Jacquards' Web (15 page)

One sentence from his letter to the Government about his intentions reveals the strength of his sense of justice. Babbage explained that he was revealing his plans in detail in order that

‘you may have fairly before you all the facts of the case’. His mistake also stemmed from his almost incredible naïveté in political matters. He lacked the politician’s essential skill of having a canny understanding of the likely effect of a particular action or statement on an audience.

In any case, financial backers want good news, not honest but unpleasant revelations. Under the circumstances the Government could hardly be blamed for putting its own sense of justice to work and concluding that Babbage was behaving with utter 100

A question of faith and funding

irresponsibility. The fact was that the British Government had, as we have seen, spent £
17 470
on the Difference Engine. Many people in the Government responded with indignation, suspi-cion, and even fury to the news that work had stopped on the Difference Engine. There had always been those in the corridors of power, and in the scientific world generally, who found it convenient and easy to regard Babbage as a troublesome fraud, extorting money from the Exchequer. Some even put it about that he was dishonestly using the money to prop up his own lifestyle.

When Babbage announced that he had abandoned the Difference Engine, his detractors and enemies set to work on his reputation with knives and cudgels. The Government did not at this stage completely rule out offering Babbage new funding to work on the Analytical Engine, but neither did they indicate that this was—so to speak—on the cards. Babbage remained in a limbo, having no idea whether additional financial help might be forth-coming. The Analytical Engine had entered development hell.

Babbage returned to Britain in September
1840
. Temporarily exhilarated by his visit to Turin, where he had been received as an eminent international inventor and man of science, he had to confront the depressing truth that it was increasingly unlikely he would ever be able to afford to build the Analytical Engine.

He knew that his own financial resources, considerable as they were, would be nowhere near enough for the task. Yet somehow he continued to apply himself with energy and dedication to his great object.

He was sustained by two hopes. Firstly, he thought it reasonably likely that one of the Italian scientists whom he had recently visited might write a lengthy and detailed paper on the new project. Babbage hoped that such a paper would affirm the importance of the invention and give him leverage with the British Government. He had a curious habit of trying to win influence by these rather indirect means instead of honing his diplomatic skills and adopting a more direct, and possibly more successful, approach. His host in Turin, Giovanni Plana, had indicated that 101

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he himself was not in sufficiently good health to undertake the job, but Luigi Federico Menabrea, a talented young mathematician whom Plana had introduced to Babbage in Turin, appeared interested in carrying it out. Babbage remained in touch with Menabrea and supplied him with comprehensive information about the Analytical Engine.

Babbage’s second cause for optimism, however tenuous, was that the Government might, after all, have a spontaneous change of heart and make new funding available to him.

Babbage went on working, as he always did, while continuing to press for a decision on whether the Government was prepared to give him more money. He had been hoping for more money since
1834
, when he first had the idea for building an Analytical Engine. Now it was six years later, but in fact another two years were to elapse before he finally received his answer.

It arrived by post in the first few days of November
1842
.

Sir Robert Peel, founder of the Conservative (Tory) party, whose members included landed gentry, wealthy industrialists, and the upper middle-class, had been elected Prime Minister the previous year. He could be sympathetic to men of science, but not when they made representations to the Government for money.

Peel’s view—one that has, after all, been shared by many governments since—was that if an invention was any good it would attract capital from the free market, and if it wasn’t and didn’t, it hardly deserved to be funded by the public purse. Peel loathed the idea that the Government should be expected to be the banker of last resort for desperate inventors whose ideas had failed to attract capital from any other source.

On
31
August
1842
, Peel had written a confidential and scathing letter about Babbage to a friend, the geologist William Buckland. The letter makes all too clear what Peel thought of Babbage:

102

A question of faith and funding

What shall we do to get rid of Mr Babbage and his calculating Machine? I am perfectly convinced that every thousand pounds we should spend upon it hereafter would be throwing good money after bad. It has cost £
17 000
, I believe—and I am told would cost £
14
or £
15 000
more to complete it.

Surely if completed it would be worthless so far as science is concerned?

What do men really competent to judge say of it
in private?

It will in my opinion be a very costly toy to complete and keep in repair. If it would now calculate the amount and the quantum of benefit to be derived to Science it would render the only service I ever expect from it.

I fear a reference to the Royal Society, and yet I should like to have some authority for treating this Calculating Machine as I should like to treat the Caledonian Canal—and would have treated it but that I was told it would cost £
40 000
to unravel the web we have spent so many hundred thousand pounds in weaving.

I will consider any opinion you may give me as to the course which should be pursued strictly confidential.

Pray read the enclosed papers.

Most truly yours

Robert Peel

Viewed from a pure cost perspective, Peel’s caustic attitude to Babbage was, perhaps, entirely reasonable. But Prime Ministers are elected to be leaders and visionaries, not accountants. Babbage was planning a new kind of revolution—an information technology revolution, and all Peel could think of was his Exchequer.

Yet Peel was much too canny an operator to make public the strength of his contempt for Babbage. He was only too aware, after all, that Babbage was one of the leading intellectuals in England, with influential friends in science, business, and politics, many of whom were leading Conservatives. In particular, Peel was aware that Babbage was good friends with the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert.

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The Duke, by now an especially close friend of Babbage, had been a prime mover behind Babbage securing funding for the Difference Engine back in the
1820
s. Indeed, it is ironic that Babbage received
all
his official funding for his visionary cogwheel calculator from supposedly backward-looking aristocrats (who can perhaps be compared, very loosely, to the noblemen of pre-Revolutionary France) but didn’t receive a penny from the upper middle-class politicians who attained power after the Reform Act of
1832
. The Reform Act broadened the electoral base and gave the towns and cities much more extensive parlia-mentary representation.

As cunning as the foxes he loved to hunt in what little spare time he had, Peel decided to place the burden of the Babbage funding decision on someone else’s shoulders. In effect, he passed the buck. He commissioned a report on the Difference Engine from the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy.

Airy had been appointed Astronomer Royal in
1835
, at the early age of thirty-four. By then he had already made many valuable contributions to science, especially in the field of optics. He was to remain Astronomer Royal until
1881
, yet he was never regarded as having distinguished the appointment.

Later in his career, in
1846
, he was vilified by the public for failing to act on the findings of a young English astronomer, John Couch Adams. Adams concluded in
1845
, after laborious calculations, that there were certain irregularities in the orbit of Uranus suggesting the possible existence of a new planet. Instead of instigating a major telescopic search that would almost certainly have resulted in the discovery of the new planet, Neptune, Airy chose not to act on Adams’s information. As a result the planet was instead discovered in
1846
by a German astronomer, Johann Gottfried Galle.

There was every reason on Earth why Airy should have been exactly the right person to understand just how much potential importance there was in Babbage’s ideas. In the course of his astronomical work, Airy had to carry out a large number of 104

A question of faith and funding

complex, repetitive arithmetical calculations. But the truth was that Airy was less a scientist than a bureaucrat. He was also a pedantic, narrow-minded man with little or no real vision of what science could achieve for humankind. To make matters worse, he detested Babbage, perhaps because in his heart of hearts Airy knew that he himself did not entirely understand what Babbage was trying to achieve. Airy was no fool, but Babbage was operating at the very limits of scientific and mathematical possibility, and only those with the most fearless and visionary intellects were likely to grasp exactly what he was seeking to do. In any event, Airy took every opportunity to attack Babbage’s plans for cogwheel calculating machines.

There is little doubt Peel had a pretty good idea, in advance, of what Airy thought of Babbage. Peel rarely missed a trick in the political sphere, and his network of contacts made even Babbage’s look slim. Asking Airy to report on Babbage’s work was like asking someone who was obsessed, say, with the trans-portation potential of canals to prepare a report on the future of the railway, which competed heavily with the canals in the mid-nineteenth century.

When Airy delivered his report, Peel was certainly not disappointed. Airy’s crass judgement on the Difference Engine was that it was ‘useless’.

And so, probably on Thursday 3 November
1842
(at that time letters were often delivered in London on the same day they were posted), Babbage received a letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Henry Goulburn.

3
November
1842

Downing Street

My Dear Sir

The Solicitor General has informed me that you are most anxious to have an early and decided answer as to the determination of the Government with respect to the completion 105

Jacquard’s Web

of your calculating Engine. I accordingly took the earliest opportunity of communicating with Sir Robert Peel on the subject. We both regret the necessity of abandoning the completion of a machine on which so much scientific ingenuity and labour has been bestowed. But on the other hand the expense which would be necessary in order to render it either satisfactory to yourself or generally useful appears on the lowest calculation so far to exceed what we should be justified in incurring that we consider ourselves as having no other alternative. We trust that by withdrawing all claim on the part of the Government to the machine as at present constructed and by placing it at your entire disposal we may to a degree assist your future exertions in the cause of science.

I have the honour to be

Dear Sir

Yours ever most faithfully

Henry Goulburn

Sir Robert Peel begs me to add that as I have undertaken to express to you our position now on this matter he trusts you will excuse his not separately replying to the letter which you addressed to him on the subject a short time since.

Having now met Babbage, we know him well enough to be pretty certain that he
wouldn’t
excuse Peel this, and he didn’t. Babbage’s anger at the contents of the letter was compounded at being fobbed off with a subordinate. On
6
November he demanded an interview with the Prime Minister. On Friday,
11
November, at eleven o’clock in the morning, he was granted one.

The interview was, to put it mildly, an unmitigated disaster for Babbage. It is possible to reconstruct it almost on a minute-by-minute basis from a detailed account Babbage wrote of the interview. The word ‘wrote’ is in fact not really adequate to describe how it came to be composed. What happened was that immediately after the interview, in a hot fury of anger and 106

A question of faith and funding

Sir Robert Peel, pugnacious, politically brilliant, was no judge of Babbage’s ideas.

disappointment, Babbage rushed back into his house, dashed into his study and—as if aware this was the only way he could obtain any relief—gouged onto paper a blow-by-blow account of what he must even at the time have realized was a meeting that pretty well killed his twenty-year vision of cogwheel computing stone dead.

The document containing the account is lodged in the British Library in London. Holding the document in one’s hands is an experience at once deeply moving and profoundly troubling.