Charles Babbage

English mathematician and inventor

• Born: December 26, 1791
• Birthplace: In or near London, England
• Died: October 18, 1871
• Place of death: London, England

While contributing significantly to the mathematics of his time and inventing several practical devices, Babbage conceptually anticipated many of the developments that would later be realized in twentieth century computation science.

Early Life

Charles Babbage, the first child of Benjamin and Elizabeth (Teape) Babbage, was born on December 26, 1791. The exact location of his birth is not known, but it was in the vicinity of London, where his father was a well-to-do banker. The family, on both sides, had been comfortably established in the nearby countryside for several generations. Two more sons were born but died in early childhood. A daughter, Mary Anne, outlived her brother Charles, with whom she had a lifelong close relationship.

As a young child, Charles was subject to fevers, which were naturally of great concern to his parents; when it came time for some formal education, he was placed under the tutelage of a clergyman with the admonition “to attend to his health, but not to press too much knowledge upon him.” He later attended school in Enfield, where he was instructed in the classics. Charles’s natural aptitude for mathematics in particular, and logical, systematic thinking in general, manifested itself early. As a schoolboy he discovered algebra and, for several months, arose at 3:00 a.m. for self-instruction along with a similarly precocious classmate.

As he grew older, Charles became more robust, and as an adult he was full-figured and rather handsome. When he was twelve years old his parents moved back to Totnes, where they had lived before going to London. That was Charles’s home until he entered Cambridge University in 1810. By that time his mathematical self-instruction had progressed into differential and integral calculus. He was very disappointed to find himself far in advance of the mathematical instruction available at the university.

At Cambridge Babbage’s social nature developed. He had many friends and joined in numerous nonacademic activities. In addition, Babbage’s liberal political consciousness emerged, curiously manifesting itself, in part, by his espousal of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s calculus notation over that of England’s Isaac Newton. With a group of like-minded fellow undergraduates, he formed the Analytical Society to study the mathematical developments being made on the Continent.

Babbage was graduated from Cambridge University in 1814. Soon thereafter, against his father’s wishes, he was married to Georgiana Whitmore. The young newlyweds settled in London, but Charles continued his studies, receiving his master’s degree in 1817. He had no income-producing position at that time, but family moneys allowed the couple to live quite comfortably in London society. Charles was accepted in scientific circles and was elected to the Royal Society in 1816.

Life’s Work

The only professional appointment that Babbage ever held was to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University (1828-1839), an appointment that had few formal duties. Consequently, and by virtue of his private wealth, he was free to pursue his own interests from his home in London.

For a dozen years after he and Georgiana settled there, he thoroughly enjoyed the social and intellectual atmosphere of the city. Eight children were born to them. Only four survived infancy, and Georgiana died in childbirth with the eighth in 1827. Babbage, devastated by the loss, became an increasingly bitter and sharply critical man. He spent the year following his wife’s death traveling on the Continent. He never remarried or had a normal home life again. His surviving children were reared by relatives living outside London. Of the four, the only daughter, also named Georgiana, died as a young girl. Only after they had reached adulthood did Babbage get to know his sons well.

Nevertheless, Babbage, a gregarious man of great vitality, traveled widely and associated with a broad circle of contemporaries such as Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens as well as with fellow scientists at home and abroad. He was a great admirer of the scientific developments in Germany and France and of their associated educational institutions and professional societies. He was a significant force in establishing in England the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the Astronomical Society, the Statistical Society of London, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1830, he wrote Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of Its Causes , deploring the sad state of the Royal Society in England at the time.

Babbage continued to pursue his mathematical interests beyond his university days, publishing a number of significant papers in the areas of the calculus of functions, algebraic analysis, probability, and geometry. Because this was at a time when British mathematics had reached a dismally low level, Babbage’s mathematical work was held in especially high regard on the Continent.

One of the important mathematical needs of that time was for tables of trigonometric, logarithmic, and other functions. Those in existence had been laboriously generated by human calculators and were not without error. About 1821, Babbage, impressed by the potential of machines to carry out fixed operations and recognizing that successive entries in such tables could be expressed in terms of finite differences, conceived of an infallible calculating machine to replace fallible human calculators. The calculated results would be automatically printed out to eliminate transcribing errors.

In constructing his first mechanical calculator, the “difference engine,” Babbage was assisted by sizable funding from the British government, which recognized the importance of accurate tables for use in navigation, for example. He designed the engine and personally supervised its construction by a skilled, hired engineer. In connection with this activity Babbage devised some new machine tooling techniques and an unambiguous method of mechanical notation for parts drawings to aid in communication between designer and engineer. A working model was built that may be seen in the British Museum of South Kensington.

The upset associated with his wife’s death interrupted further developments for the machine planned by Babbage. After his return to England he faced difficulties with his engineer and with obtaining further government funding. No more work was done on the difference engine after 1832. By that time, however, Babbage had conceived of a much more sophisticated and versatile “analytical engine,” one that embodied many ideas now familiar in the world of electronic computers.

The analytical engine had a storage unit for holding numerical input data, a mill for working on them, and a separate operations control section, and he used punched-card systems for input and operation. The rest of Babbage’s life—and much of his private fortune—was devoted to improving and refining these basic ideas. Only a modified version of the analytical engine was ever built, but detailed plans for several versions of it were carefully drawn up that show the soundness of Babbage’s ideas.

In England, Babbage was widely regarded as an eccentric, irascible genius, but he was much respected abroad. In 1840, he traveled to Italy, where he gave a series of lectures on his analytical engine that was especially well received. A member of the audience, L. F. Menabrea, wrote up those lectures and published them in French. Subsequently, they were translated into English and provided with a lengthy commentary by Countess Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She was a mathematically precocious teenager when she first met Charles Babbage in 1833. He was pleased with her interest in and appreciation of his calculating machines, and the warm friendship that developed between them lasted throughout her sadly short lifetime.

Babbage was a prolific writer on social, political, economic, and religious, as well as technical, topics. He was the outstanding cryptologist of his time, using mathematical techniques to decipher the codes devised by others. In addition, he invented many practical devices, such as an occulting light that could be used to send messages and an ophthalmoscope for studying the eye. The American scientist Joseph Henry, who visited Babbage on two occasions, wrote of him:

Hundreds of mechanical appliances in the factories and workshops of Europe and America, scores of ingenious expedients in mining and architecture, the construction of bridges and boring of tunnels, and a world of tools by which labor benefited and the arts improved—all the overflowings of a mind so rich that its very waste became valuable—came from Charles Babbage. He more, perhaps, than any man who ever lived, narrowed the chasm separating science and practical mechanics.

Significance

Charles Babbage enjoys higher and more widespread esteem today than he ever did during his lifetime. Many of his ideas regarding computing machines were realized only during the late twentieth century, with the advent of modern electronic devices. In his time he was the leading advocate of the systematic application of science to industry and commerce and of statistical methods to economic and social problems—what would today be called “operations research.”

Babbage was a man born ahead of his time. Disappointed with the current state of affairs in England, unappreciated, even snubbed at times in his home country, he nevertheless looked forward with optimism to the future that could be made by the application of scientific principles. He has been quoted as saying that he would willingly give up the rest of his life to be able to return five hundred years hence with a guide to explain the intervening advances that he believed were sure to come.

Bibliography

Babbage, Charles. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864. Thirty-six autobiographical fragments of very uneven quality and style.

Babbage, Henry P., ed. Babbage’s Calculating Engines: A Collection of Papers Relating to Them—Their History, and Construction. Los Angeles: Tomash, 1982. Facsimile reprint of 1889 edition published in London, with a new introduction by Allan G. Bromley. Contains thirty-three items, most of them assembled by Charles Babbage before his death. Additions and editing provided by his youngest son.

Collier, Bruce. The Little Engines That Could’ve: The Calculating Machines of Charles Babbage. New York: Garland, 1990. Detailed technical exposition of Babbage’s “difference engines,” originally written as the author’s Harvard University Ph.D. thesis.

Dubbey, J. M. The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978. A critique of the mathematical work of Babbage with extended commentary on the calculus of functions, mathematical notation, and the mathematical basis for the operation of his calculating engines. Includes a list of all of Babbage’s mathematical books and papers.

Goldstine, Herman H. The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Chapter 2, “Charles Babbage and His Analytical Engine,” describes the concepts developed by Babbage that are inherent in modern computing. Shows how Babbage built upon what previously had been accomplished by others and introduced significant conceptual advances.

Hyman, Anthony. Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Modern Computer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Full-length biography based on the author’s extended research on published works and archival materials. Analyzes the social and political climate of Babbage’s time and his involvement aside from his technical achievement. Mathematical discussion of Babbage’s engines is contained in the appendixes.

Merz, John Theodore. A History of European Scientific Thought in the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1965. Republication of a work originally published between 1904 and 1912. Chapters 1-3 of volume 1 compare and contrast the scientific spirit in France, Germany, and England during the lifetime of Charles Babbage, with several references to Babbage.

Moseley, Maboth. Irascible Genius: A Life of Charles Babbage, Inventor. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Focuses on personal details of Babbage’s life. Quotes extensively from correspondence deposited in archives.

Stein, Dorothy. Ada: A Life and a Legacy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Biography of Augusta Ada Byron, later countess of Lovelace, with extensive discussion of her relationship with Charles Babbage.

Swade, Doron. The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. New York: Viking Press, 2001. Technical examination of Babbage’s career, focusing on the difficulties he encountered when he tried to build his first “difference engine.” Includes sixteen illustrations and photographs.