The Difference Machine
On the drive into work, I was completely fascinated with this story on NPR about Charles Babbage, a noted mathematician who dreamed up the first known computer back in the 1800s.
What fascinated me was how he was viewed when he was alive and the challenges he faced in getting people to understand what he was doing. Babbage’s failure to persuade investors and peers to buy into what they believed was a hopeless dream of an eccentric is the kind of story history sometimes vindicates.
Because of his challenges communicating the value of his work, Babbage never saw his idea for a giant calculator manifest itself. At most he was able to only build parts of what he called the “Difference Machine.” It wasn’t until the late 1900s that his designs were proven to work. Here’s an excerpt with photos from NPR.
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn’t just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage’s Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Who knows where we’d be today if Babbage had succeeded and not died “an embittered old man with a tarnished reputation.” Here’s a good video about Babbage’s work and his Difference Machine in action today.
Earlier this year I found myself attracted to the story of Nikola Tesla for the exact same reasons. Many of his ideas are only now being explored as we look at new ways to store and transmit electricity. He was also viewed as an eccentric, but Tesla seemed a little more successful than Babbage in capitalizing on his ideas.
Babbage was also a visionary in user interface design and GUI. He suggested using a mouse to program the calculating machine–though in fairness, he was thinking of an actual mouse named “Gooey”. As Christian points out, Babbage couldn’t raise the cabbbage. He could have been the first garage computer inventor but for the unfortunate fact that the automobile hadn’t been invented.
When I look at the plans he had drawn up and think about all the things that could have been wrong that weren’t, it’s pretty amazing. Something with so many moving parts could have easily jammed up somewhere, but it works. Check out the video of the Difference Machine in action.
The NPR piece also talked about his frustration with inaccurate results in print and how he would argue for the need of machined results. It had to sound strange to people that couldn’t imagine machined results.