e.g., the concept of a storage unit (memory) and an operating unit (control/program). ANALOG VS...
eBook - ePubThe Cognitive Sciences
An Interdisciplinary Approach
- Carolyn P. Sobel, Paul Li(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...As time went on, Babbage altered his design, and in 1830 the proposed machine involved 25,000 parts and had it been completely built would have been about 8 feet high, weighing about 15 tons (Computer History Museum, 2008b (Figure 5.3).) But the actual building of this Engine was only partially completed in Babbage’s lifetime. In more recent times, Babbage’s plans for it were studied, and construction of Difference Engine No. 2 was undertaken in our time, and the calculating section was completed in 1991. In 2002, the printing apparatus was also completed (Computer History Museum, 2008a). It consists of 8,000 parts, weighs 5 tons, and is 7 feet high and 11 feet long. What is most impressive, however, is that it works ! In 1834 Babbage began work on another project, which later received the name Analytical Engine. What Babbage had in mind, in fact, was what we now recognize as the precursor to the computer of the 20th century. It was to be a “general-purpose programmable computing machine,” which could add, subtract, multiply, and divide (Babbage, 1864/1968). This machine (Figure 5.4) was designed to operate using cards much like Jacquard’s. Babbage saw that the concept of the program embodied in these cards exactly suited the purposes of a program to be used in a computing machine. As he explained it, the manufacturer of the fabric has a choice. He or she can implement the design dictated by the pattern of holes on the cards using threads all of one color, in which case the pattern will be realized as a kind of damask, woven into the fabric but undifferentiated as to color. Or the manufacturer may choose threads of different colors to implement the same design, using the same cards but in this case differently colored threads. The form of the pattern will remain the same, but the pattern will be represented as some arrangement of colors (Babbage, 1864/1968). Babbage drew the analogy to the Analytical Engine, which would contain a store and a mill...
eBook - ePubThe Real World of Victorian Steampunk
Steam Planes & Radiophones
- Simon Webb(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Pen & Sword History(Publisher)
...Small sections of the difference engine had been built, but nothing that was of any practical use. Babbage was a notoriously difficult man to work with and had a habit of falling out with people, even his supporters. Along the way, he had made quite a few enemies. One of these was a secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Reverend Richard Sheepshank. Richard Sheepshank thought that Babbage had effectively been living off the taxpayer for nearly 20 years, while moaning the whole time about not being given enough money. So strongly did he feel about this, that Sheepshank wrote and published a book attacking Charles Babbage. It was called Letter to the Board of Visitors of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, in Reply to the Calumnies of Mr. Babbage and contained a brilliantly succinct summary of what many people by then felt about Babbage and his famous difference engine. He wrote, ‘We got nothing for our £17,000 but Mr. Babbage’s grumblings. We should at least have had a clever toy for our money.’ In The Difference Engine of course, history turns out rather differently and the difference engine of the title, really the analytical engine which Babbage envisaged, was an enormous success which revolutionized Victorian society and kickstarted the information revolution well over a century before it took place in our own world. One of the important characters in The Difference Engine is somebody who worked closely with Babbage on his mechanical computers in the real world. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and she had a great interest in mathematics and science. Although interest in Britain in Charles Babbage’s work was sometimes lukewarm, there were those in Europe who could see how tremendously significant were the ideas which Babbage was trying to put to work in a practical way...
eBook - ePubRules
A Short History of What We Live By
- Lorraine Daston(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...Babbage did not create this world of arithmometers, comptometers, and tabulating machines; his Difference and Analytical Engines never got past the design stage. But taking his cue from Prony’s logarithm project, Babbage did more than anyone else to reimagine calculation as mechanical, the first mental activity to be performed by mindless machines. Since we now live at a moment when artificial intelligence, smartphones, and algorithms-for-anything-and-anyone foster dreams (and nightmares) of computers capable of mimicking and surpassing all human intelligence, Babbage’s transfer of calculation from mind to machine seems prescient to us. We can even imagine the human mind itself as a kind of machine, which is the model underlying much contemporary cognitive science. Worse, we can imagine the machines developing minds of their own, and not very nice ones, either: we remember the computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). But in between Babbage’s idea that mindless machines could calculate and our anxieties about being replaced by mechanical minds lies almost a century of calculating machines working in tandem with humans, from about 1870 to 1970. It was humans who figured out how to divide the labor of complex calculations so that machines with little or no programming capacity could perform them, and it was humans who operated the machines. This was the reality of calculation that Wittgenstein would have encountered firsthand when he was a student of engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and the University of Manchester, and perhaps that experience lies behind his doubts about the autonomy of such machines: “If calculating looks to us like the action of a machine, it is the human being doing the calculation that is the machine.” 6 During the decades when Big Calculation was done by humans and machines together, calculation straddled the line between mind and machine...
eBook - ePubReckoning with Matter
Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage
- Matthew L. Jones(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...6 Calculating Machines, Creativity, and Humility from Leibniz to Turing As soon as someone gets a computer to do it, people say: “That’s not what we meant by intelligence.” People subconsciously are trying to preserve for themselves some special role in the universe. MICHAEL KEARNS, 2004 1 In 1844, the satirical periodical Punch carried a series of testimonials about the power of one J. Babbage’s “New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer” (figure 6.1). An E. L. Bulwer of Lytton, Bart., proclaimed himself “much pleased with Mr. Babbage’s Patent Novel-Writer, which produces capital situations, ornate descriptions, a good tone, sufficiently unexceptionable ties, and a fund of excellent, yet accommodating morality.” While ridiculing Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine, the parody lambasted the mechanical quality of the production of popular fiction as a product of the unthinking agglutination of existing bits. For his part, “L ORD W ILLIAM L ENNOX, Author of Waverley” expressed his “pleasure in stating that he finds the operation of the Patent Novel-Writer considerably more expeditious than the laborious system of cutting by hand. Lord W. has now nothing more to do than to throw in some dozen of the most popular works of the day, and in a comparatively short pace of time draw forth a spick-and-span new and original Novel.” His lordship felt machines could do yet more: “Lord W. would suggest the preparation, on a similar plan, of a Patent Thinker, to suggest ideas; in which he finds himself singularly deficient.” 2 FIGURE 6.1. “The New Patent Novel Writer,” Punch, 1844, p. 268. (Courtesy of Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.) Debates about the originality of machines were in the news. 3 In 1843, Babbage’s collaborator, Ada Lovelace, publically denied the possibility that machinery might be original: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything...
