Charles Babbage Biography (1791-1871)

Nationality
English
Gender
Male
Occupation
inventor

Charles Babbage, the son of a wealthy English banker, was born in the early years of the
Industrial Revolution. As that revolution progressed, he became one of its foremost--and most
controversial--spokesmen. Because of his views on what the scientific method could do for
industry and commerce (and a few other eccentricities), most of his contemporaries regarded his
as a crank. Today, he is remembered as the brilliant mathematician who invented the prototypeof
the digital computer .

Babbage entered Cambridge University at the age of 19, and it was there thathe thought of a
computer first crossed his mind. One evening in 1812, as he sat gazing at a table of mathematical
data, it occurred to him that a machinecould calculate such data faster than humans and without
human error. In theincreasingly complex world in which he lived, errors in mathematical tables
were becoming a matter of real concern; particularly serious--since they werethe cause of
frequent shipwrecks--were inaccuracies in navigational tables. Babbage had occasion to return to
his idea of a computing machine about 1820,when as a member of a learned society, he was
given the task of verifying tables of astronomical data. The numerous errors he found in them led
him to exclaim, "I wish God these calculations had been accomplished by steam." Babbagenever
did see numbers calculated by a steam-powered machine, though he spentthe rest of his life and
much of his fortune trying to build one.

In 1822 he completed a small working model of the Difference Engine, a machine that could
compile and print mathematical tables. The next year, after convincing the British government to
fund the project, he began building a full-scale version. Progress was slow and expensive, since
machine tools for makingthe parts had to be custom-crafted. But Babbage's efforts, which
included astudy of all mechanical devices that could be used in building his machine, had a
profound effect on mechanical engineering. The ensuing improvements to machine tools and
techniques were worth far more to the British industry thanthe £17,000 the government
ultimately spent on the project. The government withdrew its support of the Difference Engine in
1834, but by then Babbagehad already conceived the idea for his Analytical Engine. A
programmable automatic machine, the Analytical Engine was the direct ancestor of the modern
digital computer.

Babbage's constant improvements and redrafting of plans may be one reason theAnalytical
Engine was never finished. Another was the technology available to him. It would have been far
simpler for him to implement his ideas with electromechanical devices than with mechanical
ones, but it would be many yearsbefore electrical technology was reliable enough for Babbage's
purposes. Babbage himself would have blamed the shortsightedness of the British governmentfor
the failure of his machines ever to see practical application. But the real wonder is how he ever
managed to get any government funding at all. The idea of a machine that seemed to perform
human thought processes struck many ofhis contemporaries as ridiculous, if not sacrilegious.

Babbage tossed off ideas and designs for other devices with great abandon--among them, a
cowcatcher for locomotives, a meter to reduce water waste, a device for recording earthquake
shock waves, and a skeleton key . All these seemto have been of fleeting interest to him,
obsessed as he was with his computing engines. Typically, credit for the ophthalmoscope that he
invented in 1848went to Hermann von Helmholtz, who invented the same device in 1851; his
multipurpose machine tool, which would have been very useful in small factories,was never
built; and his lighthouse signalling system was pirated by a Russian naval officer (to whom he
had gladly shown it) and later patented by an English admiral (who profited from it).

Had Babbage been born a few generations later, when technology was more advanced, the world
might not have had to wait until the mid-twentieth century forthe digital computer, and Babbage
might have died content. As it was, a friend who visited him before his death reported that he
sounded as if he hated "mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English
government andorgan grinders most of all" (organ grinders and other street musicians have been
among the few things that could distract him from his work). His hatred was, however, abstract;
it melted away in the face of anyone with a hard-luckstory. he was, as one of his biographers
characterized him, a lovable but "irascible genius."

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