In the style of an EPQ (Extended Project Qualification) Dissertation
By Rick Anderson
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Research Review
Difference Engine No.1
Analytical Engine / Lady Lovelace
Difference Engine No.2
Finally, a complete build
Natural Philosophy
Influencers
The Lunar Society
Three Herschels, two Darwins, one Babbage
Discussion/Development
Mathematician
Engineer
Computer Pioneer
Author
Philosopher – Natural and Traditional
Science society networker
Conclusion
Evaluation
Bibliography
Appendix – assessment of Bibliography references
Charles Babbage – more than a computer pioneer?
Abstract
Charles Babbage was a 19th century English mathematician and polymath, a natural philosopher best known for his designs of the Difference and Analytical calculating Engines, considered to be the forerunners of the modern computer. This paper describes Babbage’s many other areas of expertise across science, philosophy and economics, including as an author. It also considers his many memberships of 19th century Societies in London and Cambridge and to what extent he was naturally influenced by the 18th century Lunar Society of Birmingham. Pulling these various strands together the paper concludes with an answer to the question of whether he was more than a computing pioneer, and if so in which areas in particular.
Introduction
Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871) is seen by many as the Godfather of the modern computer. In the early 1800’s he went up to Cambridge University to study Maths. He attended Trinity and Peterhouse Colleges, both well established, in contrast to my own Fitzwilliam, yet to be invented.
But at least I graduated with Honours, in Natural Sciences; whereas he was sent down before graduating in Mathematics, because in those days you had to present a thesis for debate and he chose a controversial subject ; his disdain for authority became a trademark.
Despite this unfortunate ending he had already found a crucial lifelong colleague at Cambridge, future astronomer John Herschel, and they were founders of the alternative mathematical Analytical Society. Babbage used Cambridge to launch his career in Natural Philosophy and quite soon after into his Engine design.
Whereas my career post Cambridge took me straight to Industrial Chemistry and eventually I.T., now with this paper and as a Tutor I am finally returning to the option I never took up at Cambridge – the History and Philosophy of Science.
So my first objective is to use Babbage as a way of understanding a great period of 18th and 19th century British Science. Within that my second objective is to discover if there is a link between Babbage and his numerous societies and the Birmingham Lunar Society, just before Babbage’s time .
My third objective is to try for myself the art of writing an EPQ, an Extended Project Qualification dissertation. As a Maths, Science and Business tutor, of course I should be comfortable answering exam questions on these topics; and having supervised scores of EPQ’s I will now write one and within this really understand the practicalities of research techniques.
My overall and fourth objective is to answer the question of the title, namely was Babbage more than “just” a computer pioneer, and if so to what extent and in what fields.
My primary research is to visit the Science Museum and see for myself some old and new versions of Babbage’s famous calculating engines. My secondary research involves reading in full three books. Two full traditional paperback books, written about periods before and after his lifetime, namely “The Lunar Men” (Uglow, 2003) and “The Cogwheel Brain” (Swade, 2000); and one scanned version written by Babbage himself, effectively his autobiography , “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher” (Babbage, 1862). Also of course numerous internet links.
If we now pick now up Babbage, post Cambridge, he soon founded or helped form several more mathematical or scientific societies and joined the prestigious Royal Society of Science. In fact he also became the Chair of the famous Lucasian Mathematical Society of Cambridge.
His early Maths specialism was in “Tables” – of logarithms, trigonometry, and so on – in particular spotting errors in them. He wished he could automate out these errors mechanically, powered by “steam” he mused – and this joke developed into a lifelong project, using not steam but with thousands of finely manufactured metal alloy Cogwheels – driven by an initial crank shaft but thereafter, on each calculation, automatically.
Basic mechanical calculators had been around for some time – for instance a hundred years before, Leibnitz (of calculus fame, along with Sir Isaac Newton) had developed a simple machine, but more for domestic drawing room novelty. But Babbage’s “Engine” design and vision was far beyond that.
In this paper we will review the three Engines that he designed – but did not complete, at least not himself. However, his second was finally built recently under the supervision of Doran Swade, the author of Cogwheel Brain; while his Analytical Engine design was interpreted in his famous collaboration with Lady Ada Lovelace.
But what of his interests outside pure mathematics? We will focus initially on one aspect namely Natural Philosophy, which effectively was “Science” before scientists were so called and covered not just traditional aspects like religion and ethics but also the natural world of the earth and its’ species, and the Universe and their Laws.
In rounding up the Research we will outline Babbage’s influencers, to see where he was coming from, in order to see in the Discussion section where he was going to and how as a mathematician, he could absorb so much else. To that end we will summarise his expertise in and influence upon various roles in his career – computer pioneer, engineer, philosopher, networker, author before finally drawing a conclusion as to the extent that Babbage really was more than the Godfather of computing.
Research Review
Difference Engine No.1
Babbage began by developing “Difference Engine No.1” so called because it relies on the method of finite differences, as illustrated below with some polynomials for the first few values:
You will see that the power of the polynomial determines the point at which the differences become constant – 1st difference for a linear equation, 2nd difference for a quadratic and 3rd difference for a cubic. Note for GCSE Maths students – yes, this is related to Sequences: replace the “x” by “n” and you see the familiar constant “difference of differences” of a quadratic sequence. Note also that by adding back the differences you can reverse to the original numbers, which meant for Babbage he could utilise simple addition and subtraction – instead of the more complicated multiplication and division – even for generating numerous values of complex polynomials. And since logarithms and trigonometric ratios could be approximated to polynomials this extended its further use.
The crucial use of “differences” gave its name to the difference engine, yet also limited it to addition and subtraction – so it was a special purpose rather than a general purpose calculation machine capable of more analysis, which Babbage developed later. The genius of Babbage was to reproduce the calculations described with rotating mechanical cogs and gears with numbers inscribed according to the degrees of rotation, which, once set in motion, would achieve results automatically including coping with “carrying” of units like “tens”.
After building a small prototype of the Engine (now lost) in 1822, Babbage formally began the project soon after. Babbage employed an Engineer, Clement, to construct and assembled the 24,000 parts needed for the fully completed Engine. Funding came from the British Government Treasury, who supported the idea of automatic tabulation. Clement delivered a working model, in 1832, around a seventh of the full size, and Babbage used this to demonstrate to visitors to his house in London. The model survives in working order today, in the London Science Museum, along with detailed notes even if the drawings and remaining parts are lost.
Even this incomplete model is now recognised as a major feat of precision engineering which was the first calculating machine to incorporate a mathematical rule in order to automate the calculation of successive results. For instance, in demonstrating his model at his soirees, Babbage repeatedly generated results with a difference of 2, then the machine surprised his audience with another difference altogether without any physical intervention – Babbage had set the machine up to do this. Just this little snippet is proof the model was in good working order and that a form of “programming” was in place.
Following the promise of the 1832 demonstration model, the fact that Babbage did not go on to complete the engine was due to many factors, some within his control, some not. He suffered family tragedies. He fell out with Clement. He forever tampered with designs, including working on a different Engine. He did not market it professionally. The project drifted for another ten years until the Treasury, after funding close to £1 million in today’s money, finally “pulled the plug” in 1842. Note also that 1832 was the year of publication of Babbage’s magnum opus the Economy of Manufacturers and Machinery, the writing of which must have surely distracted him, but for genuinely beneficial reasons.
Although Babbage did not complete his Engine, it should be noted that after reading about it the Scheutz brothers from Sweden did make a Difference Engine – at least a simpler version of it – three machines in fact. They attempted to market them, with one of the customers being the UK Government who ironically bought it in the late 1850’s after years of frustration with Babbage himself. The machine did actually help a little with production of some official Tables but was not deemed sufficiently useful to warrant further roll-out. The machine was retired, but has been preserved in the Science Museum and in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in the USA where it is regularly demonstrated. As a final note Babbage did finally get to demonstrate the small model of his machine one more time at an Exhibition in London in 1862, which created some interest for the audience.
The Analytical Engine and collaboration with Ada Lovelace.
Meanwhile, let us go back to 1834, by which time Babbage cleared the decks to begin work on his follow-up to the Difference Engine, namely the Analytical Engine. Although he published little himself externally, more recent analysis of his thousands of sketches, notes and diagrams revealed the astonishing conclusion that this Engine truly did lay the foundations for the modern general purpose computer, having almost all the necessary design principles and major components we would recognise today. He developed the cog-wheel design to allow values from one results column to be fed back into the beginning. He called it the “locomotive which lays down its own railway”, “engine eating its own tail” ; we call it a “loop”. Other circular features included the design principle of sub-operations on the periphery of a central calculator (echoes of the modern Business Warehouse Star Schema) and a cylindrical barrel with studs which determined the operations needed for calculation – a “micro programme” now. He improved speed and the carrying of tens with successive carrying carriages, and a series of latches , which if set in a “warned sate” and then “polled” to carry a digit, imitated in Babbage’s’ words “knowing”, “memory” and “recollection”
Babbage introduced the idea of the “Store” for containing fixed and variable values – in today’s computers the “hard drive” and “memory” ; and the “Mill” for executing calculations having selected the starting values and returning results to the Store on completion – equivalent to the central processor today. But it was 100 years before Von Neuman published similar ideas in his seminal work on the “architecture” of computers. Babbage also introduced the idea of “pipelining” – what we would call today “parallel processing” to save total processing time. Some of his numbers carried an extraordinary accuracy of 40 decimal points.
With the type of calculations now extended to include the operations of multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction, Babbage proposed two further developments. First the output of results would include a printer on to paper and plates for publishing. Second he introduced the idea of punch cards and a card reader for determining which calculations should take place in which order . (As a student in the 1970’s I myself used punch cards on the Cambridge University computers)
The idea of the cards was not entirely new, with the Jacquard loom for textile production using them. In fact when the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert came to discuss the Engine (indicating the importance and recognition of Babbage’s work) the Prince impressed Babbage with his understanding of the Loom-Engine connection.
There were also cards for repeating a sequence of operations with the final value being fed back to the beginning and the calculation repeated and improved– GCSE students will recognise this as “iteration”. The Engine could also perform “conditional branching” where a second event depends on the outcome of the previous event – and this mirrors the GCSE Probability Tree .
To convey the motion and positions of his parts at different stages of rotation Babbage hit upon the new nomenclature of Mechanical Notation, a feature of which was to sketch these various views in the same way that Walt Disney was to use in establishing his cartoon company.
It should be noted that although Babbage employed a full-time draughtsman and had help from assistants including his sons, again like its predecessor the Analytical Engine was never fully built. This was partly because Babbage continued to fall out with potential Government sponsors in particular his lifetime nemesis Sir George Airy, Astronomer Royal, but also because by that time he seemed to prefer the intellectual challenge of design rather than physical challenge of production – perhaps just as well because the complete Analytical Engine would have been huge – filling a large room, and would literally have needed steam to power it.
During this period Babbage famously collaborated with Lady Ada Lovelace, estranged daughter of the poet Lord Byron. A mathematician herself, at age 17 she met Babbage at one of his soirees in 1833 – accompanied by her Maths tutor Mary Sommerville, known to all the Herschels and who would become one of the most famous Victorian female scientists. Babbage subsequently demonstrated his original Difference Engine model to Ada, and they began to exchange ideas in writing about the Analytical Engine.
Eventually as her family commitments eased , ten years later Ada completed a translation of an Italian review (written in French) of Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine in 1843 . Baggage encouraged her to write her own notes and her input culminated in writing a series of sequential operations necessary to generate Bernoulli’s numbers on Babbage’s engine and as such she claims the title of the first “programmer” – certainly the first female one. Her programme – known as Note G – was only an appendix – but is one of the most substantial appendices ever published – the first “computer programme”
The Bernoulli formula function is complicated and for the first time she showed that a complex mathematical function could generate a series of numbers with sequential operations on the Analytical Engine and then repeated in a loop. She also introduced the idea of using the engine for non-numerical purposes such as generation of musical notes – did she anticipate the Moog Synthesiser ? ; and use of symbols instead of numbers and speculated on “weaving algebraic patterns just as Jacquard’s Loom weaves flowers and leaves”. Because Her “Sketch on an analytical engine” was the only Paper of substance she published, some argue her importance is over-rated, but when a hundred or more years later experts began to read that document they realised what a visionary she was – or could have become if ill health had not sadly taken her early.
Babbage eventually created a fragment of the Engine, and later his son Henry completed a model of the Mill for demonstration and it still exists today in the London Science Museum A hundred years later Alan Turing described the Engine as “Turing complete” as a general purpose computer in principle capable of dealing with any algorithm and in doing so referenced Lady Lovelace.
In summary Wilkes (1992) recently argued that although, perhaps surprisingly, there is no direct physical line from Babbages’s Engines to modern day computers, nevertheless he described Babbage’s work – particularly the Analytical Engine – as “vision verging on genius” because he had identified so many of the design aspects that we take for granted in modern computer architecture. He continued “It was only when the first digital computers had come into action that the extent of Babbage’s genius became fully appreciated”.
One of the reasons there was no real follow up was because Babbage published so little of the design details in singe formal coherent papers. Which brings us to Difference Engine No. 2 and its eventual reincarnation.
Difference Engine No.2
After completing most of the work on the Analytical Engine, Babbage returned to consideration of the original Difference Engine. This time the No.2 machine carried only a third of the parts with no loss of efficiency and with more emphasis on output to printer paper and engraving. Amazingly, his printer design allowed for modern days ideas about “portrait” and ” landscape”, and font choice and options around rows and columns.
Unlike the first Engine, whose drawings suffered by real use and exposure in workshops, the 20 drawings for the second Engine were conceptual only and have survived in pristine condition. This was to prove crucial in eventual construction – but many years after Babbage’s death in 1871. He died with parts for all three of his unfinished Engines scattered in his workshops. But in his will he left these and his drawings to his son, Henry, who from these later produced a fragments of the machines which ended up for instance in the Science Museum and in the Whipple Museum of calculators in Cambridge University – back where Babbage started. A similar fragment many years later have inspired the Harvard electro mechanical calculator used in the World War 2 Manhattan project.
Finally, a complete Build.
Fast forward a hundred years, and Dr Allan Bromley from the Computer Science department in Sydney Australia, with Doran Swade, the curator of Computer Science at the Science museum in South Kensington, London, begin a project in 1985 to complete a full working construction of the complete Difference Engine No.2 by the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth which would occur in 1991.
Using his drawings and most of the same 19th century manufacturing techniques and standards of precision as much as possible, they embarked (Swade 1993 and 2000) on a journey which would prove every bit as troublesome as Babbage’s -funding requirements, marketing the project, engineering issues . At some stages they came across some design issues that would prevent the machine working – should they solve themselves – was that valid ? They had to assume Babbage would have solved them with similar tinkering – after all he spent his whole life doing that ! The difference this time that a deadline approached whereas Babbage let time drift .
A working trial piece demonstration created momentum with the media but sponsors like IBM come and went and manufacturing supplier – so vital to the production of identical components – went bust. But eventually the final build took place – amazingly on the Ground Floor of the Science Museum in full view of the visiting public. The two engineers were encouraged to explain what they were doing.
By the time of the launch the full machine was ready – almost. In full calculation mode it occasionally jammed so for the launch to the media in June 1991 the machine was set with rotating wheels as expected – but only with Zeros. But just the sight of the machine coming to life with beautiful helical movement of the wheels and columns with pristine shiny gears was enough and progress was then made to get it full working by the time of Babbage’s exact 200th anniversary in December. The jamming was reduced and occasional carry errors eliminate – by making sure that all parts were made to precision just as Babbage had foreseen. By end of November 1991 the machine was certified to be in full working order, repeatedly and accurately performing full, complex calculations . The project team had done it with a few days to spare before Babbage’s centenary on 27 December. Subsequently they added the Printer. In building the complete Engine they proved that Babbage’s failures were not due to faults in his vision or design, rather simply practical difficulties of production.
The newly built No.2 machine still remains in the Science Museum in South Kensington. I went to see it as part of “Primary Research”, along with The Scheutz model and Henry Babbages’s portion of the Analytical Engine Mill. While there, I observed a series of visitors fascinated by the fully rebuilt model, and video of it working – typically parents with children..and parents explaining. Also, the location was interesting – in the Mathematics department, not the adjacent information Age section. But there also is a fourth Engine portion– Clement’s original fragment – in the “Making of the Modern World” section. A project to build the Analytical Engine in full is being run by Doran Swade – Plan 28 – though after ten years it has not come to fruition.
Here are my photos from the Science Museum – not the best but they are mine!
Various models or portions of the Babbage Engines exist in America for instance at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Another build of Difference Engine No.2 took place in Mountain View, California. Sponsored by a Microsoft Executive, the machine was then moved from Silicon Valley to Seattle. (CHM)
Babbage and philosophy
Now let us look at Babbage’s interests outside his Engines. Towards the end of his life Babbage looked back with his self-penned “autobiography” “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher”. The reasons he viewed himself as such were that as a “polymath” he had broad interests and expertise in many subjects; from Maths to Engineering and Astronomy ; but further, to Economics and Manufacturing (he published a successful book “Economy of Manufacturers and Machinery”). He invented well-known items like the Ophthalmoscope for eye-testing and, incredibly, the “Cow-catcher” – well known to us in films on the front of American steam-trains. He proposed the “black-box” recorder for every moment of a train’s journey. He was a code-breaker – he cracked a cipher which had a defied unlocking for 300 years.
Babbage at his peak moved in intellectual circles, in fact was at the centre of them with his regular hosting at his home in London of “scientific soirees”, popular in the 1830’s both within the scientific community – such as Faraday, Charles Darwin and Wheatstone – and outside – such as the Duke of Wellington and Charles Dickens . And crucially as we shall see later, astronomer Mary Sommerville chaperoning a young Debutante called Ada Byron, whom Mary tutored in Maths. He wished both to promote Science in general, and mathematical calculation in particular, as a central force for good and means of societal advancement; but also to improve the way it was run (as a campaigner for reform he criticised the Royal Society).
It is important to note that before the 19th century the idea of the “scientist” as a whole, never mind the scientific specialist roles, was not well established. What we might now call scientists, were often referred to as “natural philosophers”, principally the philosophical study of Physics, but also aspects of nature like botany and anthropology.
Natural Philosophy is not inherently mathematics, but they intersect. For instance Babbage himself contributed an article to the publication “Philosophical Transactions” of the Royal Society just as Sir Isac Newton has done 150 years earlier. And before that 16th century Mathematicians who studied Astronomy and circular motion such as Galileo and Kepler were often described as Natural Philosophers. It should be noted however that Koyré (Ungureanu 2014) maintained that unlike Babbage “the great minds of the past, such as Galileo or Newton, were not engineers or craftsmen. Technological improvement was incidental, a mere by-product of the progress of science.” So Babbage was a new kind of scientist and natural philosopher who combined great intellectual insight with practical engineering skills who saw the combination of science and technology as a force for national advancement and collective good
Another extraordinary example of Babbage’s work in the philosophy genre was his 1837 “Ninth Bridgewater Treatise”, an unauthorised addition to Reverend Willaim Whewell’s series of papers which aimed to position Science within the traditional religious view of the world and the universe. (Unauthorised because Babbage, no stranger to picking arguments, was responding to Whewell’s criticism of mathematical philosophers)
Babbage proposed that every motion, word and breath is somehow stored and remembered by the particles of air in the atmosphere. In echoes of the Science Museum recreation of the Difference Engine, the Manchester Science and Industry museum in 2019 hosted an event called Atmospheric Memory in which Babbage’s ideas from the Treatise were interpreted by the artist digital artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Babbage said “The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.”
Babbage argued that unusual occurrences such as geological faults and miracles were in fact pre-ordained adaptations of natural laws and drew parallels with his Engines’ ability to be instructed – in a sense pre-programmed, though the phrase did not exist at the time. He links his Engine to discussions around fatalism and determinism on the one hand, and free will on the other. It is an immense tour-de-force of original intellectual thinking. He moves into the same arena, albeit from a different direction, occupied by Emile Zola’s work involving the Experimental Novel and Naturalism.
The Treatise is said to have inspired authors Edgar Alan Poe; and Charles Dickens, who attended Babbage’s soirees. Also note that the Treatise drew inevitably on work by John Herschel, Babbage’s lifelong collaborator.
(Steven Leech, 2019)
Babbage’s machines began to “think” like humans – they could be given instructions, one solution became the input for the next stage. Although a physical crank of a handle was needed to start the machine, thereafter many calculations were achieved at speed, automatically without further human intervention and the idea of machine intelligence was born. The debate into the connection between psychology, the human brain and machines had truly begun, and even though it took a hundred years to come to fruition the end point was electronic computing, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Some of Babbage’s philosophical views drew from Francis Bacon, a philosopher himself from the earlier Age of Enlightenment, who promoted an empirical view of the importance of evidence and facts in induction. Which brings us to the question, who else influenced Babbage to become the all round polymath across mathematical, scientific and philosophical areas?
Babbage’s influencers
Babbage was largely self-taught in Mathematics before going up to Cambridge. His early interest in Mathematical tables was spurred by a brief connection with an insurance company and actuarial tables, and a French project to assign specific roles to the production of tables by “computers” which in those days were people not machines. Gaspard de Prony published Logarithms and Trigonometry Tables after describing the three levels in his “division of labour” – categories of senior theorem mathematicians, calculating mathematicians, then the quickly trained “computers”.
This would later inform his Difference and Analytical Engine designs to mirror the four aspects of Table production – calculation, checking, printing and proof reading, all of which he felt would be more reliable if automated. This also links to him being an early proponent of “division of labour” as outlined in his book “Economy of Manufacturers and Machinery”
As a pure mathematician he was highly advanced although not at the very leading edge. He was an expert on functions including calculus and was part of the movement to use “d” instead of “delta” in differentiation, to introduce “infinitesimal differences”.
Babbage’s early 19th century work was a natural succession to the late 18th century advances in British science and industry – the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – and the role of scientific clubs to facilitate this. One such example lies In the Lunar Society as described in “The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810” . (Uglow, 2003). Let us look at them as a detailed case study to illustrate this.
The Lunar Society
We find a group of experimenters, tradesmen, artisans, entrepreneurs such as Erasmus Darwin (yes, an ancestor of Charles and fellow Botanist), Joseph Priestley (electricity and gases), Wedgewood (pottery and minerals), James Watt (Condensing Cylinder Steam Engine) and his business partner Matthew Boulton . Together from their Birmingham Lunar Society (which met monthly on the full moon) they developed or improved many facets of the industrial revolution such as canals, steam engines, pottery, ceramics, mineral extraction, electricity, soda water, balloons, medical heart-drugs; and perhaps interesting for Babbage, copying machines.
They were not called scientists, but knew science. They were also campaigners. They promoted scientific cooperation. They were sometimes described as natural philosophers, particularly Joseph Priestley, famous for his early views on the nature of “matter” not just from a chemical point of view, such as involving analysis of air and water, but from a philosophical and religious angle as well. The founder, William Small was a Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy.
James Watt, before his work on steam engines, developed an expertise in the harmonics of church organs and on mathematical instrument manufacture – such as compasses and scales. He later developed the ideas around workflow in manufacture with his business associate Matthew Boulton, and developed the Soho factory in Birmingham, and established the requirement for precision, engineering which makes me believe that Babbage’s development of the Difference Engine has a natural connection to and progression from the Lunar Society. In fact the beginning of Babbage’s career in the 1820’s almost overlaps with the end of the Lunar Society (1765 to 1813) . He probably never met their core members directly (although he definitely did meet their lineage) but both their spirit of British natural inventiveness and their engineering achievements must surely have influenced him.
Three Hershels, two Darwins, one Babbage
One other direct connection from Babbage to the Lunar society is through William and Caroline Herschel, famous astronomers and members of the Royal Society like Babbage; Caroline was “part of the Lunar Men’s wider circle” and as William’s sister she recorded William’s observations, making and publishing standardised for time calculations before becoming a famous astronomer herself.
William’s son was John Herschel, whom Caroline looked after and mentored following her brothers’ death. John Heschel was pivotal throughout Babbage’s career, first at Cambridge together, and then John was there at the start of Babbage’s Astronomical Society and at the famous conversation where Babbage expressed his desire to use “steam” for calculation of Tables. John accompanied Babbage on his visits to factories. John Heschel continued as a supporter and friend of Babbage for the rest of their lives.
There are many connections from John Herschel’s father Willaim to the Lunar society. Sir William Watson, a close scientific associate of William Herschel, was linked with some members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. In 1785 he published “A Treatise on Time”, a philosophical essay dedicated to William Herschel and heavily indebted to Joseph Priestley, a member of the Lunar Society
Erasmus Darwin, fulcrum of the Lunar Society, while working on Botanic Linnaeus nomenclature, sought advice from Sir Joseph Banks, as did William Heschel while striving for a naming system for planets. Many of the members of the Lunar Society were also members of the Royal Society of Scientists as were Babbage and John Herschel.
Erasmus Darwin collaborated extensively with Wiilliam Herschel on the similarity between the order of natural botany and the cosmology of the Universe. In due course Wiliam’s son John became the lifelong friend and mentor of Babbage, and Babbage knew Erasmus’s grandson, Charles Darwin, well enough to invite him to his soirees. Darwin and Babbage were good friends. As Darwin acknowledged in his autobiography, “I used to call pretty often on Babbage and regularly attended his famous evening parties.” (Francesco Cassata, Roberto Marchionatti, 2011) The Economist Alfred Marshall even argues that Babbage’s work on mechanism of the mind and Darwin’s theory of evolution in the “Original of the Species” are closely interwoven. Note that the Lunar Men book’s timeline Appendix starts with Erasmus Darwin and concludes with a very last entry – his grandson Chales Darwin, friend and associate of Babbage.
There is a symmetry in that Erasmus Darwin and William Herschel were keen collaborators in the late 1700’s (JP Daly, 2020) – “(Erasmus) Darwin later visited (Willaim) Herschel’s observatory at Slough. What is beyond doubt is that Darwin enthusiastically embraced Herschel’s natural historical cosmology”, while in the early 1800’s William’s son John and Erasmus’s grandson Charles Darwinmet, incredibly, in South Africa, coincidentally, on Darwin’s famous HMS Beagle voyage on route to the Galapagos Islands, while docked near Herschel’s observatory in Cape Town. And were reunited in Westminster Abbey – their bodies buried next to each other. That Babbage mixed with these two giants of 19th century science speaks volumes to his connections, influence and influences, as seen below in my Tree.
So in summary there was a natural if indirect link from the Lunar Society of Birmingham to Babbage and his associates in London and Cambridge, both in terms of personnel, family trees and also their specialisms. Babbage must have been aware of and influenced by the Lunar Society and its members. Although he was less entrepreneurial than many Lunar members – Babbage rarely commercialised or took patents on his inventions – nevertheless his goal of mechanisation for the wider good was shared by the Lunar Society; but he then saw the additional benefit of progressing mechanisation into calculation and automation. He was more mathematical than the Lunar Society but as a Polymath natural philosopher his wider science interests like Engineering definitely coincided, as did his general belief in the value of Science “clubs”.
Discussion/Development
In the light of the above research let us examine and summarise the various roles which Babbage undertook. To what extent did he excel, did he leave a legacy, when was he acknowledged, how did he compare to equivalent figures before, during and after his lifetime?
Mathematician
As a Mathematician Babbage was in the Premier League, but not a Champion. He was at the forefront of the debate about the versions of calculus originated by Newton and Leibnitz, but he was not a Newton or Leibniz himself. Although a Chair for ten years of Lucian Maths back at Cambridge University, he fulfilled his duties rather than excelling (he never returned to live there). His special expertise was in the areas of Tables, statistics, functions including calculus, and probability. But he had a wider role – to promote the use of Maths in everyday life, the use of measurement, accuracy, precision, empirical judgement; he believed that everything could be expressed numerically and recorded as such (he frequently stopped to measure animal heartbeats) And he linked Maths to other specialisms like philosophy and astronomy.
Engineer
He understood the need for precise design and manufacture, which is why he hired Clement for Engine No. 1 and draughtsman Godfrey for Engine No.2 He understood metallurgy, gearing ratio, cogs, leverage, springs, shafts, connecting rods, tolerances. Also wider civil engineering aspects such as railway track gauges and factory design. He was an inventor of mechanical devices. With some skill in making and using tools he was able to run his own workshop. He created a very small prototype of the Engine himself, even before Clement’s model.
With that array of theoretical engineering knowledge and practical skills, two questions emerge. First where did they come from since Babbage wasn’t formally trained in Engineering at school or University? I believe the answer is partly self-taught – he designed water-walking shoes as a school boy – and also by liaison with his Society colleagues. Secondly, why did it take so long (almost ten years) to get even part of the Engine No.1 built? Especially since as you will see from the photos, the Engine is big but not that big. The reason is partly because of his poor Project Management skills – no timeline milestones, his tinkering with design, running over budget, falling out with Clement. And partly, because of the sheer complexity of the interlocking cog wheels and columns – and the need to avoid jamming and calculation errors – and the large number (20,000) of small parts requiring very fine tolerance production. Some would argue that Clement deliberately over complicated production to extend his contract, but remember even the Science Museum project took seven years to complete. And even Clement’s incomplete model is now recognised as a shining example of advanced early 19th century engineering.
Computer Pioneer
After Babbage died, he and his work were almost forgotten, as was Ada Lovelace. Although his son Henry’s noble efforts to publicise and occasionally build some designs just about extended his legacy to the 1900’s, there was a gap of almost 50 more years to the invention of the modern computer and even then only one major designer, Aitken (Harvard Mark 1) significantly recognised his work. So when and why has Babbage become recognised as the Godfather of computing, after falling out of favour?
There is an argument that in choosing mechanical cogwheel design, rather than the as yet unavailable electronic option, and preferring base 10 rather than the Base 2 of Boolean logic, which paved the way years later for digital age, that Babbage had created a dead-end. And his failure to find large scale uses, and failure to complete his complex Engines, and his alienating of important potential sponsors, also contributed to his diminished reputation.
Arguably the reinvention of Babbage started with the “Babbage Papers” held in the London Science Museum Archives containing three main types of material; his notebooks, engineering drawings and also notations which “describe the way parts are intended to act” and can be thought of as ‘walk throughs’ or ‘traces’ of micro-programs for various models or plans of the engines” (Reference: Science Museum)
In this Bibliography reference you can follow in extraordinary detail scans of many of the thousands of original drawings, formulae, plans, explanations, instructions that Babbage had created, even if not published. It’s a beautifully constructed digital retrospective by the way. My guess is that when Dr Allan Bromley, already an expert on computing history, began in 1979 to research and put together this archive he must have thought, “wow, Babbage got there first! And no-one knew!) It was he who persuaded Doran Swade to commence the project to build Engine No.2 in 1985.
In terms of the towering figures of mathematical computing machines, Babbage is now considered up there with the greats. Pascal and Leibniz from the 1700’s; monumental mathematicians who produced the arithmetic machine and reckoner, early mechanical small desktop mechanical calculators but very limited compared to Babbage’s machines. Then in the 1800’s, as well as Babbage, Colman’s arithmometer – the first reliable office mechanical calculator; and George Boole, developer of Boolean logic which permutates digital “1 or zero” digital computer design. In the 1900’s , Aitken’s Harvard Mark 1 referencing Babbage, and of course Turing’s famous papers before and after WW2, bookending his literal Colossus to crack the Enigma code.
It should be noted Turing was more of a theoretical computer scientist, relying on his Engineer Tommy Flowers for the build, which now featured Thermionic valves, driven by early electronics not mechanics or steam. And in the 2000’s one might argue that Steve Jobs (Apple hardware including the Mac and I Pad) and Bill Gates (Microsoft software and Windows operating system) are the most recent key figures, unless a name becomes attached to Quantum computing or AI.
My take on this is that Babbage combined both of Turing’s theoretical and Flowers’s practical roles; but unlike them (they had a War to urgently win) he lacked the discipline of a deadline. And likewise he combined aspects of Gates and Jobs, but lacked their commercial impetus. I think Babbage, had he lived today, may have invented programming languages, but would be bored to churn out individual coding. He may have been a solutions architect, but outsourced the grind of implementation.
Author
Babbage wrote six significant books in his lifetime as follows (links in Bibliography):
- Table of the Logarithms of the Natural Numbers (1827) .
- Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830) – Criticizes the state of science in England and suggests reforms including to the Royal Society.
- On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) – describes the political economy, industrial processes, and the impact of machinery on manufacturing
- The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) – Discusses natural theology and the connection between science and religion1.
- The Exposition of 1851 (1851) – Describes the importance of the Great Exhibition of 1851
- Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864) – Effectively an autobiographical work reflecting on his life and contributions to natural philosophy and science
Note that at the time of his death in 1871, Charles Babbage was beginning to pull together descriptions of his various Engines to be formally published. His son, Henry, having inherited much of his father’s materials, did finally publish a full Engines description in 1889. He also built several small versions of the Difference Engine, and at the end of his life in 1910, completed the portion of the Analytical Mill now in the Science Museum. In terms of computing, there was a brief flurry of references in the 1930’s and 40’s as the modern computer’s invention began, then a lull until aided by the Science Museum’s Build project; a flurry of books about Babbage’ s Engines followed from the 1980’s onwards.
In terms of the above six books it’s instructive to describe them to help answer our central question, was Babbage more than (just) a computer pioneer?
Babbage’s lifelong development of his Engines started, and to some extent continued, from the standpoint of calculating, checking, proof reading and printing mathematical tables so it is no surprise his first major publication was the logarithms of the first 108,000 numbers.
The Decline of Science begins to reveal both Babbage’s wider interests in Science as a whole, but also his lifelong fight with his perceived detractors, in this case the Royal Society.
Of all Babbage’s publications, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures is perhaps his most influential (OEMM as it is called). It is an extraordinary intellectual achievement, some would argue on a par with his physical Engines. OEMM was a consequence of his visits to workshops and the new industrial factories, often with frequent collaborator John Herschel, in England and also continental Europe. The type of factories that Lunar Men Watt and Boulton had established in Soho, Birmingham.
In this book Babbage describes his “Babbage principle” relating to advantages of specialisation and division of labour accordingly leading to lower overall production costs, along with the benefits of machinery over labour.
He also introduces the concept of economies of scale from larger factories; the “transactional cost” method including cost of each part of a process including conformance to quality specifications; the benefits of incremental improvements through observing and hence refining manufacturing processes; standardisation techniques for producing identical parts; the idea of measuring performance of management tasks and factory workflow; the importance of supply chains; and the effect of taxation on manufacturing.
In short, he describes the transition from simply “making” to manufacturing (Ozgur, 2010), and perhaps invents many aspects of microeconomics.
The influence of OEMM cannot be overstated. Arguably the two most famous publications in economic history are Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” – in simple terms the Communist and Capitalist views of political economy. Marx referenced Babbage directly, and although Smith’s first edition didn’t, subsequent editions leaned heavily on the fact that initially Smith’s view was that agriculture laid the foundations for Britain’s increasing wealth, but now Babbage was explaining that Britian’s role in the Industrial Revolution, in particular manufacturing, was the major factor.
Later in the 1800’s, the influence of Babbage can be seen John Stewart Mill’s seminal works like “Principles of Political Economy” and into the 1900’s, in Frederik Taylor’s theories on work study, operational research, factory design and piecework payment systems (and Babbage even predicted the issue that workers, if studied, would behave particularly productively); and in Japan and America, the ideas of Quality Assurance, Total Quality and even Quality Circles seemed to refer back to OEMM. (Note ; as an industrialist myself, with practical expertise on Quality and Operational Research, and as Business and Economics tutor, I was astonished to discover Babbage’s influence)
Then just five years after OEMM came the Bridgewater Treatise, described earlier under philosophy; proving that Babbage could switch very quickly from Engineering and Manufacturing to Religion and Philosophy. It is an extraordinary demonstration of his broad range of “polymath” natural philosophy knowledge. Apparently Engineering and Philosophy seem disconnected, but Babbage’s common ground was the influence of empirical observation, measurement and the relation of human ingenuity and thought to mechanical operation.
The Exposition of 1851 coincides with the great Crystal Palace exhibition of the same year, and as well as offering his views on the building design, entry prices and prizes, Babbage takes the opportunity to talk more generally about the roles of science, government and technology. The fact he was not invited to exhibit indicates the beginning of his fall from grace.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, referred to earlier, looks back autobiographically on his life, beginning surprisingly perhaps by dedicating it to the King of Italy. I believe that this not only reveals how important he feels his travels were, but also some indication of not being fully accepted or acknowledged in his own country.
The book illustrates the range and progression of his priorities and it is instructive to group his chapters broadly to these categories: his early life and upbringing; the Difference and Analytical Engines and his demonstration in 1862; his recollections of meetings with famous people: Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington, Humphrey Davey; stories of his various experiences, for instance with the Courts, Theatre, Fire, and Water; his work on railways, effectively as a management consultant, combining recommendations on information (the “black box” equivalent, infrastructure (the gauge) and engineering invention (the cow catcher); religion and miracles; his contribution to Science and human knowledge.
The book reveals both his genius but also his foibles, his insistence on recording “who said what when” in his meetings, and his cantankerous aspects. For instance, after surprisingly not being asked to participate in the great 1852 Exhibition at Crystal Palace – and that must have hurt – he finally gets to demonstrate the Engine fragment formally for the first (and last) time in 1862 at the London follow up, an Exposition in South Kensington. It was going well but he complains about the small space, falls out with some audience members who were complaining about his latest grievance – street organists – and promptly leaves early in annoyance.
But let us focus on his crowning achievements. In describing his later Engines, Babbage talks of “The whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism”….” I concluded also that nothing but teaching the Engine to foresee and then to act upon that foresight could ever lead me to the object I desired, namely, to make the whole of any unlimited number of carriages in one unit of time”….” it formed the first great step towards reducing the whole science of number to the absolute control of mechanism”
Two of his most important quotes are these, first the core philosophy of his life:
“I think one of the most important guiding principles has been this:—that every moment of my waking hours has always been occupied by some train of inquiry. In far the largest number of instances the subject might be simple or even trivial, but still work of inquiry, of some kind or other, was always going on.”
Second, his acknowledgment of the difficulties of his Engine work, and the hope and expectation that someone in future will pick up the reins and run with it.
“Half a century may probably elapse before anyone without those aids which I leave behind me, will attempt so unpromising a task. If, unwarned by my example, any man shall undertake and shall succeed in really constructing an engine embodying in itself the whole of the executive department of mathematical analysis upon different principles or by simpler mechanical means, I have no fear of leaving my reputation in his charge, for he alone will be fully able to appreciate the nature of my efforts and the value of their results”.
At the end of the Life of a Philosopher book, Babbage then lists in chronological order some eighty published papers either directly in his name, or others publishing for him, or extracting his work.
They begin with a paper in 1813 on the Analytical Society with his Cambridge colleague John Herschel.
Then continue with many mathematical papers such as on Calculus and Functions; on mechanical calculators, his own Engines; water related devices like diving bells, submarines and lighthouses; printing methods; the geology of the earth’s surfaces; the astronomy of Neptune and the Sun; the bones of extinct animals; gun arrangements in an army’s battery; observations on awarding peerages; and extracts from most of his books, including his second last paper in 1864 derived from his “Passages” book.
Then more than fifty years after his first paper comes the eightieth and last, sometime after 1864, intriguingly it is the beginnings of his unfinished account of the history of the Analytical Engine, in which he includes a reprint of the earlier translation of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” and acknowledges translation by none other than “the late Countess of Lovelace, with extensive Notes by the Translator.”
In summary the large range of topics in his papers and books spanning half a century indicates that yes, Babbage truly was a polymath and all-round natural philosopher.
Philosopher – natural and traditional
We have covered Babbage’s philosophical links extensively so let us summarise his role, first as a natural philosopher.
Babbage was a new kind of scientist and natural philosopher who combined great intellectual insight with practical engineering skills who saw the combination of science and technology as a force for national advancement and collective good.
A true Polymath, his range and depth of his expertise was astonishing – from his mathematical calculating engines of course, but also to the other sciences of physics, engineering , geology and astronomy; and into business and economics. Note also his ability to link many of these – for instance the role of factory machinery and engineering in generating economic efficiency and economies of scale.
Babbage’s knowledge of more traditional areas of philosophy such as religion, ethics and the human mind came to light particularly in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.
As ever he was able to link this area back to his Engine work, noting that his Analytical Engine would have “foresight” and suggesting that the Universe perhaps had pre-programmed, deterministic aspect.
In Babbage’s last book, he calls himself a “philosopher”. His title “passages from the life of…” indicates to me a whimsical look back, and its varied contents seem as if to say, “yes, I’ve seen and done everything, just as a natural philosopher should”.
Science society networker
Babbage also carried on the tradition of late Georgian/early Victorian English Science Societies as a means of networking and promoting sciences – he belonged to many and founded some, such as the Cambridge Mathematics Practitioners, the Analytical Society, the British Association for Advancement of Science, The Statistical Society, The Royal Astronomical Society, and the Royal Society.
Perhaps his “clubs” were the London versions of the Lunar Society, the Birmingham based group. There was only a few years between them and meetings and conversations must surely have overlapped. Perhaps Babbage should have paid them more attention – but were the philosophical intelligentsia of London and Cambridge too far removed from industrial Birmingham? Perhaps, but it has been claimed that “(John) Herschel and Babbage spent a great deal of time visiting factories and viewed themselves as the philosophical equivalents of great industrialists such as James Watt, Matthew Boulton…”. (Ashworth, 1996)
We have noted several indirect connections between Babbage and the Lunar Society. , such as Watt and Darwin. Another is through the famous English scientist Sir Humprey Davy, pioneer in electrochemistry and gases like nitrous oxide. Let us use his example to see how science society networking worked. Davy was well known to a founder of the Lunar Society, steam engineer James Watt (Lacy, 2023).
Also, Davy was president of the Royal Society (of Science) while Babbage was an active member. In fact the somewhat Machiavellian side of Babbage is shown during Davy’s accession to and time as President of the Royal Society ; Babbage and John Herschel and others from the “Cambridge group” frequently corresponded – overtly and covertly – about how to get their preferred candidate voted in as President – and it wasn’t Davy. Despite this Babbage helped Davy with vacuum tube calculations and Davy supported Babbage in his request for Engine funding from the Board of Longitude, and later Davy was on a sub-committee in Government looking as they often did at Treasury Engine funding.
Babbage and Herschel in the Royal Society moved away from Maths a little but “continued to hold up mathematical skills of the highest order as the sine qua non of the true natural philosopher” . Their extra research enabled “Cambridge Network members to a claim to superiority over mathematically illiterate philosophers”.
Babbage fell foul of and fell out with the Royal Society for a number of reasons – his failure to win a medal, and his perceived attack in “Decline of Science”. In many senses Babbage was a superb member and founder of Science and Maths societies, but on the other hand his personal grievances and thin-skin ease of taking offence were sometimes his own worst enemy.
Conclusion
Yes, Babbage really was more than a computer pioneer. In fact, in the period either side of his death, namely the 2nd half of the 19th century, one might argue that his influence in subjects outside of mechanical calculation was the greater. But we need to distinguish between just strong expertise, and expertise so outstanding as to leave a lasting legacy.
As a mathematician he clearly outstanding – many papers published, ten years a Lucasian chair of Mathematics at Cambridge – but ultimately, he was a follower not a leader. For instance, he didn’t invent calculus but helped to resolve the different versions. What he began to achieve was recognition of the importance of practical, applied mathematics for instance in measurement, quantification, requirement of empirical evidence.
As an engineer, he had excellent design skills – such as in his Engines – and reasonable practical skills – he had his own workshop. He and Clement were some of the first to recognise and implement the idea of repeatable production of small machine parts to very tight tolerances. Babbage was a very good engineering manager – except in one crucial respect namely Project Management in which he allowed drift of specification scope and time. He was also a visionary who promoted the importance of technology including mechanical engineering in the advancement of Great Britain in the industrial revolution.
As a natural philosopher was one the last of the breed and one of the best – such a large range of specialisms in both the sciences – physics, engineering, industry, mathematics, astronomy, even stretching to botany and geology – and also traditional philosophy as evidenced by his epic Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. After Babbage’s period, the roles of specialist scientists began to emerge, and to separate from traditional philosophy, and rarely again would an all-rounder of Babbage’s expertise and stature come forth.
Babbage’s belief in and enjoyment of formal clubs and societies, was proved by his numerous memberships and founding leaderships. Some of which were natural successors to the Lunar Society which finished just as he was starting his career. Although he seemingly didn’t physically meet its members his associations with them and the wider Lunar network were numerous through his close relationships with for instance the Herschels, the Darwins, and Humphrey Davy. Babbage was also a great informal networker as well, proved by his very popular for a time soirees for the great and the good. But ultimately Babbage let his own eccentricities and overt criticisms, for instance of the Royal Society, and civil servants like Airey, diminish his reputation.
We shall close by comparing and contrasting his two greatest expertises and influences – computer science obviously – but starting with his role in examining and influencing, in his actual and near lifetime, the development of the United Kingdom as a world leading manufacturing powerhouse. His epic Economy of Machinery and Manufactures is of course less well known than his Engine designs but it laid the foundation of many operational strategies which were actually implemented in real manufacturing businesses. For instance his “Babbage principle” of division of labour, the benefit of economies of scale, transactional cost efficiencies, vertical integration of supply chains, quality control and assurance, to name but a few. As such he was hugely influential in early Microeconomics, Operational Research and eventually Management Consultancy. One of his recommendations was on the transition from invention to innovation in processes, leading to mass marketable products – which leads us finally to his Engines, because sadly Babbage could not achieve that himself.
Babbage’s Difference Engines were the first to make the transition from rudimentary mechanical calculators – with very little application beyond drawing room curiosities – to sophisticated automatic calculators with a high degree of accuracy and precision and real purpose (in Table production and generating polynomial results). Although he never had them fully built, his working models were enough to demonstrate potential – which was proved by the recent full build of Engine No.2 at the Science Museum.
The Analytical Engine was even less complete in his lifetime, but its potential was a step above the Difference Engine as it was more of a programmable all-purpose machine capable of more extensive calculations. As we now know, Ada Lovelace’s interpretation of his designs opened up the possibility of computer programmes.
Babbage did achieve a lot of recognition in his lifetime for his Machines – which other mathematician could be welcome to demonstrate their product to Prime Ministers and Chancellors of The Exchequer as well as such a range of celebrities and scientists? So why did his machines fall out of sight for almost a hundred years? Partly because his use of cogwheels – while ingenious – was ultimately less sophisticated than electronics. Partly because although he was a great networker, he had a habit of falling out with colleagues like Engineer Clement and sponsors in Government – which with his own tendency to tinker lead to him never fully completing his machines. And partly the need for computers hadn’t really arrived – or he couldn’t sell the need or see it (Tables were too narrow an application). It seemed that simple early office mechanical calculators were all that was needed.
So if there was no really direct line from Babbage to modern computers why and when did he become so famous as the Father of Computing? Was there something in the sheer size of his Machines, similar to early mainframe computers? Actually, I conclude that the work of Bromley and Swade in the 1980s’s played a huge role in uncovering his designs, from for example his Notebooks and the collection of Babbage Papers, and on turning that into a finished Engine project. With that came widespread publicity in both the scientific and crucially the non-scientific media. As people began to use computers themselves, they began to wonder, where did all this come from? Add in Ada Lovelace’s contribution and all-told it was a great story; but more than a story. Babbage had correctly and astonishingly predicted a hundred years in advance the solutions architecture of much of today’s computing – the separation of hardware and software, of programming and data store, the idea of loops, iterations and subroutines. This only truly became apparent in the full examination of his designs; and so, his elevation to “father of the computer” was retrospective.
Some analogies I can think of are these; on TV on Long Lost Families or Who Do you Think You Are, people learn about their long-lost relatives’ activities. When fans in America heard the Rolling Stones interpretation of Rhythm and Blues for the first time in the early 1960s’s many didn’t know that the songs’ origin was actually in African American Blues in their own country. Consider Columbus being viewed as the first European to discover America – later it was discovered the Vikings were there much earlier. Or (ironically) the recent discovery of the 2000-year-old ancient Greek Antikythera machine with gears for predicting navigational and astronomical events. Also consider Vincent Van Gogh, the impressionist painter, unloved in his lifetime. Which leads to a final analysis of Babbage.
A Dr Who episode brought Van Gogh forward in time to a modern art gallery displaying his paintings. The Doctor asked him to listen to what the visitors were saying. Of course, they were gushing in praise and Vincent was astonished but delighted. Babbage and Lovelace also appeared in a Dr Who episode – but nearer to their own time period. I bet that Babbage would love to be transported forward to finally realise the recognition he craved . In today’s terminology he would be described as “insecure”. All sorts of recognition has emerged in the end – a crater on the Moon named Babbage, a computer language called Ada, a road in Cambridge called Babbage Road to name a few.
So, in final conclusion, the large majority of people who have heard of Babbage would know him in popular culture as the father of computing only; but a significant minority of specialists would know him as the extraordinary polymath.
Evaluation (of my project, required in EPQ)
As most EPQ students do, I aimed to run the project in the summer holidays. My time plan worked successfully. The start was slow – writing the first few paragraphs is always the most difficult. But once the fascination of the topic took hold, it was easy to keep going. In fact, I doubled the minimum length required.
I achieved my objectives. I reached a conclusion and answered the question, namely that Babbage certainly was just more than a computer pioneer. Those with just a slight recognition of Babbage would be surprised, but experts would not. What might be controversial are my assertions that Babbage’s work was a natural succession to Lunar Society; and that his work on factory economics as described in his epic book OEMM is in my view almost as important as his purely Difference and Analytical Engine work. This may reflect some bias on my part – as a factory economist myself I was astonished and impressed to discover his influence in that area.
Another objective was to complete a project to learn lessons on students’ behalf including research techniques. Here is what I found and hence can provide recommendations.
I vowed at the outset not to rely purely on the internet. Spending time reading a couple of proper paper books was invaluable because you see the whole picture not just fragments. My primary research visit to the Science Museum was useful in a number of ways – you get to see the physicality of the Machines, and visitors’ reactions to them. Also discover little surprises like the Herschels’ telescope.
‘
But inevitably the internet plays a big part. Here are some thoughts. Google Scholar and JSTOR provide reliable references. You have to join JSTOR but its free up to a hundred articles. Google Scholar seems unlimited access and I recommend searching on some key words, then after selecting a document use “Control-F” to highlight particular words you are looking for – this makes potentially long and intimidating documents much easier to navigate. Then either take short word for word extracts into your dissertation – but remember to acknowledge with quotation marks and use italics. Or try to summarise in your own words a short paragraph to insert into your project. Note that if “PDF” is mentioned to the right of the Google Scholar screen you get the full download – better than just an abstract.
Make sure that if you use a Reference that you immediately record it – full references in Bibliography, author name and date in the dissertation itself. Otherwise you will forget.
Occasionally I used Copilot a Google Artificial Intelligence Add-In. It generally gives a nice summary of a topic with reasonable accuracy. Typically I used it to answer a linkage question like “did A ever meet B”? I feel it sometimes gave me the answer it thought I wanted to read; and sometimes gave exactly the same answer to two slightly different questions. Sometimes the wrong answer (it confused the different Herschels). So I used “critical thinking” to not always totally believe what it told me. One thing is certain – never copy exactly what it says – you will be found out!
I frequently looked at the marking grid to make sure that as well as I enjoyed the project, I was also fulfilling what examiners want. For instance, trying to link phrases and also present alternative arguments; such as “Babbage sought recognition so gained a lot of publicity from his soirees and was a great networker, on the other hand he frequently fell out with potential sponsors”.
Also to consider what were my limitations and so what further work might I do: increasingly I found such a huge amount of material available that it became difficult to choose and difficult to be sure I was finding something new; I think my angles on the Lunar Society and the super-importance of OEMM potentially were new so I would like to follow up more on those aspects.
Also, I’d like to solve the puzzle of where in the world all the remaining fragments or complete Engines are located. Did I miss one at the Science Museum? Yes I did – Clement’s part-build – a good example of primary follow up research is that the Science Museum did identify my missing Engine after I emailed them. Which reminds me, the official guidance is to use technical academic language so exclamation marks are no doubt frowned upon and I have probably over used them in my project (!).
In terms of what I might have done differently, the eventual length at 10,000 words was twice the minimum, so I should have been more disciplined in scope (but I became fascinated). Also I found in the structure of the dissertation a little difficult to decide what to put in Research, or Discussion, or Conclusion and could have resolved that from the start. My basic advice is this: in Research use more fact-based paragraphs without your own opinion and most of your references should be here. Save just a few references for discussion where you will be more writing your own interpretation and opinion on what the Research showed and develop some themes of your own. Then in Conclusion bring it all together, referring back to the title, answering its question, using justifying evidence with a little bit of counterbalance argument.
But all in all I am pleased and proud to have completed this work.
Bibliography
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN February 1993 Doran Swade
The Cogwheel Brain, Doran Swade, 2000
The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810 Paperback – 4 Sept. 2003 Jennifer Uglow
Babbage’s ‘Library in the Air’ | Science and Industry Museum
Steven Leech, 2019, Atmospheric Memories.
Science Museum Archives Babbage Papers
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/documents/aa110000003/the-babbage-papers
CHM Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley U.S.A
The Babbage Engine – CHM (computerhistory.org)
Video of CHM demonstration of their Engine
Andrew Lacy, 2023, the Lunar Society website
Sir Humphry Davy (1778 – 1829): His Life, Letters and Notebooks – Zoom – 22nd February 2023 – Lunar Society
CHARLES BABBAGE: AN INADVERTENT DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST
Erdem Ozgur
History of Economic Ideas, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2010), pp. 11-31 (21 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23724549?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Memory, Efficiency, and Symbolic Analysis: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and the Industrial Mind
William J. Ashworth
Isis, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 629-653 (25 pages)https://www.jstor.org/stable/235196
Visions of Science James Ungureanu
Wilkes Computing Perspectives 1992
Charles Babbage – The Great Uncle of Computing?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/131295.214839
The Botanic Universe: Generative Nature and Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmic Transformism
JEBO2718-libre.pdf (d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net)
A transdisciplinary perspective on economic complexity. Marshall’s problem revisited Francesco Cassata, Roberto Marchionatti∗ Department of Economics, University of Turin, Italy
Babbage’s books:
1 Table of the Logarithms of the Natural Numbers (1827) – A mathematical work providing logarithmic tables1.
2 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830) – Critiques the state of science in England and suggests reforms1.
3. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) – Discusses industrial processes and the impact of machinery on manufacturing1.
4 The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) – Explores natural theology and the relationship between science and religion1.
5 The Exposition of 1851 (1851) – Discusses the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its significance
Appendix: Assessment of sample of References (required for EPQ)
| Reference | Relevance to Paper | Reliability of author |
| The Cogwheel Brain, Doran Swade | Tells the story of Babbage as a computer pioneer and beyond and of the rebuild of Difference Engines No.2 | Swade is regarded as one of the experts on Babbage and as Science Museum computer science curator was the co-leader of the project to rebuild Difference Engine No. 2. He is not biased, as he lists the pros and cons of the argument that Babbage was a computer pioneer. Swade both publishes a book and features in an article in the well respected Scientific American Magazine |
| Charels Babbage the Great Uncle of Computing ? , Maurice Wilkes | Discusses Babbage’s life, connections and impact on computing | Part of a wider magazine on Computing Perspectives, Communications of the Age, Wilkes worked very closely with Swade and Dr Bromley, the other leader of the Difference Engine No. 2 rebuild who helped to digitalise the Babbage Papers at the Science Museum. Wilkes lists the pros and cons of the argument that Babbage was a computer pioneer. He won a Turing award. |
| CHARLES BABBAGE: AN INADVERTENT DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST, Erdem Ozgur | Describes Babbage’s contributions in areas beyond calculations Engines namely as an early developer of Microeconomic ideas and promoter of manufacturing | The paper is from JSTOR’s respected academic paper library and is part of a wider series of papers on economic theory in “Quaderni di storia dell’economia politica” |
| The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730-1810 Paperback – 4 Sept. 2003 Jennifer Uglow | Tells the story of the Lunar Society a crucial account of the club and its members which influenced Babbage | Jenny Uglow has received several literary prizes for this book and as an author has witten several Biographies of other historical English figures. She has featured as an expert in the BBC’s In Our time on the Discovery of Oxygen and the Lunar Society itself and as consultant to period dramas like Pride and Prejudice. |
