Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Charles Babbage is popularly acknowledged as the "Father of Computing" for his pioneering work with computing machines. Babbage's early work can be linked to the later use of Jacquard punch cards, chains and subassemblies, and the logical structure of the modern computer.
Early Years
Babbage was born in London on December 26, 1791, the son of Benjamin Babbage, a London banker and grandson to Benjamin Babbage, who was the Mayor of Totnes, Devon in 1754. Although Babbage was born in London, he's thought of a Devonian.
Babbage followed the regular path of a Victorian era "thinking gentleman", enrolling in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1810, and earning his MA in 1817. Babbage filled the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839 and was the founder of several Victorian era societies and associations, the most notable of which included the Analytical Society in 1820, and the Statistical Society of London in 1834. Babbage was believed to be one of England's greatest intellectuals in an era filled with brilliant minds. Babbage was known as a fan of the created object, seeing great beauty in things constructed by man, stamped buttons, stomach pumps, railways and tunnels, all man's command over nature. This passion for complex creation can be seen in his inventions.
Design of Computers
Because of the high error rate in the calculation of mathematical tables, Babbage searched to find a method by which they could be calculated by machine, which wouldn't suffer the mistakes, fatigue and boredom of human calculators. These thoughts had come to him as early as 1812. Three different elements appear to have influenced him: a dislike of messiness, his awareness of logarithmic tables, and work on calculating machines carried out by Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Leibniz. In 1822, in a letter to Sir Humphrey Davy about the application of machinery to the calculation and printing of mathematical tables, he discussed the principles of a calculating engine.
Babbage introduced a framework of what he titled a Difference Engine to the Royal Astronomical Society on June 14, 1822 and in a paper titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". It calculated polynomials using a numerical method called the differences method. The Society approved the idea, prompting the government to give funds for its construction in 1823. Babbage converted one of the rooms in his home to a workshop and hired Joseph Clement to supervise construction of the engine. Every section had to be made by hand using custom machine tools, many of which Babbage himself designed.
Babbage took comprehensive tours of industry to better understand manufacturing processes. Based on these travels and his experience with the Difference Engine, Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture in 1832. It was the first publishing about what we would today call operations research. Charles began to have problems with the treasury that also coincided with many disagreements with Clement. The engine had come under fire when Charles' had left the country and rumors had spread that Charles had wasted the government's money; that the engine didn't work; and that it had no functional value if it did. In 1842 the government officially abandoned the project.
While he was unwillingly disconnected from the Difference Engine, Babbage started to think about a better calculating engine. Between 1833 and 1842 he attempted to construct a machine that would be programmable to do any form of calculation, not just ones relating to polynomial equations. The initial breakthrough came when he redirected the machine's output to the input for further equations. He described this as the machine "eating its own tail". It didn't take very much longer for him to define the primary details of his Analytical Engine. The mature Analytical Engine used punched cards adapted from the Jacquard loom to assign input and the calculations to perform. The engine was comprised of two parts: the mill and the store. The mill, similar to a modern computer's CPU, carried out the operations on values recovered from the store, which we would think of as memory. It was the world's first general-purpose computer.
A plan for this emerged by 1835. The scale of the process was genuinely incredible. Babbage and a handful of assistants produced 500 large design drawings, 1000 sheets of mechanical notes, and 7000 sheets of scribbles. The completed mill was 15 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The 100 digit store would extend to 25 feet long. Babbage built only small trial parts for his new engine; a whole engine was never completed. In 1842, after repeated failures to find financial support from the First Lord of the Treasury, Babbage approached Sir Robert Peel for financing. Peel refused, and offered Babbage a knighthood instead, which Babbage refused. He would keep changing and improving the design for many years to come.
Second Difference Engine
Between October 1846 and March 1849 Babbage started designing a second Difference Engine using knowledge earned from the Analytical Engine. It used only about 8000 parts, three times less than the first. It measured 11 feet long, 7 feet high and 18 inches deep. It was a wonder of mechanical engineering. Different than the Analytical Engine that he continually fine-tuned and altered, he didn't try to improve the second Difference Engine after finishing the first design. The 24 schematics remained in the Science Museum archives until a full-size replica was built in 1991 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth.
Other Accomplishments
Babbage is remembered for other achievements as well. The advancement of analytical calculus is possibly the first among them. In 1812, Babbage helped found the Analytical Society. In the years 1815-1817 he contributed three papers on the "Calculus of Functions" to the Philosophical Transactions, and in 1816 was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Charles Babbage also attained noteworthy results in cryptography. He broke Vigen's autokey cipher in addition to as the much weaker cipher that is called Vigen cipher now.
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