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Charles Babbage:
The Father of Computers
Most of you are familiar with computers and would probably be doing a
lot of work on them. They have become such an important part of the
modern world that we cannot even imagine a world without computers. Do
you know who invneted this amazing machine?
 Although
the computer is definitely not the invention of one single being, one
man is generally given the credit for coming up with the concept of the
programmable computer. This man is none other than Charles Babbage.
Charles Babbage, born on December 26, 1791 in London, was an English
mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer. His father,
Benjamin Babbage, was a banking partner of the Praeds, while his mother
was Betsy Plumleigh Teape. In 1808, the family moved to East Teignmouth
and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby St. Michael's Church.
Around the age of eight, the young Babbage suffered from a
life-threatening fever and was afterwards sent to a country school in
Alphington near Exeter to recover from this illness.
His parents didn't want the boy to be taxed too much. Although he
attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon for a
short period, his weak health forced him back to private tutors for a
time.
He then joined the 30-student Holmwood Academy in Enfield, Middlesex.
It was while studying in this academy with a well-stocked library that
Babbage discovered his love of mathematics. After leaving this academy,
he studied with two more private tutors.
Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1810 and
with several of his friends formed the Analytical Society in 1812.
In the same year, he transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was the
top mathematician at Peterhouse, but failed to graduate with honours.
Instead, he received an honorary degree later in 1814.
On July 25, 1814, Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore; they had eight
children, but only three survived into adulthood. Georgiana died in
Worcester in September 1827, the same year that Charles' father, and at
least two sons died. These deaths resulted in Babbage suffering from a
mental breakdown which delayed the construction of his machines.
Those days, numerical tables were calculated by humans who were
called 'computers,' meaning "one who computes". At Cambridge he saw the
high error rate of this human-driven process and started work on trying
to calculate the tables mechanically.
It is believed that he may have been influenced by an intense dislike
of untidiness; his experience working on logarithmic tables; and work on
calculating machines already conducted by Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise
Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz.
He began his work in 1822 with what he called the difference engine.
Unlike similar efforts of the time, Babbage's difference engine was
created to calculate a series of values automatically.
The first difference engine was composed of around 25,000 parts,
weighed around 13,600 kg, and stood 2.4 metres high. He later designed
an improved version, "Difference Engine No. 2", which was not
constructed until 1989-1991, using Babbage's plans.
Soon after the attempt at making the difference engine crumbled,
Babbage started designing a different, more complex (complicated)
machine called the Analytical Engine. Altough Babbage could not actually
complete his work due to many problems, his engines were among the first
mechanical computers. And although his machines were unwieldy (big and
heavy to handle), their basic architecture was very similar to that of a
modern computer.
The data and programme memory were separated, operations were based
on instructions, the control unit could make conditional jumps and the
machine had a separate Input/Output unit. Parts of his uncompleted
mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum.
Babbage also designed a printer for the second difference engine and
this is considered as astonishingly (amazingly) complex for the 19th
century. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed this printer.
Babbage died at age 79 on October 18, 1871, and was buried in
London's Kensal Green Cemetery. His brain is preserved at the Science
Museum in London.
Other accomplishments
In 1824, Babbage won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
"for his invention of an engine for calculating mathematical and
astronomical tables."
From 1828 to 1839 he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and
was instrumental in forming the Astronomical Society in 1820 and the
Statistical Society in 1834.
Babbage also achieved notable results in cryptography (the science of
hiding information inside secret codes and breaking them). He broke
Vigenčre's autokey cipher (code) as well as the much weaker cipher that
is called Vigenčre cipher today.
His discovery was used to aid English military campaigns, and was not
published until several years later. As a result credit for the
development was given to Friedrich Kasiski, a Prussian infantry officer,
who made the same discovery some years after Babbage.
In 1838, Babbage invented the pilot (also called a cow-catcher), the
metal frame attached to the front of locomotives that clears the tracks
of obstacles. He also constructed a dynamometer car and performed
several studies on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway in
about 1838. His eldest son, Benjamin Herschel Babbage, worked as an
engineer for Brunel on the railways before emigrating to Australia in
the 1850s.
Babbage is also credited with the invention of standard railroad
gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, the
heliograph, and the ophthalmoscope. He twice stood for Parliament as a
candidate for the borough of Finsbury. In On the Economy of Machine and
Manufacture, he described what is now called the Babbage principle,
which describes certain advantages with division of labour.
Honours
Babbage has been honoured with many things named after him,
particularly the Babbage crater on the Moon, and the Charles Babbage
Institute, an information technology archive and research centre. The
Babbage lecture theatre at Cambridge University, used for undergraduate
science lectures, commemorates his time at the university.
Publications
* A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of
Lives (1826)
* Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of
Its Causes (1830)
* On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835)
* The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a Fragment (1837)
* Table of the Logarithms of the Natural Numbers from 1 to 108000
(1841)
* The Exposition of 1851 (1851)
* Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864) |
