In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis · 7 Mar 2016 · 405pp · 117,219 words
as the ballets based on his stories, would later influence two of the most important heroes in the history of Artificial Intelligence, the English mathematician Charles Babbage and Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace. These two would go on to invent the first general-purpose computer and write the first computer program
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computational machine that was designed and built by one of the most celebrated prodigies of Victorian England, the eminent mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Arguably, this is a contentious proposition by the curators. If this were a section dedicated to evolutionary biology many scientists would be aghast
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means a foregone conclusion in the late eighteenth century. As it turned out, general-purpose computers had to be discovered twice. The wheels of industry Charles Babbage was the first person to produce an engineering design that distinguished between a program and the machine capable of executing it. For this he is
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refer to this period as the ‘first machine age’, when machines became an integral part of human society and changed it forever. By the time Charles Babbage came of age, Great Britain, the first country to industrialise, was the unchallenged imperial, economic and naval power. The coronation of young Queen Victoria in
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with artificial wings, studying the anatomy of birds and writing a book entitled Flyology in which she illustrated her ideas and findings. She first met Charles Babbage in 1833, and became fascinated with the Difference Engine. Babbage was also impressed by her mathematical acumen and used to call her the ‘Enchantress of
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the auto-mation of manual jobs. 1818: Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein. 1835: Joseph Henry invents the electronic relay that allows electrical automation and switching. 1842: Charles Babbage lectures at the University of Turin, where he describes the Analytical Engine. 1843: Ada Lovelace writes the first computer program. 1847: George Boole invents symbolic
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick · 1 Mar 2011 · 855pp · 178,507 words
the refuse of fish; fire has been sifted by the lamp of Davy; and machinery has been taught arithmetic instead of poetry. —Charles Babbage (1832)♦ NO ONE DOUBTED THAT Charles Babbage was brilliant. Nor did anyone quite understand the nature of his genius, which remained out of focus for a long time. What did
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off machinery in exhibitions. The shows that drew the biggest crowds featured automata—mechanical dolls, ingenious and delicate, with wheels and pinions mimicking life itself. Charles Babbage went with his mother to John Merlin’s Mechanical Museum in Hanover Square, full of clockwork and music boxes and, most interesting, simulacra of living
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were real, but it never was. It remained poised before its own future. Midway between his time and ours, the Dictionary of National Biography granted Charles Babbage a brief entry—almost entirely devoid of relevance or consequence: mathematician and scientific mechanician;… obtained government grant for making a calculating machine … but the work
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transposed according to a secret word agreed on by the correspondents and carried in their memories. But the most advanced cryptanalyst in Victorian England was Charles Babbage. The process of substituting symbols, crossing levels of meaning, lay near the heart of so many issues. And he enjoyed the challenge. “One of
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it was being called a “mechanical brain” or “thinking machine”; a typical headline declared: “Thinking Machine” Does Higher Mathematics; Solves Equations That Take Humans Months♦ Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine loomed as ancestral ghosts, but despite the echoes of nomenclature and the similarity of purpose, the Differential Analyzer owed
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clumsy to describe the possibilities with words; simpler to reduce them to symbols, and natural, for a mathematician, to manipulate the symbols in equations. (Charles Babbage had taken steps down the same path with his mechanical notation, though Shannon knew nothing of this.) “A calculus is developed for manipulating these equations
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of meaning. Anyone could verify a proof step by step, by following the rules, without understanding it. Calling this quality mechanical invoked the dreams of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, machines grinding through numbers, and numbers standing for anything at all. Amid the doomed culture of 1930 Vienna, listening to his
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suitcase, with a typewriter keyboard and signal lamps. The cipher had evolved from a famous ancestor, the Vigenère cipher, thought to be unbreakable until Charles Babbage cracked it in 1854, and Babbage’s mathematical insight gave Bletchley early help, as did work by Polish cryptographers who had the first hard years
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a “programme,” Turing explains, and constructing such a list may be called “programming.” The idea is an old one, Turing says, and he cites Charles Babbage, whom he identifies as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839—once so famous, now almost forgotten. Turing explains that Babbage “had
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as a prophet (“our heresiarch uncle,”♦ William Gibson says) by another generation of writers in the age of information. Long before Borges, the imagination of Charles Babbage had conjured another library of Babel. He found it in the very air: a record, scrambled yet permanent, of every human utterance. What a
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of 1873, 162–97, reprinted in Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 4 (October–December 2000), 20. ♦ NOT “THE MANUAL LABOR OF ROWING”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 37. ♦ “ ‘THE TALL GENTLEMAN IN THE CORNER’ ”: Ibid., 385–86. ♦
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“THOSE WHO ENJOY LEISURE”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), v. ♦ HE COMPUTED THE COST OF EACH PHASE: Ibid., 146. ♦ “AT THE
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Publications, 1961), xxiii. ♦ “LO! THE RAPTURED ARITHMETICIAN!”: Élie de Joncourt, De Natura Et Praeclaro Usu Simplicissimae Speciei Numerorum Trigonalium (Hagae Comitum: Husson, 1762), quoted in Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 54. ♦ “TO ASTROLOGERS, LAND-MEASURERS, MEASURERS OF TAPESTRY”: Quoted in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an
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1997), 105. ♦ “IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROFESSOR”: Michael Mästlin, quoted in Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” 14. ♦ “THIS LADY ATTITUDINIZED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 17. ♦ INSTALLED IT ON A PEDESTAL: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds
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BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144. ♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34. ♦ “I AM THINKING THAT ALL THESE TABLES”: Ibid., 42. ♦ “WHETHER, WHEN THE NUMBERS”: Ibid., 41. ♦ “WE
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peragantur,” trans. M. Kormes, 1685, in D. E. Smith, A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 173. ♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock
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& Joy, 1822), 1. ♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43. ♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (
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Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447. ♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69. ♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner
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, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282. ♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52. ♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62. ♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to
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Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264. ♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219. ♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300. ♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED
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TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65
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98. ♦ “WHAT A MOUNTAIN I HAVE TO CLIMB”: Ada to Lady Byron, 6 February 1841, ibid., 101. ♦ “IT WILL ENABLE OUR CLERKS TO PLUNDER US”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 113. He added: “possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit …” ♦ “THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE”: Quoted in Anthony
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Hyman, Charles Babbage, 185. ♦ “NOTIONS SUR LA MACHINE ANALYTIQUE”: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, no. 82 (October 1842). ♦ NOT TO “PROCLAIM WHO HAS WRITTEN IT”: Ada to Babbage,
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♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247. ♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES NOT OCCUPY COMMON GROUND”: Ibid., 252. ♦ “THE ENGINE EATING ITS OWN TAIL”: H. Babbage, “The
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Analytical Engine,” paper read at Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331. ♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “
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Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” ♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147. ♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW
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MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” ♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 149. ♦ “I FIND THAT
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STORMS”: Ibid., 301. ♦ “A DIFFERENT SENSE OF ANACHRONISM”: Jenny Uglow, “Possibility,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage, 20. ♦ “IF, UNWARNED BY MY EXAMPLE”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 450. ♦ “THEY SAY THAT ‘COMING EVENTS’ ”: Ada to Lady Byron, 10 August 1851, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada
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“MESSAGE-ALPHABET”: Lewis Carroll, “The Telegraph-Cipher,” printed card 8 x 12 cm., Berol Collection, New York University Library. ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST SINGULAR CHARACTERISTICS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 235. ♦ POLYALPHABETIC CIPHER KNOWN AS THE VIGENÈRE: Simon Singh, The
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1949): 368. ♦ HE WAS WORKING ON AN IDEA FOR QUANTIZING SPEECH: J. C. R. Licklider, interview by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg, 28 October 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, http://special.lib.umn.edu/cbi/oh/pdf.phtml?id=180 (accessed 6 June 2010). ♦ “MATHEMATICIANS ARE ALWAYS DOING THAT”: Heinz
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Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Labyrinths, 8. ♦ “OUR HERESIARCH UNCLE”: William Gibson, “An Invitation,” introduction to Labyrinths, xii. ♦ “WHAT A STRANGE CHAOS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), 111. ♦ “NO THOUGHT CAN PERISH”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Power of Words” (1845
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FORMULA”: Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory (New York: Dover, 1951). ♦ “IN TURNING OUR VIEWS”: Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 44. ♦ “THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING”: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “The Pencil of Nature: A New Discovery,” The Corsair 1, no. 5
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Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. A Fragment. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1838. ———. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864. ———. Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings. Edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1961. ———. The Analytical Engine and Mechanical Notation. New
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York: New York University Press, 1989. ———. The Difference Engine and Table Making. New York: New York University Press, 1989. ———. The Works of Charles Babbage. Edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Babbage, Henry Prevost, ed. Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers
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Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970. Buxton, H. W., and Anthony Hyman. Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq., F.R.S. Vol. 13 of the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Calude, Cristian S. Information and Randomness: An
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2002. Calude, Cristian S., and Gregory J. Chaitin. Randomness and Complexity: From Leibniz to Chaitin. Singapore, Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific, 2007. Campbell-Kelly, Martin. “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827).” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69. Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of
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“Sight and Signalling in the Navy.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 55, no. 5 (1916): 400–14. Dubbey, J. M. The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton
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. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Horgan, John. “Claude E. Shannon.” IEEE Spectrum (April 1992): 72–75. Horsley, Victor. “Description of the Brain of Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B 200 (1909): 117–31. Huberman, Bernardo A. The Laws of the Web
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, and Michael Wheeler, eds. The Mechanical Mind in History. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Huskey, Harry D., and Velma R. Huskey. “Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage.” Annals of the History of Computing 2, no. 4 (1980): 299–329. Hyatt, Harry Middleton. Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois. 2nd and rev. ed
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F., with Lisa Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. New York: Norton, 2008. Menabrea, L. F. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace.” Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève 82 (October 1842). Also available online at http
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the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age.” British Journal of the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75. Moseley, Maboth. Irascible Genius: A Life of Charles Babbage, Inventor. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Mugglestone, Lynda. “Labels Reconsidered: Objectivity and the OED.” Dictionaries 21 (2000): 22–37. ———. Lost for Words: The Hidden History of
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, Richard. The First Part of the Elementarie Which Entreateth Chefelie of the Right Writing of Our English Tung. London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582. Mullett, Charles F. “Charles Babbage: A Scientific Gadfly.” Scientific Monthly 67, no. 5 (1948): 361–71. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine. Vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power.
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Problem Solving.” IEEE Communications Magazine 22 (1984): 123–26. Pulgram, Ernst. Theory of Names. Berkeley, Calif.: American Name Society, 1954. Purbrick, Louise. “The Dream Machine: Charles Babbage and His Imaginary Computers.” Journal of Design History 6:1 (1993): 9–23. Quastler, Henry, ed. Essays on the Use of Information Theory in Biology
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They have been translated into more than twenty languages. His Web site is at www.around.com. ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 4.1 Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 6.1 The New York Times Archive/Redux 7.1 Copyright Robert Lord 7.2 Reprinted with permission from Journal
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
(1815–52), painted by Margaret Sarah Carpenter in 1836. Lord Byron (1788–1824), Ada’s father, in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1835. Charles Babbage (1791–1871), photograph taken circa 1837. CHAPTER ONE ADA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE POETICAL SCIENCE In May 1833, when she was seventeen, Ada Byron was among
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occasion, made less impression on her than her attendance a few weeks later at another majestic event of the London season, at which she met Charles Babbage, a forty-one-year-old widowed science and math eminence who had established himself as a luminary on London’s social circuit. “Ada was more
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focus.”26 It was while in this frame of mind that she decided to engage again with Charles Babbage, whose salons she had first attended eight years earlier. CHARLES BABBAGE AND HIS ENGINES From an early age, Charles Babbage had been interested in machines that could perform human tasks. When he was a child, his mother
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possible to put computer guidance systems into the nose cone of a rocket. There are other cases, however, when the timing is out of kilter. Charles Babbage published his paper about a sophisticated computer in 1837, but it took a hundred years to achieve the scores of technological advances needed to build
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able to read the instructions of any other machine and carry out whatever task that machine could do. In essence, it embodied the dream of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace for a completely general-purpose universal machine. A different and less beautiful solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, with the clunkier name “untyped lambda
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century-old device that seemed to be similar to what he wanted. When Aiken explored the attic, he found one of six demonstration models of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, which Babbage’s son Henry had made and distributed. Aiken became fascinated by Babbage and moved the set of brass wheels into
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major step in the creation of the modern computer: figuring out how to store programs inside a machine’s electronic memory. GRACE HOPPER Starting with Charles Babbage, the men who invented computers focused primarily on the hardware. But the women who became involved during World War II saw early on the importance
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the Navy rather than as a member of the Harvard faculty. When Hopper reported for duty in July 1944, Aiken gave her a copy of Charles Babbage’s memoirs and brought her to see the Mark I. “That is a computing machine,” he told her. Hopper just stared at it silently for
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worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such
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it is! He figured it out!’ Bush envisioned the Internet as fully as you could, given that you didn’t have digital computers. He and Charles Babbage are in the same league.” Another hero was Doug Engelbart. “His lab was node four on the Internet, which was like having the fourth telephone
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on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. When Howard Aiken was devising his digital computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine that he found, and he made his crew members read Ada Lovelace’s “Notes.” The most productive teams were those that brought
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King, June 7, 1833. 3. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon, 2008), 450. 4. Laura Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club (Broadway, 2011), 190. 5. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), chapters 2 and 8, http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater/intro.htm; Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, 192
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Elizabeth Medora Leigh (Readers Union, 1975), 160. 21. Velma Huskey and Harry Huskey, “Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Oct.–Dec. 1980. 22. Ada to Charles Babbage, Nov. 1839. 23. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 30, 1843. 24. Ada to Lady Byron, Jan. 11, 1841. 25. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress
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of Numbers, 136. 26. Ada to Lady Byron, Feb. 6, 1841; Stein, Ada, 87. 27. Stein, Ada, 38. 28. Harry Wilmot Buxton and Anthony Hyman, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage
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(ca. 1872; reprinted by Charles Babbage Institute/MIT Press, 1988), 46. 29. Martin Campbell Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Westview, 2009), 6. 30
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, 42; Bernstein, The Analytical Engine, 46 and passim. 31. James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web (Oxford, 2004), 23. 32. Ada to Charles Babbage, Feb. 16, 1840. 33. Ada to Charles Babbage, Jan. 12, 1841. 34. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Longman Green, 1864), 136. 35. Luigi Menabrea, with notes upon the memoir by
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the translator, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Invented by Charles Babbage,” Oct. 1842, http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html. 36. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 136; John Füegi and Jo Francis, “Lovelace
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of the History of Computing, Oct. 2003. 37. All quotes from Menabrea and Lovelace’s notes are from Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine.” 38. Charles Babbage to Ada, 1843, in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 197. 39. Spoken in the film Ada Byron Lovelace: To Dream Tomorrow, directed and produced
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by John Füegi and Jo Francis (Flare Productions, 2003); also, Füegi and Francis, “Lovelace & Babbage.” 40. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 5, 1843. 41. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 2, 1843. 42. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 6, 1843; Woolley, The Bride of Science, 278; Stein, Ada, 114. 43. Ada to Lady Byron, Aug. 8
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, 1843. 44. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 45. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 46. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 47. Ada to Lady Lovelace, Aug. 15, 1843. 48. Stein, Ada, 120. 49. Ada to Lady
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. The archives for the trial are at the University of Pennsylvania, http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upd/eniactrial/upd8_10.html, and at the Charles Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota, http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=umfa;cc=umfa;rgn=main;view=text;didno
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from Peter Eckstein, “Presper Eckert,” Annals of the History of Computing, Spring 1996; J. Presper Eckert oral history, conducted by Nancy Stern, Oct. 28, 1977, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; Nancy Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC (Digital Press, 1981); J. Presper Eckert, “Thoughts on the History of Computing,” Computer, Dec. 1976
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, 1980); Alexander Randall, “A Lost Interview with Presper Eckert,” Computerworld, Feb. 4, 2006. 62. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 63. Eckstein, “Presper Eckert.” 64. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 148. 65. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 66. John W. Mauchly, “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating,” 1942, in Brian
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Neumann, 3169; McCartney, ENIAC, 61. 68. Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 71. 69. McCartney, ENIAC, 89. 70. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 71. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 72. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute; Randall, “A Lost Interview with Presper Eckert.” 73. Hodges, Alan Turing, 3628. 74. In addition to the Hodges biography
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(Harvard, 1946). 8. Grace Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum. 9. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 130. 10. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 135. 11. Richard Bloch oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. 12. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 53. 13. Grace Hopper and Richard Bloch panel discussion comments, Aug. 30, 1967, in Henry S. Tropp
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. 9, 1947, http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566k.jpg. 19. Grace Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968. 20. The Moore School Lectures, Charles Babbage Institute, reprint (MIT Press, 1985). 21. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968. 22. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws on Jean
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, Turing’s Cathedral, 1305. 46. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1395. 47. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Jan. 7, 1969. 48. Bloch oral history, Feb. 22, 1984, Charles Babbage Institute. 49. Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (MIT Press, 1987), 88; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 9. 50. Goldstine, The
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; Norman Macrae, John von Neumann (American Mathematical Society, 1992), 281. 58. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 178. 59. Presper Eckert oral history, conducted by Nancy Stern, Charles Babbage Institute, Oct. 28, 1977; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1952. 60. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” U.S. Army Ordnance
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-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf. 61. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1957. See also Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing. 62. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. See also McCartney, ENIAC, 125, quoting Eckert: “We were clearly suckered by John von Neumann, who succeeded in some circles at getting my ideas
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Mind (Washington Square Press, 1984), 204; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1980; Stern, “John von Neumann’s Influence on Electronic Digital Computing.” 81. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 82. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 5077. 83. Crispin Rope, “ENIAC as a Stored-Program Computer: A New Look at the
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.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, Nov. 6, 1969. 15. Reid, The Chip, 1648. 16. Jack Kilby oral history, conducted by Arthur L. Norberg, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, June 21, 1984. 17. Craig Matsumoto, “The Quiet Jack Kilby,” Valley Wonk column, Heavy Reading, June 23, 2005. 18. Reid, The
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Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1998); J. C. R. Licklider oral history, conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg, Oct. 28, 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; J. C. R. Licklider interview, conducted by James Pelkey, “A History of Computer Communications,” June 28, 1988 (Pelkey’s material is
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://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/index.html); Robert M. Fano, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider 1915–1990, a Biographical Memoir (National Academies Press, 1998). 13. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 14. Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist’s Dilemma in a Materialistic World” (1957), in Collected Works, vol. 4 (MIT, 1984), 709. 15. Author’s interview
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Rosin, “The Project MAC Interviews,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Apr. 1992. 20. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. 21. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 22. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1960, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people
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: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN (privately printed at the Harvard bookstore, 2011), see http://walden-family.com/bbn/. 24. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 25. J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (MIT, 1965), 53. 26. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 4. 27. Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report
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; James Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower (MIT, 1982), 20. 29. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago, 2006), 108. 30. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 31. Licklider interview, conducted by James Pelkey; see also James Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation,” http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.1-IntergalacticNetwork
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. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. 47. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. 48. Author’s interview with Larry Roberts. 49. Larry Roberts oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. 50. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. 51. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (MIT, 1999), 1012; Larry Roberts oral history
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, Charles Babbage Institute. 52. Wes Clark oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, May 3, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute. 53. There are differing versions of this story, including some that say it was a taxi ride
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” system and a “packet switch” one. 73. Leonard Kleinrock, “Principles and Lessons in Packet Communications,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Nov. 1978. 74. Kleinrock oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, Apr. 3, 1990. 75. Leonard Kleinrock, “On Resource Sharing in a Distributed Communication Environment,” IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2002. One loyalist did support Kleinrock
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. Stephen Lukasik, “Why the ARPANET Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Mar. 2011; Stephen Lukasik oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Charles Babbage Institute, Oct. 17, 1991. 83. Charles Herzfeld, “On ARPANET and Computers,” undated, http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm. 84. “A Brief
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Up Late, 2192 and passim; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 1330 and passim; Stephen Crocker oral history, conducted by Judy E. O’Neill, Oct. 24, 1991, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; Stephen Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 2009; Cade Metz, “Meet the Man Who Invented
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oral history, conducted by Michael Geselowitz, Feb. 17, 2004, IEEE History Center. 105. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Apr. 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute; Vint Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be,” Nov. 1993, http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html. 106. Robert Kahn oral
Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson · 28 Mar 2012 · 463pp · 118,936 words
and all its parts.”14 This ambition was fulfilled, some 150 years later, by the English mathematician, engineer, and patron saint of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage (1791–1871). “By a new system of very simple signs I ultimately succeeded in rendering the most complicated machine capable of explanation almost without the
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must have had some other purpose before they were used to fly. U-boat commanders appropriated the Enigma machine first developed for use by banks. Charles Babbage envisioned using the existing network of church steeples that rose above the chaos of London as the foundation for a packet-switched communications net. According
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shift in computational identity as objects are referred to more by process than by place. Such a language falls somewhere between the mechanical notation of Charles Babbage, able to describe and translate the logical function of any conceivable machine, and the language of DNA, able to encode the construction of proteins in
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.Samuel Butler, “Lucubratio Ebria,” Canterbury Press, 29 July 1865; reprinted in Jones, Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 40. 69.Butler, Unconscious Memory, 57. CHAPTER 3 1.Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2d ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), 33. 2.Leibniz to Hobbes, 13/23 July 1670, in Noel Malcolm, ed
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, 1929), 180. 8.Leibniz, letter, n.d., quoted in H. W. Buxton, 1871, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq. F.R.S. (MS, 1871), Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 13 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 51, 381. 9.Leibniz, 1685, in Smith, Source
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, 342. 13.Ibid., 344. 14.Leibniz, supplement to a letter to Christiaan Huygens, 8 September 1679, in Loemker, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 384–385. 15.Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, 1864), 142. Facsimile reprint, New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969. 16.Buxton, Babbage, 158. 17
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, (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1951), 393. 19.Babbage, Passages, 42. 20.Buxton, Babbage, 46. 21.Babbage, Passages, 118–119. 22.Doron D. Swade, “Redeeming Charles Babbage’s Mechanical Computer,” Scientific American 268, no. 2 (February 1993): 86. 23.Charles Darwin, 1876, in Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809
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version published by Francis Darwin in 1896. 24.Ada Augusta Lovelace, Note A to L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3 (London: J. E. & R. Taylor, 1843), reprinted in Henry Provost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a
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Collection of Papers Relating to them; their History, and Construction (London: E. and F. Spon, 1889), 25. Facsimile reprint, Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). 25.Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 97. 26.Ibid., vii. 27
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.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed., enlarged (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 273–276. 28.Babbage, Passages, 128. 29.George Boole, An Investigation
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Engine (ACE),” reprinted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran, eds., A. M. Turing’s A.C.E. Report of 1946 and Other Papers, Charles Babbage Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 10 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 20–105. 35.Hodges, Turing, 307. 36.Carpenter and Doran, Turing’s
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Personnel Security Board, 27 April 1954, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 655. 12.Ralph Slutz, interview by Christopher Evans, June 1976, OH 086, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 13.John von Neumann, “The Role of Mathematics in the Sciences and Society,” address to Princeton graduate alumni, June 1954
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for Advanced Study, RAND Corporation Memorandum P-377, 10 March 1953, 5–6. 20.Martin Schwarzschild, interview by William Aspray, 18 November 1986, OH 124, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 21.Richard Feynman, “Los Alamos from Below—Reminiscences of 1943–1945,” Engineering and Science 39, no. 2 (January–February 1976
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Neumann, n.d., Library of Congress, summarized in Aspray, von Neumann, 271. 38.Herman H. Goldstine, interview by Nancy Stern, 11 August 1980, OH 018, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 39.Metropolis, Howlett, and Rota, History of Computing, xvii. CHAPTER 6 1.Arthur Burks, Herman Goldstine, and John von Neumann
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, I Remember, 375. 17.Arthur W. Burks, interview by William Aspray, 20 June 1987, OH 136, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 18.Willis H. Ware, interview by Nancy Stern, 19 January 1981, OH 37, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 19.John von Neumann, “Governed,” review of Cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener
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Repercussions of Computers,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 1 (1970): 69. 24.Burks, interview. 25.Ralph Slutz, interview by Christopher Evans, June 1976, OH 86, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 26.Ware, interview. 27.Herman H. Goldstine, interview by Nancy Stern, 11 August 1980, OH 18
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, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 28.Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 242–243. 29.Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert
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American Mathematics, 1776–1976 (Washington, D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 1977), 119. 43.Martin Schwarzschild, interview by William Aspray, 18 November 1986, OH 124, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 44.Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains (New York: John Wiley, 1949), 5. 45.John von Neumann, 1948, “The General and
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16 (1962): 122. 8.Barricelli, “Numerical Testing of Evolution Theories: Part 1,” 70. 9.James Pomerene, interview by Nancy Stern, 26 September 1980, OH 31, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 10.Nils A. Barricelli, “Symbiogenetic Evolution Processes Realized by Artificial Methods,” Methodos 9, nos. 35–36 (1957): 152. 11.Barricelli
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-11827, 2 May 1946, 2, 16. 42.RAND, The RAND Corporation, 23. 43.Paul Baran, interview by Judy O’Neill, 5 March 1990, OH 182, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 44.J. M. Chester, Cost of a Hardened, Nationwide Buried Cable Network, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-2627-PR, 1 October
The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris · 1 Jan 2012 · 456pp · 123,534 words
Champlain Denouement CHAPTER TWO - The Hyperpower A Very British Industrial Revolution The Longitude Problem The Quest for Truth The Millionth-of-an-Inch Measuring Machine Charles Babbage And It Worked The Portsmouth Block-Making Factory CHAPTER THREE - The Giant as Adolescent Affordable Clocks Samuel Slater Rips Off the British But Lowell Invents
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machine still pales beside the most audacious grasp at ultraprecise complexity. The ne plus ultra of regal overreaching was Charles Babbage’s calculating engines. Charles Babbage If there were a hall of fame of intelligent people, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) would surely have his own plaque. Born into a well-to-do family, he spent most
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ease the frictional pressures so the hand crank worked as envisaged—an altogether astonishing degree of foresight for a paper design. A modern realization of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, a distant prototype for the modern computer. It was constructed at the London Science Museum over a six-year period
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Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 13, no. 1 (1852): 123–125, quote at 124. 23 Ibid., 124. 24 Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), is the best modern account of Babbage and his calculating engines. 25
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Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), 68–96, is his own account of the struggle over funding.
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. 28 The description of number two and the rejection note are from Swade, Difference Engine, 173–176. 29 Ibid., 117–119. 30 Ibid., 121. 31 Charles Babbage, “On the Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 2, 1826, reprinted in
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Charles Babbage and His Calculating Machines, Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds. (New York: Dover, 1961), 346–354, quote at 351, plates at 380–384. 32 Swade,
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team did not attempt to make Babbage’s printer, which was of the same size and complexity of the DE2 itself. 37 Ibid., 201. 38 Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing (London: John Murray, 1846). 39 Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
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in full in Huntington, Hall’s Breechloaders, 306–323, quotes at 311, 319–320, 323. 84 Gordon, “Simeon North,” 183; Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 229. 85 Green, Eli Whitney, 139. 86 John K. Mahon, History of the
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith · 26 Jun 2019 · 370pp · 107,983 words
be used for number processing well into the twentieth century. A form of Pascaline mechanism, including Leibniz’s innovations, would in time be incorporated into Charles Babbage’s 1822 mechanical calculator, the Difference Engine, and then into the first ‘general purpose’ computing devices that followed in its wake. Through general purpose computation
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was partially inspired by an automaton not unlike those created by Vaucanson decades before. In the last year of the eighteenth century, eight-year-old Charles Babbage saw a silver automaton of a naked woman in a Covent Garden amusement shop. When writing his autobiography over sixty years later, Babbage recalled the
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moment he first saw The Silver Lady, saying that the automaton‘attudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’. Charles Babbage grew to become a mathematician and mechanical engineer whose accomplishments are vast and span everything from modern economics to the pricing of postage stamps, but
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, fame, position and intellect gave her access to many of the great scientists, technologists and thinkers of the day, including Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage. At the time of their meeting, in 1833, Babbage was forty-two and already one of the most famous inventors in England, while Ada was
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’s journey. And, in the same way, the story of Ada Lovelace would make a fine Hollywood hero’s journey with Ada as Luke Skywalker, Charles Babbage as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Byron’s Romantic image as a sort of psychological Darth Vader. The unprecedented success of the film series led to
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become a complex system, performing in ways that are hard to comprehend and control, while also manifesting all the flaws and biases discussed. Ironically, when Charles Babbage constructed his Analytical Engine to eliminate the mass production of human errors in logarithm tables he little suspected that we would one day reach a
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen · 6 Feb 2024 · 169pp · 41,887 words
poetry and numbers. She also had a gambling problem. And was likely using the first computer ever to bet on horses. The conventional story has Charles Babbage, another Royal Society member, together with Ada Lovelace originating the concept of a digital programmable computer sometime in the 1820s. Things were a bit more
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49 The device, which he proudly: Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999), 123–62. 50 Also, did you know that: Charles Babbage, “Street Nuisances” in Passages in the Life of a Philosopher (London: John Murray, 1864), 253–71. 51 While other visitors yawned: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan
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, and Co., 1882), 89. 52 The switch to another ruleset: Babbage, “Miracle” in Passages in the Life, 291–93. 53 Frustrated with their slow progress: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 1/3 (1826): 250
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–65. 57 Whatever the arrangement of objects in: L. F. Menabrea and Ada Lovelace (1842), “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage Esq.” in Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academics of Science and Learned Societies, and from Foreign Journals, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Richard
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. Chapter 5: Template CULTURE 60 Within the gears: Menabrea and Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine,” 666–731. 64 “It is here that the union”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1832), 113. 66 check my receipts: Dennis Yi Tenen, “The Emergence of American Formalism,” Modern
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
. One of those encounters happens in 1801, when a mother brings her precocious eight-year-old son to visit Merlin’s museum. His name is Charles Babbage. The old showman senses something promising in the boy and offers to take him up to the attic to spark his curiosity even further. The
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, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well. Although this account contains its fair share of figures like Charles Babbage—well-to-do Europeans tinkering with new ideas in their parlors—it is not just a story about the affluent West. One of the most
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one of the most significant innovations in the history of textile production. But its most important legacy lies in the world of computation. In 1839, Charles Babbage wrote a letter to an astronomer friend in Paris, inquiring about a portrait he had just encountered in London, a portrait that when viewed from
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a spandrel. It is possible—maybe even likely—that a further twist awaits us. Recall the “irresistible eyes” of the mechanical dancer that so entranced Charles Babbage in Merlin’s attic. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since
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into everyday life: first as an escape from our “lawful calling and affairs,” and then as a key element in those affairs. Think back to Charles Babbage, staring into the eyes of that automated doll in Merlin’s attic, two centuries ago. That encounter was, quite literally, child’s play, but the
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Impresarios of Mechanism,” Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention, Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds. (London: Faber & Faber, 1996): 54. “The motions of her limbs”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 32. “the hummingbird effect”: Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that
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Archaeology 32:1 (August 2003): 6–23. Caxton, William. Game and Playe of the Chesse. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2007. Collier, Bruce, and James MacLachlan. Charles Babbage: And the Engines of Perfection. Oxford University Press, 2000. Conard, Nicholas J., Maria Malina, and Susanne C. Münzel. “New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet
by David Kahn · 1 Feb 1963 · 1,799pp · 532,462 words
of Mathematics at Cambridge, the pioneer who enunciated the principles on which today’s huge electronic computers are based and who himself built their prototypes: Charles Babbage. Most of his cryptologic work was never published and hence never played a role in the science, but it was astonishingly advanced. He was among
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person, the more intimate is his conviction. In my earliest study of the subject, I shared in this belief, and maintained it for many years. Charles Babbage uses mathematics to solve a cipher “In a conversation on that subject which I had with the late Mr. Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal
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, boring job, about as exciting as adding up columns of figures, and that they would rather be out on a date with a girl friend. Charles Babbage asserted that no man’s cipher was worth looking at unless the inventor had himself solved a very difficult cipher. This rule holds true in
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, 1960), III, 107, 115-116; William F. Friedman, “Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, Cryptologist,” Casanova Gleanings, IV (1961), 1-12. 153 solutions in early 1800s: by Charles Babbage, for example. See Babbage in text. 154 lesser writings: Sacco, §147. 154 Silvestri: Meister, Päpstlichen, 31-32; Sacco, §142; Sacco, Primato, 6; Wagner, XII, 1
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. 198 Laussedat: Kerckhoffs, 62-63. 198 “C.P.B.”: “Ciphers and Cipher-writing,” Macmillan’s Magazine, XXIII (1871), 328-338. C.P.B. may be Charles Babbage, though elsewhere he never used a middle initial. For a solution of the Wheatstone, see [William F. Friedman], Several Machine Ciphers and Methods for their
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lingue … (Roma: Bernabò, 1710). Unpaged. 203 Chase: DAB. 203 Chase ciphers: “Mathematical Holocryptic Cyphers,” The Mathematical Monthly, I (March, 1859), 194-196. 204 Babbage: DNB; Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, eds. Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), xi-xxxii. Quotations from Babbage are cited to this volume
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Charles Wheatstone, inventor of two important cipher systems; Lyon Play fair, First Baron Playfair, who gave his name to one of Wheatstone’s ciphers; and Charles Babbage, who solved many difficult ciphers Left, Confederate brass cipher disk; right, Edward S. Holden, one of the cryptanalysts of the electoral scandal telegrams of 1876
Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation
by Steven Johnson · 5 Oct 2010 · 298pp · 81,200 words
. We have a phrase for those ideas: we call them “ahead of their time.” Consider the legendary Analytical Engine designed by nineteenth-century British inventor Charles Babbage, who is considered by most technology historians to be the father of modern computing, though he should probably be called the great-grandfather of modern
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the shape of a grid and placed it between those two electrodes, he was unwittingly opening up the adjacent possible for the Analytical Engine that Charles Babbage had failed to produce sixty years before. The power of that new portal was apparent instantly: the first computer built with vacuum tubes, the mammoth
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early 1800s, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed the first punch cards to weave complex silk patterns with mechanical looms. Several decades later, Charles Babbage borrowed Jacquard’s invention to program the Analytical Engine. Punch cards would remain crucial to programmable computers until the 1970s. Lee de Forest created the
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patented the revolver, a handgun that featured a rotating cylinder with multiple chambers for bullets. PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER (1837) Although a working version was never built, Charles Babbage outlined the basic principles of the programmable computer—including the notions of what we now call software, CPU, and memory—in his legendary Analytical Engine
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(1944) German engineer Konrad Zuse is credited by many with inventing the first fully functioning modern computer, based on a binary system, in 1944. However, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, and John Vincent Ansoff can all also be credited with inventing various forms of computers. DNA AS GENETIC MATERIAL (1944) The idea that
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more on the discovery of oxygen, see Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Joe Jackson’s World on Fire, and my own Invention of Air. Charles Babbage’s attempt to build the first computer is chronicled in Doron Swade’s The Difference Engine. The story of Apollo 13 is told in Jim
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Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor, 2005. Swade, Doron, and Charles Babbage. The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. New York: Viking, 2001. Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
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