Anyone who recognizes the name Charles Babbage knows two things about him: A century and a half ago, he invented the digital computer. And he never succeeded in building it.
He is remembered both as a brilliant inventor and as a failure.
The generally accepted explanation for his failure is that he was limited by the technology of the time. Nineteenth-century machine tools, so the story goes, simply could not produce parts to the tolerances required by Babbage's designs for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.
That explanation, it turns out, is simply not true. This fact was spectacularly demonstrated a few years ago when Doron Swade led a team of engineers, specialists in Victorian-era metallurgy, and others, to build one of Babbage's machines to his specifications using only construction methods and materials available to Babbage in his time. Swade and his team got the Difference Engine II put together and tested in time for the Babbage Sesquicentenary Celebration at the Science Museum in London, where Swade is Senior Curator of Computing. When they turned it on and started doing calculations with it, they completed a process that proved conclusively that Babbage could have built his Engines using the technology of his time. So, if it wasn't the limitations of 19th-century technology, why did Babbage fail?
Swade addressed that question recently in a lecture that I managed to catch at Stanford University. The short answer is, because of who Babbage was.
Babbage was a radical who never let up challenging authority. Although he founded the Analytical Society and was later named Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, he got thrown out of Cambridge as a student for writing a thesis judged to be blasphemous. The church held great sway over higher learning at the time, and Babbage openly challenged its power. But it wasn't just the church he challenged. "Most of his writings were written to protest rather than to convince," Swade said. He regularly attacked his peers and the academic institutions of the day. One example: In 1850, Babbage published a savage attack on the Royal Society at the time when it was funding work on his engines. "There is a cost to principles," Swade said, "particularly if you're politically inept."
Some of the attacks got very personal, and Babbage definitely had enemies. He earned them, and some had influence over those funding his work. There were challenges to his appeals for money and there were outright vendettas against him.
Nevertheless, he got funding under conditions that seem outrageous today. He submitted no budget for the project, was subject to no cost ceiling or benchmarks for success. Lenders wouldn't be so free with their money today.
Some sort of constraints might have been useful, though. When Babbage had spent all the money he was able to get, he had only a fraction of the machine parts needed to build the first machine. So he instructed his chief engineer to assemble what he could from them so he would have something to show investors, and this fragment is the only piece of Babbage's engines ever built by his operation.
That same engineer was involved in his own dispute with Babbage, this time over money, which got in the way of completing the machines. Babbage didn't alienate just those in power; he made enemies of employees and contractors, too.
Then there was the vision thing: Although Babbage had his Ada Lovelace to explain and popularize his work, and although she did a good job, he himself was a lousy communicator of his ideas (to paraphrase Swade). And Ada, according to Swade, didn't really understand Babbage's work all that well. I know people who disagree with him on that point, but Swade contends that Ada's great contribution to the understanding of the potential of the computer, her generalizing beyond the mere calculation that was all Babbage himself ever talked about, was due to her misunderstanding of Babbage. That, and being a romantic. Ada scholars may leap to her defense by e-mailing me at mswaine@swaine.com.
-- M.S.
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