Jacquards' Web (16 page)

After all, what Babbage wrote was no less than an explanation of how the information technology revolution, that really might have happened in Victorian Britain, was in fact suffocated at birth.

Babbage’s vivid account of the meeting includes much of the 107

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verbatim dialogue that passed between the two men. His pain and upset are even apparent in the appearance of the writing itself, which is erratic, contains many crossings out, and is not always easy to decipher. Uncharacteristically for him, in his haste and anger his description of the meeting leaves out much of the punctuation and even some of the words.

The timing of the meeting was, from any perspective, extremely unfortunate. The year
1842
had been an exceptionally tough one for Peel. Shortly before the day when he met Babbage, he had written to his wife, Julia, that he was ‘fagged to death’

with the cares of office. Hunger and rioting were widespread.

Peel was in no mood to meet Babbage at all, let alone for a stressful confrontation. Even so, Babbage would surely have done better if he had handled the meeting in a radically different manner. He should have been placatory, and done his utmost to explain to Peel about his work in layman’s language. As it was, and this is clear even from Babbage’s own notes, he conducted the meeting in a defensive, sullen, bad-tempered, and self-pitying manner that only served to irritate and alienate Peel. As Babbage explains in his account of the interview:

I then informed Sir RP that many circumstances had at last forced upon me the conviction which I had long resisted that there existed amongst men of science great jealousy of me. I said that I had been reluctantly forced to this conclusion of which I now had ample evidence which however I should not state

—

unless he asked me

In reply to some observation of Sir RP in

a subsequent part of the conversation I mentioned one circumstance that within a few day the Secretary of one of the foreign embassies in London had incidentally remarked to me that he had long observed a great jealousy of me in certain classes of English Society.

(
right
) Hot off the press. This first page of the memorandum which Babbage scrawled in a fit of fury after his disastrous interview with Robert Peel shows the painful deterioration in Babbage’s usually elegant handwriting as a result of his anger. Note the lack of commas and the missing ‘s’ after day.

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Babbage went on to explain why he was mentioning all this. He told Peel of his fears that some of those who had advised the Government over the worth of the Engines might have based their decision on personal malice rather than on an objective assessment. Peel evidently made no direct reply to this. Then, finally, Babbage got down to what really mattered:

I turned to the next subject, the importance of the Analytical Engine.
I stated my own opinion that in the future scientific history
of the present day it would probably form a marked epoch and that
much depended upon the result of this interview
. I added that the Difference Engine was only capable [of] applications to one limited part of science (although that part was certainly of great importance and capable of more immediate practical applications than any other) but the Analytical Engine embraced the whole [of] science.

I stated that it was in fact already invented and that it exceeded any anticipations I had ever entertained respecting the powers of applying machinery to science.

The italics in the above passage are mine. The brilliance of Babbage’s anticipation of how posterity would see the Analytical Engine is deeply moving and somewhat uncanny, almost as if he were at that moment a time-traveller with a personal experience of the future. Yet as far as his dealings with the pragmatist Peel were concerned, Babbage ought to have given him a clear indication of the practical benefits of his machines, accompanied by a realistic plan of action and a date when the Government could expect that something of definite practical usefulness would be completed. But Babbage, in his bitterness and haste to justify himself, was not thinking clearly at all. He tried quoting to Peel the comment Plana had made that the invention of the Analytical Engine would provide ‘the same control over the executive

[department of analysis] as we have hitherto had over the legislative’. Peel very likely did not have the faintest idea what Babbage was talking about.

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A question of faith and funding

After another bad-tempered and unpleasant foray, initiated by Babbage, about the different pensions and grants given to scientists by the Government, Peel finally decided to interrupt the endless stream of complaints and grievances with a hard fact:

‘Mr Babbage, by your own admission you have rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better machine.’

Babbage, recalled to reality, glared at Peel. ‘But if I finish the Difference Engine it will do even more than I promised. It is true that it has been superseded by better machinery, but it is very far from being “useless”. The general fact of machinery being superseded in several of our great branches of manufacture after a few years is perfectly well known.’

Only briefly diverted from his course, Babbage again went on to complain of all the vexation and loss of reputation he considered that he had suffered from those members of the public who believed him to have profited personally from the money the Government had granted towards the development of the Difference Engine. ‘This belief is so prevalent that several of my intimate friends have asked if it were not true,’ Babbage said. ‘I have even met with it at the hustings at Finsbury.’

Peel was on home territory now. ‘You are too sensitive to such attacks, Mr Babbage,’ he replied. ‘Men of sense never care for them.’

Fixing the Prime Minister with another hard stare, Babbage returned, ‘Sir Robert, in your own experience of public life you must have frequently observed that the best heads and highest minds are often the most susceptible of annoyance from the injustice or the ingratitude of the public.’

The fact of two of the most eminent men of the nineteenth century holding such an unproductive and ill-tempered conversation leaves us in no doubt that neither of them was at his best that day. Peel was exhausted, and irritated with Babbage. Babbage felt hurt, betrayed, and angry that the Prime Minister could be so reluctant to support the continued development of machines whose worth seemed to Babbage self-evident. Babbage asked Peel 111

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to contemplate the dream; Peel saw only a highly unsatisfactory reality.

‘I consider myself to have been treated with great injustice by the Government,’ was Babbage’s parting comment. ‘But as you are of a different opinion, I cannot help myself.’

Babbage got up from his chair, wished his Prime Minister good morning, and abruptly left the room.

Hurt and humiliated by the meeting, Babbage was hardly likely to want to write about it or generally make his hurt and humiliation public. But very likely he could not help speaking about it to his closest friends. One of these, the great novelist Charles Dickens, appears to have drawn on Babbage’s disappointment at the hands of the British Government in his
1855
novel
Little Dorrit
, which is a scathing indictment on the innate cruelty of official institutions.

From the years
1839
to
1851
, Babbage and Dickens lived only a few hundred yards from each other; Dickens in his large house on Devonshire Terrace in Marylebone Road, and Babbage in Dorset Street. They probably met in
1838
through their mutual friend the actor William Macready. Babbage and Dickens moved in similar circles, and were often guests at each other’s dinner parties.

Dickens was most certainly not of a scientific disposition or frame of mind, and had little or no technical knowledge of Babbage’s work. But he had no problem understanding the benefit to mankind and freedom from mental drudgery that a calculation machine would bring. Writing from Broadstairs, Kent, to his brother Henry Austin on
20
December
1851
about the rocketing costs of the modifications to his new house in London’s Tavistock Place, Dickens was ruefully and ironically to comment that the bill submitted by the builder was ‘too long to be added up, until Babbage’s Calculating Machine shall be improved and finished …

there is not paper enough ready-made, to carry it over and bring it forward again’.

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A question of faith and funding

A crucial theme in
Little Dorrit
is how the cold and indifferent workings of the law and government bring human misery. The tenth chapter of the first part of the book, entitled with transparent irony ‘Containing the Whole Science of Government’, focuses on a Government department dedicated to never getting anything done. Dickens calls it the ‘Circumlocution Office’: The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office …

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT … Through this

delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be—

what it was.

One of the most put-upon victims of the Circumlocution Office is an inventor called Daniel Doyce. Dickens describes him as a ‘a quiet, plain, steady man’, who ‘seemed a little depressed, but neither ashamed nor repentant’.

We are told that a dozen years earlier, Doyce has perfected

‘an invention (involving a very curious secret process) of great importance to his country and his fellow creatures’. But instead of winning praise from officialdom for what he has done, from the moment Doyce approaches the Government for help with funding, he ‘ceases to be an innocent citizen, and becomes a culprit. He is treated, from that instant, as a man who has done some infernal action.’

Dickens’s imagination got by perfectly well, most of the time, without needing to use real people as the basis for all the characters he created. There were about
2000
of these, according to Peter Ackroyd, one of his most popular modern biographers.

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The similarities between Doyce and Babbage, though, are too striking to be ignored. The description of Doyce’s appearance is a good fit to Babbage to begin with (‘… a practical looking man, whose hair had turned grey, and in whose face and forehead there were deep lines of cogitation’) and even the timing of when Doyce ‘perfected’ his invention (‘a dozen years ago’) which after all is an entirely free choice on Dickens’s part, seems to have been chosen very deliberately to allude to Babbage’s work. As for the account of the invention itself, its ‘great importance to his country and his fellow creatures’ also seems to point directly to Babbage, as does the ironic account of Doyce’s plight voiced by another character, Mr Meagles:

‘… he has been ingenious, and he has been trying to turn his ingenuity to his country’s service. That makes him a public offender, sir.’

And what Doyce says about how inventors such as he are treated at home compared with abroad could easily have been words taken down pretty well verbatim from some lament Babbage might, in a self-pitying mood, have made at one of Dickens’s numerous dinner parties at Devonshire Terrace, over the turtle soup, the turbot, and the roast lamb.

‘Yes. No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That’s only natural. But what I mean, when I say that people who put themselves in the same position, are mostly used in the same way—’

‘In England,’ said Mr Meagles.

‘Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into foreign countries, that’s quite different. And that’s the reason why so many go there.’

For Babbage, the conclusion to his meeting with Peel certainly meant the end of any realistic hopes he might have had for completing the Difference Engine in England, let alone for build-114

A question of faith and funding

ing the massively more ambitious Analytical Engine. It is no exaggeration to say that Airy’s damning report on the Difference Engine, and Peel’s decision to accept his recommendation, put paid to any prospect of a cogwheel-based information technology revolution taking place in Britain in the
1840
s.

Yet, there was no inherent reason why Babbage’s machines should not have formed the technology for such a revolution in the
1840
s or
1850
s. If ever there was an age which deployed remarkable energy in planning and advancing the practical implementation of innovative technology, it was the nineteenth century.

A confidence in the future, a conviction that life was getting better, a belief that man not only has the potential for happiness and self-fulfilment but has a duty actively to pursue these destinies; all these lay at the heart of so much nineteenth-century thinking. When a new and useful technology became practical and feasible it was invariably pressed into service without delay.