Review: Babbage's calculating engine

Babbage's calculating engine by Charles Babbage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Of historical interest in general, though the details are tedious and difficult to follow without more diagrams. Honestly, the long Victorian periods would probably be hard to follow with diagrams.

Despite its attribution to Babbage, it isn't by him (the author is a Mr. Lardner), and it talks about him in the third person. It outlines the great importance of accurate tables of figures for various kinds of calculations, from land surveying to navigation and astronomy, and how difficult they are to obtain given human propensity to error; talks up Babbage's solution, the "Difference Engine," which would use his combined mathematical and engineering expertise to produce such accurate tables using mechanical calculation and printing; and closes with a summary of the state of the project, which was suspended by the time this book was written in 1834, and finally abandoned by the British Government (which had funded it to the tune of 17,000 pounds, or something more than half a million dollars in today's money - a relatively cheap project considering its magnitude) in 1842. Babbage was more interested in developing his ideas than in producing a working machine, and also clashed with his chief engineer, and his attention had already moved on to the more grandiose Analytical Engine, which would have been a programmable general-purpose computer if it had ever been built (or could have been built with the technology of the time, which is still an open question).

Babbage was, unfortunately, a combination of ahead of his time, lacking in the discipline to focus on one thing until it was done, and difficult to get along with - resembling many other creative people in these respects - and his early contributions were forgotten by the time technology enabled working computers to be built in the 1940s. But this is an interesting insight into the state of high technology, and its potential impact on society, nearly 200 years ago.

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