Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. And many years ago,
Speaker 1: when tech Stuff was in a very different format, ours
Speaker 1: show talked a bit about Charles Babbage and his various
Speaker 1: engines that his devices intended to perform different mathematical processes.
Speaker 1: We also did an episode about Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress
Speaker 1: of Numbers. But the show was so different back then
Speaker 1: that I thought it might be good to do some
Speaker 1: thorough examinations of who these people were and the contributions
Speaker 1: they made to technology in general and arguably computing in particular.
Speaker 1: And they are all the more remarkable, and that those
Speaker 1: contributions all took place in the early to mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: nearly one hundred years before we would get the first programmable,
Speaker 1: electronic and general purpose computer. But we've got a lot
Speaker 1: of ground to cover before we get there, so let
Speaker 1: us begin with the life and accomplishments of one Charles Babbage.
Speaker 1: Charles Babbage was born on December twenty six see although
Speaker 1: his obituary said it was sevento Spoiler alert, I guess
Speaker 1: Babbage is not alive anymore. He was remarkable, but he
Speaker 1: was not an immortal anyway. There's a record of his
Speaker 1: baptism that actually dates back to January seventeen two, so
Speaker 1: unless he was baptized nearly a full year before he
Speaker 1: was born, I think it is probably safe to say
Speaker 1: that the seventeen nine one date is the correct one.
Speaker 1: His grandfather was Benjamin Babbage Sr. Who was a man
Speaker 1: of some standing in Tautness, a market town in Devonshire itself,
Speaker 1: a region in the southwest of England. It's a port town.
Speaker 1: It's about the same distance from Exeter as it is
Speaker 1: from Plymouth, and Plymouth might be the first location that
Speaker 1: my fellow Americans recognize. Benny Sr. Served as mayor of
Speaker 1: Tautness for a year, indicating that he must have been
Speaker 1: at least a little bit important in that town. His son,
Speaker 1: Benji Jr. Would become a goldsmith and a tradesman, and
Speaker 1: later on a banker. Junior was a bit of a
Speaker 1: career man, which is putting it lightly. He was someone
Speaker 1: who apparently did not have time for the other aspects
Speaker 1: of life. As he was in his late thirties when
Speaker 1: he married Elizabeth Betsy plumy Teep, who came from a
Speaker 1: likewise prominent family in Devonshire. They were married in seventeen nine.
Speaker 1: Benjamin Babbage Jr. And Betsy moved from Devonshire to London,
Speaker 1: where Benny secured a position at the bitten Estate banking firm.
Speaker 1: The following year, Charles Babbage was born. His father continued
Speaker 1: to rise in the ranks of the banking industry, becoming
Speaker 1: junior partner of the banking house of Prad Digby Box
Speaker 1: Babbage and Company, though most people referred to it as
Speaker 1: Pratt and Company for the sake of Brevity, which, as
Speaker 1: we know, is the soul of wit. The bank was
Speaker 1: on Fleet Street, where there was also a barber of
Speaker 1: some renown, but that's a tale for a different time.
Speaker 1: Swing your razor high Sweeney. His family was religious, adhering
Speaker 1: to the Anglican faith, and Charles would also become a
Speaker 1: religious man. He had two brothers, who sadly did not
Speaker 1: survive infancy. He also had a sister named Mary Ann,
Speaker 1: who was seven years younger than he and would be
Speaker 1: one of his close friends as he was growing up.
Speaker 1: His early education came from private tutors, but Charles was
Speaker 1: also plagued with health problems described as violent fevers, and
Speaker 1: his parents worried that the realities of living in London
Speaker 1: at the dawn of the nineteenth century remember this is
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, that maybe all
Speaker 1: that was a little too taxing on young Chuck. So
Speaker 1: they decided that he should be sent off to attend
Speaker 1: school in a rural schoolhouse in the countryside, far from
Speaker 1: the noise and pollution of the city, and they hoped
Speaker 1: that there his health would be able to improve. So
Speaker 1: in eighteen oh three, Ben Jr. Relocated his family back
Speaker 1: to Devon and Charles would move his studies to a
Speaker 1: village named Alphington outside of Exeter. His school consisted of
Speaker 1: six students, including Charles. Their teacher was a member of
Speaker 1: the local clergy. Charles health did improve and his curiosity
Speaker 1: became one of his defining traits. He was keenly interested
Speaker 1: in puzzles and ciphers and clockwork devices. And this again
Speaker 1: was in the early eighteen hundreds. England's Industrial Revolution was
Speaker 1: in full swing, so this was an era of innovation,
Speaker 1: of urbanization and automation. Joseph Murray Jacquard had invented a
Speaker 1: machine that would later serve as one of the foundational
Speaker 1: elements to one of Babbage's own inventions. This would be
Speaker 1: the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards as a way
Speaker 1: to create specific woven patterns. The Jaccard loom is a
Speaker 1: fascinating piece of technology and a truly ingenious invention. It
Speaker 1: allowed weavers to program a woven pattern, and assuming you
Speaker 1: operated the loom properly, the machine would follow the program exactly,
Speaker 1: creating the pattern just as you had programmed it. Now,
Speaker 1: the way this worked mechanically is super cool, but it's
Speaker 1: also something that I don't think I can easily explain
Speaker 1: without visual aids. But because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: moving parts, ultimately the punch cards would determine which threads
Speaker 1: in the loom would lift up for each pass of
Speaker 1: a looms shuttle. So quick explanation here, just because it
Speaker 1: will clear some stuff up. Let's imagine you've got a
Speaker 1: series of threads arranged vertically, and let's say they're all white.
Speaker 1: This is the background of your woven pattern. Let's say
Speaker 1: you're making a rug. Well, you would weave by moving
Speaker 1: a new thread, probably a different color horizontally across these
Speaker 1: vertical strings, right, and you would alternate when you would
Speaker 1: go over or under threads, and which threads you go
Speaker 1: over or under would be dependent upon whatever pattern you're
Speaker 1: trying to make. Uh. This is painstakingly slow to do
Speaker 1: by hand. So a loom space speeds us up by
Speaker 1: lifting some threads while keeping other threads down. So imagine
Speaker 1: that the loom is lifting up every odd numbered thread
Speaker 1: and all the even numbered threads stay down. Then you
Speaker 1: could pull a horizontal thread across the width of all
Speaker 1: these vertical lines, and then switch which threads are up
Speaker 1: and which ones are down and pull the thread across again.
Speaker 1: That's the job of the shuttle. The shuttle holds the
Speaker 1: thread that goes back and forth horizontally across the lines
Speaker 1: of vertical threads. So doing this and alternating it over
Speaker 1: and over again, that is weaving. It's much faster than
Speaker 1: doing the over under, over under, over under by hand. Now,
Speaker 1: the punch cards were important because they would give more
Speaker 1: specific instructions about which threads would lift up and which
Speaker 1: ones would stay down with each pass. And the end
Speaker 1: result of this is that you would have a specific
Speaker 1: woven pattern at the end, like an intricate design, something
Speaker 1: that would have taken ages to do by hand, and
Speaker 1: Babbage would later find a different use for punch cards
Speaker 1: later in his own career. However, let's get back to
Speaker 1: young Chuckers. He really was seeking understanding of the universe
Speaker 1: in general, and that included the spiritual realm. So one
Speaker 1: of my favorite stories about Babbage is about the time
Speaker 1: he tried to summon the devil. Yep, you heard me now.
Speaker 1: According to the story, a teenage Charles Babbage, because of
Speaker 1: course he was a teenager, decided that he was going
Speaker 1: to sneak out of his room one night, creep toward
Speaker 1: an unoccupied home that wasn't too far away, go up
Speaker 1: to the attic with a lantern and knife in hand,
Speaker 1: and there he pricked his finger to draw blood. He
Speaker 1: used that blood to draw up a circle, and then,
Speaker 1: according to the story, he walked into the circle and
Speaker 1: began to recite the Lord's prayer in reverse, keeping an
Speaker 1: eye out for any signs of the devil. And while
Speaker 1: the devil did not show up, tenacious d totally did it,
Speaker 1: and they rocked out for the rest of the night. Alright,
Speaker 1: that part was a lie, But the story about Babbage
Speaker 1: trying to summon the devil is apparently true, and of
Speaker 1: course nobody actually showed up. There are other stories of
Speaker 1: Babbage using his ingenuity to attempt to create devices that
Speaker 1: would allow him to simulate the miracles mentioned in the Bible.
Speaker 1: So in a way, you could think of Charles Babbage
Speaker 1: as kind of an early model for MythBusters, as he
Speaker 1: tried to replicate biblical tales. You know, if you've watched MythBusters,
Speaker 1: you've seen that sometimes they're not testing a myth, they're
Speaker 1: trying to replicate the results of a myth. That was
Speaker 1: kind of what Babbage was doing. He was thinking, well,
Speaker 1: how could I walk on water? And he would try
Speaker 1: to make stuff that would allow him to do that.
Speaker 1: More often than not he failed. In eighteen oh six,
Speaker 1: when he was fifteen and just a couple of years
Speaker 1: after Jacquard had invented his famous loom, Babbage enrolled in
Speaker 1: a school called forty Hill in Infield, a northern region
Speaker 1: of London, nearly two hundred miles away from his home.
Speaker 1: Forty Hill had thirty students, so it was positively teeming
Speaker 1: compared to the tiny school that Babbage had previously attended,
Speaker 1: and Babbage met a mentor who would encourage his curiosity further,
Speaker 1: a man named Stephen Freeman. Reverend Freeman was a mathematician
Speaker 1: and an amateur astronomer, and soon Babbage would dive into
Speaker 1: those subjects with the same enthusiasm he had shown in
Speaker 1: trying to summon Lucifer. Babbage did become something of a
Speaker 1: troublesome student, acting out on occasion and committing small acts
Speaker 1: of vandalism. After about a year, he was sent back
Speaker 1: home to study once more with tutors as he prepared
Speaker 1: for university, focusing primarily on mathematics. In eighteen ten, he
Speaker 1: was accepted into Trinity College at Cambridge. He had a
Speaker 1: pretty easy go of it there. His family was well
Speaker 1: to do, so Babbage even had a personal maid who
Speaker 1: was paid for by his family. She would look after him,
Speaker 1: she would cook for him and clean for him, and
Speaker 1: he had an allowance of three hundred pounds sterling each year,
Speaker 1: which today would be equivalent to around thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So yeah, if you want to talk privilege, this guy
Speaker 1: fits the bill. But Babbage also found the subject matter
Speaker 1: of his studies to be lacking, complaining that the college
Speaker 1: was teaching outdated material he sought out on his own
Speaker 1: the works of more contemporary mathematicians, mostly from the continent.
Speaker 1: His desire to learn pushed him to spend a significant
Speaker 1: amount to acquire calculus textbooks that came from France, which
Speaker 1: was pretty hard to do because at the time there
Speaker 1: was this little scuffle going on called the Napoleonic Wars.
Speaker 1: Babbage formed as a bit of a joke a mathematics
Speaker 1: club at Trinity College that looked towards Europe and the
Speaker 1: mathematicians there as superior to the ones that they were
Speaker 1: studying while they were in class. Most of the mathematicians
Speaker 1: they were studying were English because England was extremely nationalistic. Now.
Speaker 1: One of his fellow club members was a guy named
Speaker 1: John Herschel that was a son of William Herschel, the
Speaker 1: astronomer who first discovered uranus. So this was prestigious company
Speaker 1: he was in, and the club became known as the
Speaker 1: Analytical Society. They pulled their books together and they formed
Speaker 1: their own society library from their collected text books. Babbage
Speaker 1: transferred from Trinity College to Peter House. Both colleges are
Speaker 1: part of University of Cambridge, with Peter House the oldest
Speaker 1: of the constituent colleges. That one was founded way back
Speaker 1: in twelve eighty four. Trinity College, by comparison, is positively youthful,
Speaker 1: having been founded in fifteen forty six. For those unfamiliar
Speaker 1: year with universities like Cambridge, the university as a whole
Speaker 1: is made up of more than thirty semi autonomous colleges,
Speaker 1: and the colleges don't share a single campus. Rather, they
Speaker 1: are found throughout the city of Cambridge. So while Babbage
Speaker 1: was still part of the University of Cambridge as a whole,
Speaker 1: he was no longer studying at Trinity College with his
Speaker 1: buddies in the Analytical Society. Babbage also continued to be
Speaker 1: interested in the paranormal. He joined a ghost club at
Speaker 1: Payder House. However, he also must have recognized that such
Speaker 1: beliefs were viewed as um let's call it eccentric, because
Speaker 1: he also joined a club called the Extraction Club, which
Speaker 1: boy okay, alright. So the Extraction Club had a rule.
Speaker 1: Every member of the club was meant to send a
Speaker 1: handwritten letter including their current address, to the club's secretary
Speaker 1: every six months. Failure to do so would result in
Speaker 1: the club turning its full resources to extract that member
Speaker 1: from an asylum, because it was assumed that if you
Speaker 1: were unable to respond to this demand that you send
Speaker 1: a letter every six months, that you must have been
Speaker 1: committed to an asylum for being very eccentric will say uh,
Speaker 1: and that they would use any means necessary to get
Speaker 1: the member out of the asylum, legal or otherwise. So
Speaker 1: Babbage's college years were very different from my own. Chuck
Speaker 1: received an honorary diploma from paid House. The reason for
Speaker 1: the honorary status is another ridiculous story, but I feel
Speaker 1: I've been a little too indulgent in his college years already.
Speaker 1: And he also married the woman he had been courting
Speaker 1: for three years. She was Georgina Whitmore, someone who sounds
Speaker 1: to me like she was genuinely a good person. However,
Speaker 1: Charles's father, Benji Jr. Took issue with his son marrying
Speaker 1: so young in life. Now remember, Charles's father way until
Speaker 1: he was in his late thirties before he got married,
Speaker 1: and he felt that Charles was making a big mistake
Speaker 1: for not securing his career before settling into domesticity. His
Speaker 1: father actually liked Georgina, but he hated the idea of
Speaker 1: his son getting married, so young, and that put a
Speaker 1: strain upon the familial bonds. Charles, for his part, lamented
Speaker 1: his father was quote uncommonly fond of money end quote.
Speaker 1: Though heck, this is the same Charles Babbage who had
Speaker 1: an allowance equivalent to thirty grand a year while he
Speaker 1: was in college. So you know, glass houses. And heck
Speaker 1: d Adams was still sending the three hundred pounds a year,
Speaker 1: and Georgina received a hundred fifty pounds a year from
Speaker 1: her family, So the two already had a pretty decent
Speaker 1: income without you know, having to work for it. In
Speaker 1: eighteen sixteen, two years after he graduated university, the twenty
Speaker 1: four year old Charles Babbage would give an impressive lecture
Speaker 1: to a group of distinguished gentleman in London, with an
Speaker 1: outcome that ultimately discouraged Babbage. I'll explain more after we
Speaker 1: take this quick break. Charles Babbage presented a two part
Speaker 1: lecture on calculus and an essay titled Demonstrations of some
Speaker 1: of Dr Matthew Stuart's General Theorems to the Royal Society
Speaker 1: of London. This institution is dedicated, ostensibly anyway, to the
Speaker 1: furthering of human knowledge in the various sciences. Babbage had
Speaker 1: hoped to gain entry into this influential society, which would
Speaker 1: give him valuable connections and potentially have him linked up
Speaker 1: with a really good position that befitted his skills, and
Speaker 1: his presentations proved to be just the ticket to get in. However,
Speaker 1: he soon became disillusion and with the Royal Society. He
Speaker 1: felt that rather than pursuing knowledge and pushing back the
Speaker 1: boundaries of what we don't know, the society was being
Speaker 1: really indulgent. They were spending most of their time having
Speaker 1: fancy dinners, then holding various ceremonies in which some members
Speaker 1: of the society would give medals to some other members
Speaker 1: of the group, not exactly what he was hoping to
Speaker 1: sign up for. For the next few years, Babbage sought
Speaker 1: out a position at a college, but had no real luck.
Speaker 1: In eighteen nineteen, he traveled to Europe and encountered the
Speaker 1: infamous mechanical hoax called the Turk. Long time listeners have
Speaker 1: heard the story of the Turk how a man named
Speaker 1: Wolfgang von Kimplin, determined to impress Austrian Impress Maria Teresa,
Speaker 1: created what he claimed to be an autonomous mechanical chess
Speaker 1: playing figure in the form of a Turk, and this
Speaker 1: figure would play games against all comers and when far
Speaker 1: more often than it would lose, and that von Kimplin
Speaker 1: would open up the cabinet that was below the figure
Speaker 1: to reveal that there were a bunch of gears and
Speaker 1: cogs supposedly working the device. Now, Babbage himself played two
Speaker 1: matches against the Turk, and he lost both of them.
Speaker 1: He was intrigued by the idea of a machine that
Speaker 1: could be able to process information independently of a human,
Speaker 1: but at the same time he dismissed the Turk itself
Speaker 1: as a hoax. He theorized that there must be some
Speaker 1: human player hidden within the machine that was making all
Speaker 1: the moves, and as it turns out, he was right.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what was going on, as the world would
Speaker 1: learn a few decades later. In eighteen twenty, after publishing
Speaker 1: more works about mathematics, Babbage received an invitation to join
Speaker 1: the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but he felt that this
Speaker 1: version of the Royal Society also failed to meet his expectations,
Speaker 1: and so he decided to be like Bender in Futurama,
Speaker 1: I'll make my own society with as in astronomy, so
Speaker 1: he and several of his friends and peers, including John Herschel,
Speaker 1: his former schoolmate, created the Astronomical Society of London, a
Speaker 1: sort of rival club to the Royal Society. One of
Speaker 1: the first projects that they tackled was to revise the
Speaker 1: Nautical Almanac, a publication that gave detailed information on the
Speaker 1: position of certain celestial bodies throughout the year for the
Speaker 1: purposes of navigation. The Almanac has within it many many
Speaker 1: mathematical tables, and some of those tables had errors in them,
Speaker 1: and so the goal was to try and create an
Speaker 1: error free version of the Almanac. The work was done manually,
Speaker 1: with two clerks working on each table independently of each other.
Speaker 1: When they were both done working on a table, the
Speaker 1: results would be compared against one another to look for disparities.
Speaker 1: Now that helped but did not eliminate error, and it
Speaker 1: may have been around this time that Babbage first started
Speaker 1: thinking about the possibility of creating a machine that would
Speaker 1: be able to replicate a precise mathematical process perfectly over
Speaker 1: and over for the purposes of generating mathematical tables error free.
Speaker 1: In eighteen twenty one, Babbage began to plan out such
Speaker 1: a machine, which would become known as the difference engine
Speaker 1: number one or sometimes the differential engine number one. It
Speaker 1: would allow an operator to calculate polynomial functions. And if
Speaker 1: you're like me and it's been a while since you've
Speaker 1: taken trigonometry or a calculus, it might be helpful to
Speaker 1: have a reminder as to what these functions are. Things
Speaker 1: changing so scory nowadays and everybody quick to forget. So
Speaker 1: the word polynomial literally means many terms, and it is
Speaker 1: a mathematic expression that can contain constants, that is, terms
Speaker 1: that have a specific and unchanging value, you know, like five.
Speaker 1: They can also have variables, that is, terms that can
Speaker 1: have one of many values, the class being x. And
Speaker 1: they can have exponents that is, the power to which
Speaker 1: the associated quantity is raised, like two to the fourth power,
Speaker 1: which is the same as two times two times two
Speaker 1: times two or sixteen. So you could have a polynomial
Speaker 1: expression looks something like four x plus two y minus
Speaker 1: twenty five. The end value of that expression depends upon
Speaker 1: the individual values of those variables. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of functions that boil down to polynomial expressions, and so
Speaker 1: you could create tables that gave the result of those
Speaker 1: expressions based on the values of the variables. And that's
Speaker 1: what Babbage wanted to do. He wanted to make a
Speaker 1: machine that, when you set it for specific values within
Speaker 1: a polynomial function, you could operate it to generate the
Speaker 1: results of that function steady and reliably. Each time the
Speaker 1: machine would generate an answer, it would advance the gears
Speaker 1: and the machinery so that the variables would have new values.
Speaker 1: So let's say that you're working with x x as
Speaker 1: your variable and it shows up a couple of times
Speaker 1: in your your polynomial function like two x plus x
Speaker 1: to the second power plus twenty. Well, you would need
Speaker 1: to figure out what the value of that function is
Speaker 1: based on the value of x. Then you can just
Speaker 1: keep on going, all right, Well, what if x is one?
Speaker 1: What if excess to what if xcess three? And so on.
Speaker 1: He wanted a machine where he could do this very
Speaker 1: much automatically. To put it another way, and really to
Speaker 1: oversimplify things, Let's say you have a calculator and it
Speaker 1: happens to have a quirk where if you press the
Speaker 1: plus button twice, it automatically adds the last number you
Speaker 1: entered into the calculator to whatever the last result is.
Speaker 1: And let's say you did the simple calculation of three
Speaker 1: plus three, so you're your result is six. But then
Speaker 1: you hit the plus button two times and it automatically
Speaker 1: adds three to that result. Now you've got nine. You
Speaker 1: hit the plus button twice again, and now got twelve.
Speaker 1: So the calculator is repeating that step exactly, and it
Speaker 1: never makes a mistake no matter how frequently you do this.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of what Babbage was thinking. He wanted
Speaker 1: a device that was consistent and dependable, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: reliable for accurate results. It must have been an enticing
Speaker 1: thought being able to generate all sorts of mathematical tables
Speaker 1: for various publications and never having to worry if they
Speaker 1: contained errors, Because this was something Babbage was really passionate about.
Speaker 1: He would compare different textbooks containing tables of logarithmic functions
Speaker 1: and things of that nature, and he would despair when
Speaker 1: they didn't agree with one another, because it indicated that
Speaker 1: someone was wrong somewhere. But because the results of these
Speaker 1: tables required a lot of manual work to calculate, it
Speaker 1: was a laborious process to figure out which of the
Speaker 1: two or more textbooks was the right one, and worse
Speaker 1: than that, they could both be wrong in different as.
Speaker 1: The whole purpose of the tables was to make work
Speaker 1: easier for clerks doing calculations by hand. They represented kind
Speaker 1: of a short cut to common tasks. But at the
Speaker 1: shortcut is wrong, everything that follows it will also be wrong.
Speaker 1: Babbage is desired to know things for certain, and his
Speaker 1: intolerance for error drove his creativity. When it came to
Speaker 1: devising a machine that could do the work infallibly. He
Speaker 1: got to work building a small prototype of what he
Speaker 1: had in mind. He used a lathe to build some
Speaker 1: of the basic components, and then he hired on a
Speaker 1: workshop to make some of the more complicated fiddly bits
Speaker 1: that were beyond his skill to produce. It was nearly
Speaker 1: summer in eighteen twenty two when he had a small
Speaker 1: but working version of his idea. It was a very
Speaker 1: limited one, but a working prototype, and when compared to
Speaker 1: what Babbage had in mind, it was very tiny, but
Speaker 1: it still had a ton of moving parts. There were
Speaker 1: twenty four axles, upon which there were ninety six wheels.
Speaker 1: The wheels geared would fit together, and the gears had
Speaker 1: different ratios between them, so that a rotation of one
Speaker 1: wheel would translate to either more or fewer rotations of
Speaker 1: another wheel. Gear ratios are really important in mechanical systems,
Speaker 1: and we see them used in everything from clocks to
Speaker 1: vinyl record turntables to car transmissions. And it's pretty easy
Speaker 1: to understand. Let's just imagine two gears and one has
Speaker 1: a circumference of ten inches and the other one has
Speaker 1: a circumference of five inches, and the two interlocked together,
Speaker 1: so that turning one will make the other one turn
Speaker 1: as well. If you were to rotate the ten inch
Speaker 1: gear once, the five inch gear would have two full rotations. Likewise,
Speaker 1: if you are to rotate the five inch gear just
Speaker 1: one time, the ten inch gear will go through just
Speaker 1: half a rotation. So by combining gears of different sizes,
Speaker 1: and by the way, this isn't just different circumferences, we're
Speaker 1: also talking about the number of teeth each gear has.
Speaker 1: I'm just oversimplifying here, but anyway, you can precisely determine
Speaker 1: the mechanical motions of a device by pairing these different
Speaker 1: gears and different ratios. Gear ratios are also important when
Speaker 1: it comes to stuff like the amount of torque you generate.
Speaker 1: That's rotational force. But that's enough about gear ratios for now.
Speaker 1: Babbage's prototype could only calculate a table based on the
Speaker 1: polynomial formula x to the second power plus x plus
Speaker 1: forty one. What's more, it was limited to just the
Speaker 1: first thirty values of that calculation, and the variables could
Speaker 1: only have whole integers as values. A crank provided the
Speaker 1: rotational force needed to operate the machine, which could generate
Speaker 1: results at a speed of thirty three digits per minute,
Speaker 1: so it took about two seconds for the machine to
Speaker 1: produce a digit. It didn't have a way to print
Speaker 1: the results either, you had to read it right off
Speaker 1: the machine. Now, the full version he hoped to build
Speaker 1: would include a printer, but that was beyond his abilities.
Speaker 1: At this point. He gathered his fellow members of the
Speaker 1: Astronomical Society and he showed off his work in June
Speaker 1: twenty two. His peers offered some feedback, and he took
Speaker 1: it into account for his more grandiose plans. He then
Speaker 1: penned a letter titled Note on the Application of Machinery
Speaker 1: to the Computation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables and send
Speaker 1: it to the President of the Royal Society of London.
Speaker 1: That would be Sir Humphrey Davy as a quick aside.
Speaker 1: Sir Humphrey is best known today for his experiments in
Speaker 1: which he used electricity to isolate various elements like boron, calcium, strontium, sodium,
Speaker 1: and potassium, among others. He's also famous for creating the
Speaker 1: Davy lamp, which is an oil lamp that had a
Speaker 1: fine metal mesh surrounding the flame and that would allow
Speaker 1: air to pass through to feed the process of burning,
Speaker 1: but it prevented the flame from escaping, which was incredibly
Speaker 1: useful in areas that had flammable gases present, like in
Speaker 1: coal mines. He would also do some early work with
Speaker 1: arc lamps, which uses an arc of electricity to provide light. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Sir Humphrey Davy was a super important dude and one
Speaker 1: day I'll have to do a full episode about him.
Speaker 1: Babbage's letter included not only a description of his difference engine,
Speaker 1: but also Babbage's thoughts on more advanced machines that would
Speaker 1: be able to do much more, including multiply any number
Speaker 1: of figures by any other number, and a means by
Speaker 1: which he could generate a table of prime numbers from
Speaker 1: zero to ten million, and most importantly, by using the machines,
Speaker 1: he could be certain that the tables would be free
Speaker 1: of error. Now, big prime numbers are something that's really
Speaker 1: useful in cryptography. A pretty common method of encrypting information
Speaker 1: involves creating a key system that uses two extremely large
Speaker 1: prime numbers. Then you multiply those two numbers together to
Speaker 1: create an even bigger number, which is used in the
Speaker 1: encryption process. So to decrypt the information, you need to
Speaker 1: know those two big prime numbers, and it's really hard
Speaker 1: to work backward from the product of multiplication to figure
Speaker 1: out which two really big prime numbers were used to
Speaker 1: generate that product. This is the basis for much of
Speaker 1: modern cryptography, including the mining process for bitcoins, among other things.
Speaker 1: Though Babbage was not that into bitcoins since they hadn't
Speaker 1: been invented yet. He was more concerned about creating tools
Speaker 1: that would allow for more efficient and accurate calculations for
Speaker 1: future work. The Royal Society responded to Babbage's letter with enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: commending Babbage on his ingenuity, but Chuck had hit pretty
Speaker 1: much the limit of how far he could go on
Speaker 1: his own He had been funding his work on his own,
Speaker 1: but he needed financial support if he was going to continue,
Speaker 1: and so he sought our meeting with the Chancellor of
Speaker 1: the Exchequer to see if he could get some public
Speaker 1: funding for his work. When we come back, i'll talk
Speaker 1: more about how that turned out, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Babbage Is meeting with the Chancellor of
Speaker 1: the Exchequer probably caused Chuck a bit of anxiety. After all,
Speaker 1: it was one thing to communicate with fellow mathematicians and
Speaker 1: the scientifically minded and agree upon the utility of Babbage's invention.
Speaker 1: To them, it would be obvious. But it's another matter
Speaker 1: to convince someone who's holding the purse strings. That person
Speaker 1: may or may not share that same mindset. Babbage brought
Speaker 1: with him a letter of recommendation from the Royal Society
Speaker 1: of London, and that went a long way, and so
Speaker 1: ultimately he was granted an advanced somewhere in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of pounds. Not all accounts actually agree on the exact amount,
Speaker 1: but it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a
Speaker 1: hundred fifty thousand dollars in today's money. A prince lay
Speaker 1: some in return, Babbage was meant to complete a difference
Speaker 1: engine capable of computing quote six orders of differences each
Speaker 1: of twenty places of figures end quote, and do so
Speaker 1: at a rate of forty four digits per minute, and
Speaker 1: he had three years to do it. Babbage would do
Speaker 1: some of the construction work in his own workshop. He
Speaker 1: turned much of his own home into additional workspaces, and
Speaker 1: he hired on an engineer named Joseph Clement to oversee
Speaker 1: additional work at a professional manufacturing facility. Unfortunately, the building
Speaker 1: process did not go as quickly or as smoothly as
Speaker 1: Babbage had hoped. Three years came and went and he
Speaker 1: was still working on it. He took on additional jobs
Speaker 1: in the meantime as work continued, and occasionally he would
Speaker 1: fund his own work in Babbage suffered a pretty severe
Speaker 1: mental breakdown because it was a very tragic year for him.
Speaker 1: In that one year, he lost his father, with whom
Speaker 1: he had had you know, that difficult relationship. His wife
Speaker 1: and his newborn son passed away that year, and his
Speaker 1: ten year old son also passed away that year, so
Speaker 1: he lost four family members in the space of a year.
Speaker 1: His friends were able to convince him to take a
Speaker 1: break from his work on the difference engine and told
Speaker 1: him that he should travel to help kind of deal
Speaker 1: with his grief, and so he sent his children to
Speaker 1: stay with his mother. He had several children with his wife,
Speaker 1: and his surviving children went to his mom to stay
Speaker 1: with her, and then John Herschel, his good friend from school,
Speaker 1: took over the job of overseeing progress on the difference
Speaker 1: Engine while he was traveling. Babbage would return to England
Speaker 1: in eighteen twenty eight, after having visited various colleges and
Speaker 1: universities and research facilities throughout Europe. He secured a professor
Speaker 1: position in Cambridge and he resumed overseeing the construction of
Speaker 1: the difference Engine. The monstrosity now had nearly twenty five
Speaker 1: thousand parts. If it were to be finished, it would
Speaker 1: have weighed four tons. It had also gone well over budget,
Speaker 1: but the Royal Society of London helped Babbage recoup expenses,
Speaker 1: convincing the UK government to send more financial support towards Babbage.
Speaker 1: So Babbage would foot the bill and then over time
Speaker 1: he would get money from the UK Government that helped
Speaker 1: offset his costs, but that support only stretched so far.
Speaker 1: By eighteen thirty two, the government had kind of had
Speaker 1: enough at that point. It had invested around seventeen thousand
Speaker 1: pounds into this effort. Babbage himself had contributed around six
Speaker 1: thousand pounds of his own money into the project, and
Speaker 1: it was nowhere close to being finished, so the government
Speaker 1: chose to suspend support, deeming it a waste of resources.
Speaker 1: For the time being. It technically was still in the books,
Speaker 1: but all actual financial support was suspended. Babbage decided to
Speaker 1: expand his workshop space at his home and to move
Speaker 1: all operations into that workspace. This was something that rubbed
Speaker 1: the engineer Clement the wrong way, and the two were
Speaker 1: unable to find a compromise, and so Clement and Babbage
Speaker 1: parted ways. By the end of all this, Babbage had
Speaker 1: started to grow really disenchanted with the whole process. He
Speaker 1: still had a really far away to go. Three quarters
Speaker 1: of the work was yet to be done, and the
Speaker 1: setbacks he had encountered and the personal losses he had
Speaker 1: endured had discouraged him to the point that he decided
Speaker 1: to give up on the project. However, something else happened
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty two that would be a positive change
Speaker 1: in his life, A significant one in an effort to
Speaker 1: expand his social circle, he began to host parties. These
Speaker 1: parties were meant not only to help him make new
Speaker 1: connections with influential people, but also introduce his growing children
Speaker 1: to influential families as well. Something that's important if you're
Speaker 1: trying to do things like you know, potentially set up
Speaker 1: a possible marriage in the future. And it was one
Speaker 1: of these parties that a seventeen year old woman named
Speaker 1: Augusta Ada Byron, better known to us as Ada Lovelace,
Speaker 1: the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, walked into
Speaker 1: his life. Now. The accounts say that at the party,
Speaker 1: Babbage demonstrated to his guests a more recent prototype of
Speaker 1: his difference engine. This one had two thousand moving parts,
Speaker 1: and love Lace was absolutely fascinated by this. She, like Babbage,
Speaker 1: had a love of mathematics and logic, and the two
Speaker 1: found they shared many interests. It wasn't long before they
Speaker 1: became fast friends, and that love Lace would become a
Speaker 1: professional partner to Babbage. In some ways, she was like
Speaker 1: a daughter to him, particularly after the tragic loss of
Speaker 1: Babbage's own daughter, Georgiana in thirty four, Babbage continued to
Speaker 1: work and host parties. Despite experiencing tremendous personal loss in
Speaker 1: his life, he was known to be a little bit
Speaker 1: irascible as well. There's a wonderful story that I want
Speaker 1: to share. Babbage famously once wrote a letter criticizing Alfred
Speaker 1: Lord Tennyson for a verse in the vision of sin.
Speaker 1: Babbage's message to Tennyson said, in your otherwise beautiful poem,
Speaker 1: one verse reads every moment dies a man, every moment
Speaker 1: one is born. If this were true, the population of
Speaker 1: the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the
Speaker 1: rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.
Speaker 1: I would suggest that the next version of your poem
Speaker 1: should read every moment dies a man, every moment one
Speaker 1: one six is born. And he probably wasn't joking about that. Lovelace,
Speaker 1: by contrast, was much better at dealing with the human
Speaker 1: side of life while still maintaining a keen mind for
Speaker 1: the mathematic and scientific, and the two worked very well together.
Speaker 1: Babbage turned his mind to other types of invention as well.
Speaker 1: He created the cow catcher a k a. The pilot.
Speaker 1: This is the wedge frame that extends in front of
Speaker 1: a locomotive as designed to push obstacles out of the
Speaker 1: way of the train. If something happens to be on
Speaker 1: the tracks, it's meant to move it out of the
Speaker 1: way so it doesn't derail the train. He also invented
Speaker 1: a railway vehicle called the dynamometer, which could measure train performance.
Speaker 1: Babbage was obsessed with quantifying various phenomena, even stuff that
Speaker 1: might seem to be unquantifiable. It was an eighteen forty
Speaker 1: that Babbage would travel to France, whereupon on he encountered
Speaker 1: the Jacquard looms i mentioned earlier. This is where Babbage
Speaker 1: first saw the use of punch cards, and before long
Speaker 1: he began to imagine new uses for that type of technology.
Speaker 1: He thought of a machine that could use punch cards
Speaker 1: to carry out specific instructions, something even more advanced than
Speaker 1: the difference engine design of his. He called this new
Speaker 1: machine design the analytical engine. Lovelace quickly became an enthusiastic
Speaker 1: supporter of this idea, and she took it even further.
Speaker 1: While Babbage was thinking of a machine capable of performing
Speaker 1: complicated mathematical processes, love Lace envisioned a world in which
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, from language to music could be
Speaker 1: translated into mathematics and then manipulated or even created through
Speaker 1: such a machine. She imagined music made by machine. In
Speaker 1: other words, Lovelace was imagining computer science nearly a century
Speaker 1: before we would see the first programmable general purpose machines.
Speaker 1: Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine was both more audacious
Speaker 1: than the Difference Engine and more elegant. It would be
Speaker 1: steam powered, it would be able to store one thousand
Speaker 1: digits with fifty decimal places. It would be able to
Speaker 1: perform any type of mathematical function, and Babbage and Lovelace
Speaker 1: worked together to create a very long pamphlet, more than
Speaker 1: sixty pages in length, describing the design of the Analytical
Speaker 1: Engine in eighteen forty three. By this time, the UK
Speaker 1: government had officially canceled funding for the Difference Engine. It
Speaker 1: was no longer just suspended. The project itself was no more. Babbage, however,
Speaker 1: hadn't quite let go of the idea, and he began
Speaker 1: to work on a new proposal for such a device.
Speaker 1: The Difference Engine Number two would be mechanically simpler than
Speaker 1: the original machine. He had able to do more than
Speaker 1: his first design, while Engine number one had more than
Speaker 1: twenty five thousand parts before it had been canceled and
Speaker 1: remember it was only about a quarter finished. The new
Speaker 1: does zign called for a machine with eight thousand parts.
Speaker 1: He would work on that in between his work with
Speaker 1: Lovelace on the analytical Engine. Little side adventure here. Babbage was,
Speaker 1: among other things, an enthusiastic patron of the theater. And
Speaker 1: there's a story that says he was watching an opera
Speaker 1: and noticed light playing upon the lace bonnet of his
Speaker 1: friend who attended the show with him, and that gave
Speaker 1: him an idea. He contacted his buddy Michael Faraday, who
Speaker 1: also deserves his own episode, to go over a concept.
Speaker 1: He wanted to use liquids of different colors, you know,
Speaker 1: jars of these liquids, so you have like a jar
Speaker 1: of amber liquid, a jar of blue liquid, and so on,
Speaker 1: and then place those jars in front of a limelight lamp. Essentially,
Speaker 1: he wanted to create a primitive series of color filters
Speaker 1: for theatrical lights to create a specific effect. He even
Speaker 1: went to the trouble of making a ballet called a
Speaker 1: Letheys and Iris to show this off, complete with the
Speaker 1: cast of sixty young women in white costume so that
Speaker 1: the light would play upon their outfits while rehearsing this piece,
Speaker 1: the theater manager got second thoughts because he started to
Speaker 1: worry about the possibility of a fire with so much
Speaker 1: liquid near powerful electric lamps, and so the piece was
Speaker 1: never actually performed for the public. Tragedy returned to Babbage's
Speaker 1: life in eighteen fifty two, when Ada Lovelace would pass
Speaker 1: away from illness. She was only thirty six years old.
Speaker 1: Babbage once again was left behind. He continued to work,
Speaker 1: completing blueprints for a prototype version of the analytical engine
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty six, but he failed to find funding
Speaker 1: for either the difference Engine or the Analytical Engine. The
Speaker 1: government had become really wary of his history of going
Speaker 1: over budget without producing a final working piece of equipment.
Speaker 1: They did offer him a knighthood, but he declined that offer.
Speaker 1: He grew increasingly unpleasant as he aged in the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: He was generally disliked by his neighbors, and he could
Speaker 1: be the patron saint of Get Off My Lawn. He
Speaker 1: was known in particular for his dislike of street performers
Speaker 1: and musicians, and I really do mean he was known
Speaker 1: for it because he wrote a pamphlet about it, listing
Speaker 1: all the sins of quote, encouragers of street music, and
Speaker 1: among whose numbers he counted gen shops, coffee shops, tourists, children,
Speaker 1: and uh ladies of doubtful virtue. His grouchiness led to
Speaker 1: the passing of what became known as the Babbage Act,
Speaker 1: which made it a crime for street musicians who interfered
Speaker 1: with any citizens ordinary occupation. So, in other words, if
Speaker 1: they didn't cut out that racket, and you couldn't get
Speaker 1: any work done, you could call in the coppers and
Speaker 1: they could get clapped for it. Nice guy, that Babbage.
Speaker 1: He never finished his difference engine nor his analytical engine.
Speaker 1: He passed away on October eight, eight seventy one. While
Speaker 1: he never saw either machine completed within his lifetime, others
Speaker 1: would later take his designs and build their own versions
Speaker 1: of the machine. His youngest son, Henry, managed to finish
Speaker 1: a section of the second Difference Engine, and others would
Speaker 1: build replicas of his designs much later on. You can
Speaker 1: find some in museums like the Computer History Museum. The
Speaker 1: model's work complete with a working printer, and they are
Speaker 1: all mechanical in operation. Babbage's life was one filled with
Speaker 1: incredible innovation and terrible loss. I always thought of him
Speaker 1: as a really smart, sour puss, someone who is, you know,
Speaker 1: really intelligent, but generally unlikable by most people. It was
Speaker 1: only after reading a much more detailed biography of his
Speaker 1: life and diving into his his past that I got
Speaker 1: a deeper appreciation for the challenges he faced and those
Speaker 1: that he overcame. And I haven't covered all those challenges.
Speaker 1: I haven't covered all of his accomplishments. I haven't covered
Speaker 1: all the tragedy of his life. He invented other things
Speaker 1: as well, like an ophthal muscope that's a medical device.
Speaker 1: He did a lot in his lifetime. The fact that
Speaker 1: Babbage did have close and lifelong friends tells me that
Speaker 1: he wasn't nearly the ker mudgeon I originally thought him
Speaker 1: to be, at least not throughout his entire life. He
Speaker 1: certainly grew more grouchy as he aged, but considering the
Speaker 1: setbacks he experienced both personally and professionally, and those terrible
Speaker 1: losses that he had endured, I think we should be
Speaker 1: able to forgive him for that, and the fact that
Speaker 1: he was more interested in seeing his work completed than
Speaker 1: getting an honorific title like a knighthood, says a lot
Speaker 1: about his priorities and his character, and that wraps up
Speaker 1: this look at Charles Babbage, a truly influential figure in
Speaker 1: the history of technology. I will have to do, as
Speaker 1: I said, more episodes about some of his contemporaries. Maybe
Speaker 1: I'll do another one about Ada Lovelace. She again is
Speaker 1: a fascinating person in her own right, and in fact,
Speaker 1: we have Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate her work and
Speaker 1: the inspiration she has given to two countless generations of
Speaker 1: young women who themselves have become prolific coders. And a
Speaker 1: lot of that was work that was foreseen by Ada Lovelace.
Speaker 1: But that wraps up this episode. Let me know what
Speaker 1: you think about what topics I should cover in future episodes.
Speaker 1: You can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: for the show is Text Stuff h s W. I
Speaker 1: look forward to hearing from you, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really Sick. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows.