My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning

guardiancomment:

Was there a computer age while Victoria was on the throne?
John Graham-Cumming has an ambitious plan: he wants to recreate the”analytical engine”, one of the first computer that was ever dreamed of by Charles Babbage in 1837 (sadly, it was never actually built):
To understand why it’s worth building an almost 200-year-old mechanical computer, it’s necessary to first understand what a computer is. Although Babbage’s analytical engine is entirely mechanical, it has the same essence as a modern computer. That computer essence is one of the important consequences of another British computing pioneer’s work, a century after Babbage. Exactly 99 years after Babbage invented the computer, Alan Turing wrote his now famous paper describing the universal Turing machine. An important mathematical idea arising from Turing’s paper and another by American mathematician Alonzo Church is that all computers have the same capabilities, no matter how they are constructed. Because of the Church-Turing thesis, as it is called, we know that Babbage’s analytical engine (with its levers and cogs), Turing’s theoretical machine and the latest tablet all have the same fundamental limits. Of course, Babbage’s machine would by modern standards have been painfully slow.
And please note: it is the size of a locomotive (!) – a larger-than-life computer. Best of luck to him.
Photograph: Science Museum Archive / Science & Society Picture Library

Was there a computer age while Victoria was on the throne?

John Graham-Cumming has an ambitious plan: he wants to recreate the”analytical engine”, one of the first computer that was ever dreamed of by Charles Babbage in 1837 (sadly, it was never actually built):

To understand why it’s worth building an almost 200-year-old mechanical computer, it’s necessary to first understand what a computer is. Although Babbage’s analytical engine is entirely mechanical, it has the same essence as a modern computer. That computer essence is one of the important consequences of another British computing pioneer’s work, a century after Babbage. Exactly 99 years after Babbage invented the computer, Alan Turing wrote his now famous paper describing the universal Turing machine. An important mathematical idea arising from Turing’s paper and another by American mathematician Alonzo Church is that all computers have the same capabilities, no matter how they are constructed. Because of the Church-Turing thesis, as it is called, we know that Babbage’s analytical engine (with its levers and cogs), Turing’s theoretical machine and the latest tablet all have the same fundamental limits. Of course, Babbage’s machine would by modern standards have been painfully slow.

And please note: it is the size of a locomotive (!) – a larger-than-life computer. Best of luck to him.

Photograph: Science Museum Archive / Science & Society Picture Library

"In your otherwise beautiful poem one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

If this were true the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

—

Charles Babbage on Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘A Vision of Sin’.

Source: ‘The father of modern computing was also a poetry critic’

(via writeonetruesentence)

Charles Babbage

vcrfl:

Charles Babbage was born on the 26th of December 1792 at Teignmouth in Devonshire. He was educated at a private school, and afterwards entered St Peter’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1814. Though he did not compete in the mathematical tripos, he acquired a great reputation at the university. In the years 1815–1817 he contributed three papers on the “Calculus of Functions” to the Philosophical Transactions, and in 1816 was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Along with Sir John Herschel and George Peacock he laboured to raise the standard of mathematical instruction in England, and especially endeavoured to supersede the Newtonian by the Leibnitzian notation in the infinitesimal calculus.

Babbage’s attention seems to have been very early drawn to the number and importance of the errors introduced into astronomical and other calculations through inaccuracies in the computation of tables. He contributed to the Royal Society some notices on the relation between notation and mechanism; and in 1822, in a letter to Sir H. Davy on the application of machinery to the calculation and printing of mathematical tables, he discussed the principles of a calculating engine, to the construction of which he devoted many years of his life. Government was induced to grant its aid, and the inventor himself spent a portion of his private fortune in the prosecution of his undertaking. He travelled through several of the countries of Europe, examining different systems of machinery; and some of the results of his investigations were published in the admirable little work, Economy of Machines and Manufactures (1834). The great calculating engine was never completed; the constructor apparently desired to adopt a new principle when the first specimen was nearly complete, to make it not a difference but an analytical engine, and the government declined to accept the further risk (see Calculating Machines).

From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical (1820) and Statistical (1834) Societies. He only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. During the later years of his life he resided in London, devoting himself to the construction of machines capable of performing arithmetical and even algebraical calculations. He died at London on the 8th of October 1871.

— From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

them-days-was-olden-as-f**k:

Full article on BBC - History

The 1820s saw Charles Babbage work on his ‘Difference Engine’, a machine which could perform mathematical calculations. A six-wheeled model was initially constructed and demonstrated to a number of audiences. He then developed plans for a bigger, better, machine - Difference Engine 2. He also worked on another invention, the more complex Analytical Engine, a revolutionary device on which his fame as a computer pioneer now largely rests. It was intended to be able to perform any arithmetical calculation using punched cards that would deliver the instructions, as well as a memory unit to store numbers and many other fundamental components of today’s computers. The remarkable British mathematician Ada Lovelace completed a program for the Analytical Engine but neither it, nor Difference Engine 2, were finished in Babbage’s lifetime.

Relays and Computers

vcrfl:

The electrical relay was invented in 1835. At that time, Charles Babbage tried to build a mechanical computer. The first functional computer, Colossus, more than a hundred years later, was based on relays. So basically we could have had them a hundred years earlier.

Fascinating. And also a possible source for some Alternative History or steampunk speculation. Note to self: find out more about Joseph Henry and relays.

From 2D Goggles | Interlude: Queen Victoria’s VERY SECRET DIARY!

chrisdwoo:

You should probably get this.

retrophilia:

A genuine, steampunk computer. This is a picture of a working difference engine. For those of you who have never heard of a difference engine, it is a mechanical computer meant to tabulate polynomial functions, designed by mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. While Babbage designed the engine, it was Ada Lovelace (the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron) who encoded the algorithms for the machine, making her the world’s first computer programmer! Sadly, Babbage’s difference engine was not built in his lifetime, due to a lack of funding.

This picture is of a difference engine built using Babbage’s plans by the London Science Museum from 1989 to 1991. The construction was supervised by Doron Swade, then Curator of Computing for the museum. He is pictured with the difference engine.

Charles Babbage