Charles Babbage

Today in History

Three days now since the seventh month turned, and I have this hour verified that my new stepped-gear carry will not jam at the 9-to-0 transition. Forty-one filings. Forty-one. The previous forty each failed at precisely the threshold where a digit rolls over and must propagate its burden to the next column, like a row of falling dominoes — if dominoes were brass, weighed three stone, and cost the patience of every workman in Marylebone. I sit in Dorset Street with oil-blackened fingers and a tolerable claret, the July heat making the workshop a furnace. My Difference Engine, that unfinished mountain of notation-made-metal, has consumed six years and Lord knows how much of my late wife's patience (God rest Georgiana, three years gone this October). Yet this carry — this one motion, invisible to any eye but a mechanism's — is the heartbeat of automatic calculation. Without it, tables of logarithms remain chained to human fallibility. With it, the machine outthinks the drudgery. Had I only known the Analytical Society lads would prove easier to set in motion than brass gears... but no. Tonight I permit satisfaction. Briefly.

Today in History

This day, twelve years past, I sat in a Cambridge coffee-house with Herschel and Peacock, drafting the founding papers of the Analytical Society. Our cause? To drag English mathematics out of Newton's dot-notation dotage and into Leibniz's elegant d-territory. The Continental analysts had raced ahead while we clung to fluxions like a rusty lever refusing to engage. We were three young men with more ambition than sense, yet I recall the ink staining my cuff as I wrote — a small mechanical failure I still make habitually. The Society lasted barely a year, but the notation changed, and with it, the machinery of my future thinking.

Today in History

Paris burns. Charles X abdicates this very day, and I am told mobs topple barricades while I sit here in Dorset Street with a toothache, filing my 40th correction to the Difference Engine's carry mechanism. Revolutions come and go; a misaligned gear endures forever. The French, I am reliably informed, have replaced one incompetent system with another. I, meanwhile, replace brass trial pieces with steel, seeking a mathematics that cannot be overthrown by riot. My servant has just knocked to ask if I require dinner. I do not. I require silence, and a lathe that does not chatter.