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In 1821 an inventor and mathematician, Charles
Babbage, was poring over a set of mathematical tables. Finding
error after error Babbage exclaimed, "I wish to God
these calculations had been executed by steam." His
frustration was not simply at the grindingly tedious labor
of checking manually evaluated tables, but at their daunting
unreliability. Science, engineering, construction, banking,
and insurance depended on tables for calculation. Ships
navigating by the stars relied on them to find their positions
at sea.
Babbage launched himself on a grand venture
to design and build mechanical calculating engines that
would eliminate such errors. His bid to build infallible
machines is a saga of ingenuity and will, which led beyond
mechanized arithmetic into the entirely new realm of computing.
Through Ada, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron,
we gain tantalizing insights into how at least one Victorian
glimpsed the promise of what was to come. Babbage springs
out of history like a jack-in-the-box: a gentleman philosopher,
a tireless inventor, a vigorous socialite, and a mesmerizing
raconteur. "Mr. Babbage is coming to dinner" was
a coup for any hostess.
Drawing on previously unused archival material,
The Difference Engine is a tale of both Babbage's
nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating engine and
its twentieth-century sequel. For in 1991, Babbage's vision
was finally realized, at least in part, by the completion
at the Science Museum in London of the first full-sized
Babbage engine, finished in time for the 200th anniversary
of Babbage's birth. The two quests are mutually illuminating
and are recounted here by the-then Curator of Computing,
Doron Swade -- one of the main protagonists of the successful
resumption of Babbage's extraordinary work.
Doron Swade is Assistant Director and Head
of Collections at the Science Museum in London. He is an
engineer and a historian of technology, and a leading authority
on the life and work of Charles Babbage. He has published
widely on curatorship and the history of computing and appears
frequently on radio and television.
Doron Swade masterminded the six-year
project to construct a Babbage calculating engine from original
nineteenth-century designs. He was born in Cape Town, South
Africa, and lives in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.
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