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Charles Babbage


Charles Babbage

Born in Devonshire, UK on December 26, 1791, Charles Babbage played a crucial role in the scientific and technical development of the period. As the inventor of the first universal digital computer, Babbage is known to many as the "Father of Computing." The use of Jacquard punch cards, of chains and subassemblies, and ultimately the logical structure of the modern computer all come from Babbage.

Babbage's greatest achievements were his detailed plans for "Calculating Engines," both the table-making Difference Engines and the more elaborate Analytical Engines, which were powerful punch-card controlled general purpose calculators. The Analytical Engine possessed features similar to those of the modern stored program computer. These features included punched-card control; separate store and mill; a set of internal registers (the table axes); fast multiplier/divider; range of peripherals; and array processing.

Babbage produced a few prototypes of the Difference Engine. However, he lost government support and failed to build a fully functional engine from his plans. Babbage made several important contributions in other areas: he wrote a consumer guide to life assurance; pioneered lighthouse signaling; scattered technical ideas and inventions in magnificent profusion; developed mathematical code breaking; and made important contributions to the field of political economics. Despite these achievements, the failure to construct his calculating machines, and in particular the failure of the government to support his work, left Babbage in his declining years a disappointed and embittered man.

Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is responsible for founding both The British Association's Statistical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. Babbage's Difference Engine was to be capable of calculating human intellect by motive power. Babbage was from the newtonian school of thought and believed that once all things where explained, all things could be predicted. The Marquis Laplace, an avid Newtonian and friend of Babbage, said that if a mind could know everything about particle behavior, it could describe everything: "Nothing would be uncertain, and the future, as the past, could be present to our eyes".

Babbage was essentially addicted to mathematics and wanted to explain everything with the use of figures, charts, or any other mathematical expression. He would stop to check the heart beat of animals; he wanted to quantify everything and anything.

Babbage was not familiar with concepts of heat propagation, nor was he knowledgeable on the efforts made by colleagues on heat and mechanical energy. This lack of knowledge was perhaps his greatest obstacle to building the engine, according to some. It is easy to forget that Babbage was essentially a child of the Enlightenment, and that his epoch was much different from our own. He resided in an era of wood and coal, and the later era of steel and oil would not begin for perhaps a decade after his death.


The Analytical Engine

In Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine, the discrete functions of mill (in which "all operations are performed") and store (in which all numbers are originally placed, and, once computed, are returned) rely on this supposition of reversibility. That means information cannot be shuttled between mill and store without leaking, like faulty sacks of flour. Babbage did not consider this, and it was perhaps his greatest obstacle to building the engine.

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