Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Charles Babbage
     
         The british inventor known to some as the "Father of
        Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the
        computer through his {Analytical Engine}.  His previous
        {Difference Engine} was a special purpose device intended for
        the production of mathematical tables.
     
        Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth,
        Devonshire UK.  He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814
        and graduated from Peterhouse.  In 1817 he received an MA from
        Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine
        through funding from the British Government.  In 1827 he
        published a table of {logarithms} from 1 to 108000.  In 1828
        he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at
        Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture).  In 1831 he
        founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science
        and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and
        Machinery".  In 1833 he began work on the Analytical
        Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London.
        He died in 1871 in London.
     
        Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer,
        standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting
        lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the
        heliograph opthalmoscope.  He also had an interest in cyphers
        and lock-picking.
     
        [Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September
        1994].
     
        Babbage, as (necessarily) the first person to work with
        machines that can attack problems at arbitrary levels of
        {abstraction}, fell into a trap familiar to {toolsmiths}
        since, as described here by the English ethicist, Lord
        Moulton:
     
        "One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the
        celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage.  He was far
        advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever.
        He took me through his work-rooms.  In the first room I saw
        parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been
        shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even
        been put to some use.  I asked him about its present form.  'I
        have not finished it because in working at it I came on the
        idea of my {Analytical Machine}, which would do all that it
        was capable of doing and much more.  Indeed, the idea was so
        much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete
        the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other
        in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical
        Machine.'"
     
        "After a few minutes' talk, we went into the next work-room,
        where he showed and explained to me the working of the
        elements of the Analytical Machine.  I asked if I could see
        it.  'I have never completed it,' he said, 'because I hit upon
        an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more
        effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on
        the old lines.'  Then we went into the third room.  There lay
        scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace of any working
        machine.  Very cautiously I approached the subject, and
        received the dreaded answer, 'It is not constructed yet, but I
        am working on it, and it will take less time to construct it
        altogether than it would have token to complete the Analytical
        Machine from the stage in which I left it.'  I took leave of
        the old man with a heavy heart."
     
        "When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed
        no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic
        scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had
        left behind him, either in papers or in mechanism, was that
        everything was too incomplete of be capable of being put to
        any useful purpose."
     
        [Lord Moulton, "The invention of algorithms, its genesis, and
        growth", in G. C. Knott, ed., "Napier tercentenary memorial
        volume" (London, 1915), p.  1-24; quoted in Charles Babbage
        "Passage from the Life of a Philosopher", Martin
        Campbell-Kelly, ed. (Rutgers U. Press and IEEE Press, 1994),
        p. 34].
     
        Compare: {uninteresting}, {Ninety-Ninety Rule}.
     
        (1996-02-22)