Authors: James Essinger
Jacquard’s Web
Benjamin Babbage: a harsh and money-obsessed
man whose money funded his son’s life’s work.
standing of his importance in the world and his success. Little else, however, is known about his personality except what can be inferred from the letters about him written by his son Charles and Charles’s wife Georgiana.
Judging from the letters, Benjamin was frequently prone to moods that were anything but jovial, at least in how he treated his eldest son. Indeed, the verbal picture these letters paint of Benjamin suggest that he could on occasion resoundingly con-form to the now almost clichéd image of the wealthy, nineteenth-century businessman, the sort of man for whom money has become not so much a simple measure of business success as an all-consuming religion. Benjamin was often impatient with Charles and abusive to him, frequently accusing him of failing to 52
From weaving to computing
make serious career plans for the future, even indeed initially refusing to approve his wish to marry Georgiana until he had made safe headway in some suitable recognized profession.
Charles found his father’s attitude difficult to fathom; Georgiana came from a family of quality, had a fortune of her own, and was by all accounts a thoroughly charming and good person. But Benjamin believed that young men should make money a higher priority than matrimony.
The truth, however, was that Charles
had
chosen a profession, but that unfortunately it would not be seen as one until about
1950
.
Yet no matter how testy and troublesome Benjamin may have been, scientific history owes him a debt of gratitude, for his preoccupation with money was to fund his son’s life’s work. On Benjamin’s death in
1827
, Charles inherited almost his entire fortune. The legacy, including Benjamin’s cash in the bank and his silver and gold plate, was worth about £
100 000
.
To set this amount in perspective, when Charles Dickens died in
1870
after a lifetime of working harder than almost any writer has ever worked, he left about £
98 000
in his will.
Between
1827
and
1870
there was almost no change in the value of money in Britain, so Charles Babbage inherited more than the fruit of Dickens’s life’s work. Furthermore, Babbage was still young and healthy enough to enjoy it.
How much would Babbage’s £
100 000
be worth today? A reasonable rule of thumb is that during the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, amounts of money should be multiplied by about fifty times to give an
approximate
idea of what they would be worth today. Taking everything into account, the legacy which Benjamin left to Charles was worth about £
5
million (about $
8
million) in today’s money. It freed Charles Babbage from financial care for the rest of his life and made possible the liberation of his scientific imagination.
There is a particular significance in how Charles’s scientific career was funded. So many of Benjamin’s customers had made a 53
Jacquard’s Web
fortune from the cloth industry that it is really no exaggeration to say that Charles Babbage’s life’s work was itself financed by the cloth business. This being so, there was a sense in which when he made such creative use of Jacquard’s ideas in his plans for the Analytical Engine, he was coming home.
As a boy growing up in a wealthy London family, Charles Babbage showed signs at a very early age of a fascination with engineering and mechanics. In his autobiography
Passages from the
Life of a Philosopher
(the word ‘scientist’ was not current until later in the nineteenth century) he writes:
From my earliest years I had a great desire to enquire into the causes of all those little things and events which astonish the childish mind. At a later period I commenced the still more important enquiry into those laws of thought and those aids which assist the human mind in passing from our received knowledge to that other knowledge then unknown to our race. Truth only has been the object of my search, and I am not conscious of ever having turned aside in my enquiries from any fear of the conclusions to which they might lead.
One particular childhood memory describes how he loved to take things apart to find out how they worked:
My invariable question on receiving any new toy, was ‘Mamma, what is inside of it?’ Until this information was obtained those around me had no repose, and the toy itself, I have been told, was generally broken open if the answer did not satisfy my own little ideas of the ‘fitness of things’.
The first reference to machinery in
Passages
is a reminiscence that opens Babbage’s chapter about his boyhood. When he was living in London with his parents, his mother took him to several exhibitions of machinery, including one in Hanover Square, organized by a man who called himself ‘Merlin’.
54
From weaving to computing
I was so greatly interested in it, that the exhibitor remarked the circumstance, and after explaining some of the objects to which the public had access, proposed to my mother to take me up to his workshop, where I should see still more wonderful automata. We accordingly ascended to the attic. There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high.
One of these walked or rather glided along a space of about four feet, when she turned round and went back to her original place. She used an eye-glass occasionally, and bowed frequently, as if recognising her acquaintances. The motions of her limbs were singularly graceful.
The other silver figure was an admirable
danseuse
, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings, and opened its beak. This lady attitudinised in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible.
These silver figures were the chef d’oeuvres of the artist: they had cost him years of unwearied labour, and were not even then finished.
The sombre note with which Babbage ends what started as a pleasant boyhood recollection carries a piercing poignancy in relation to the struggle that dominated his own life.
Charles Babbage’s formal education was rather haphazard. He attended a small school near Exeter, and then another close to Enfield, in those days a small town north of London. Later he studied with a clergyman-tutor in Cambridge before returning to Devon to be educated at Totnes Grammar School. The final step in his pre-university education was a period spent studying Classics under an Oxford tutor, also in Totnes. Despite this varied schooling, by the time Babbage went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1810
he was able to deal with mathematical questions in the three different types of mathematical notation 55
Jacquard’s Web
then current: the ones used by, respectively, the great mathematicians Newton, Leibniz, and Lagrange.
Cambridge—like Oxford—had an illustrious reputation for learning, but the teaching of mathematics there left a great deal to be desired. Maths was not seen as a practical research topic that might have a key role to play in the world. Instead, it was regarded as a mental training for future clergyman, lawyers, and gentlemen who would live lives of genteel but unspectacular, and for the most part unproductive, learning. The emphasis was on intensive coaching to train students to solve problems that would be set in the examinations held at the end of the year (in practice, many examinations actually took place in January). These problems were frequently extremely difficult, but they did not have any intrinsic value other than to hone mental agility. They were basically a kind of mathematical crossword puzzle: ingenious, arduous, mentally stimulating, but ultimately a trifle pointless.
Here is an example. It must surely rank as one of the most tortuous questions ever inflicted on an examination candidate.
A question from the Cambridge Tripos examination,
Monday,
17
January
1814
This problem was set for Cambridge undergraduates taking their final examinations in the ‘Tripos’: the mathematics examination that would lead to a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree being awarded to successful candidates. Babbage himself probably tackled this very question, for he graduated with a BA in
1814
and would consequently most likely have sat the paper on which this question appeared. This daunting puzzle was only one of several similar problems candidates were expected to answer on that Monday morning.
‘From the vertex of a paraboloid of given dimensions, a part equal to one-fourth of the whole is cut off by a plane parallel 56
From weaving to computing
to the base; and the frustum being then placed in a fluid with its smaller end downwards, sinks till the surface of the fluid bisects the axis which is vertical. It is required to determine the specific gravity of the paraboloid, that of the fluid in which it is immersed and the density of the atmosphere being given.’
Charles Babbage had never seen mathematics as a mere exercise in solving frightful problems like this. Instead, what
he
dreamed of doing was using the great science of quantity to achieve practical improvements in the processes that mattered in everyday life.
Certainly, the time for such an attitude to mathematics had never been riper. Britain was in the midst of an unprecedented technology revolution. Transport, communications, and above all the application of steam power to industry were giving people the opportunity to use levels of power thousands of times greater than that which the horse, or the human hand, could produce.
Babbage desperately wanted to play his part in this revolution, so he withdrew from his formal curriculum at Cambridge and pursued his own mathematical and scientific agenda. At the time, gentlemen scholars were allowed to do this.
With two friends he had met at Cambridge—John Herschel (son of the famous astronomer Sir William Herschel) and one George Peacock—Babbage formed what he called the ‘Analytical Society’. Its main objective was to overhaul the study of calculus at Cambridge and replace the notation of Newton with what Babbage and his friends regarded as the much more efficient notation invented by Leibniz. The campaign was, in the end, successful, although it would not be won until after Babbage graduated from Cambridge in
1814
. But the vigour of the arguments put forward to support the change forced the outside mathematical world to start to take notice of the founders of the Analytical Society, and particularly of Babbage and Herschel.
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Jacquard’s Web
The friendship between these two was the first serious intellectual friendship either had had. They were touchingly good companions. They addressed each other as ‘Dear Herschel’ or
‘Dear Babbage’ in letters: an extremely intimate salutation by the formal standards of the time. The informality of their letters (which usually contained abundant mathematical formulae as well as more personal material) is neatly explained by a comment Herschel made at the start of a letter he wrote to Babbage on
25
February
1813
:
When men with common pursuits in which they are deeply interested, correspond on the subject of those pursuits, the trifling ceremonials of an ordinary correspondence may in great measure be waived.
Babbage also enjoyed the social opportunities Cambridge offered.
He played chess and whist and helped to form other, more jovial societies which looked into matters of comic interest to their members. One was a Ghost Club, where Babbage and his friends earnestly discussed the supernatural. Another was the so-called
‘Extractors Club’. This made plans to extract any member from the madhouse should his relatives ever manage to get him sent to one. The disadvantage, perhaps, was that possibly the very act of becoming a member of such a club might have been a spur to relatives to do precisely what its members feared.
At the start of the summer vacation of
1811
Babbage returned to Totnes. He often spent part of the summer at a house his father still kept in the town. It was most likely during this summer that Babbage met a young woman named Georgiana Whitmore in the seaside town of Teignmouth, about twelve miles from Totnes. When Babbage first got to know Georgiana he was nineteen, she a year younger. She had fine, delicate features and beautiful golden-brown hair. All the evidence suggests that Georgiana and Babbage took to each other right away. The following summer they became engaged. For the first time Babbage visited her family in Dudmaston, Shropshire.
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From weaving to computing
Babbage and Georgiana were married on
2
July
1814
, shortly after Babbage came down from Cambridge. The couple had a comfortable income from Benjamin, who had either finally over-come his objections to the marriage, or had come to see in his practical way that the love between the two young people meant that he had been presented with something of a
fait accompli
.
Babbage and Georgiana rented a house at
5
Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London. Babbage wasted no time in making his mark on the scientific scene.
During
1815
he gave a series of lectures on astronomy to the Royal Institution. In the spring of
1816
he was elected a member of the Royal Society, a learned assembly of all the great thinkers in the land. For the next few years Babbage’s work was mainly mathematical. He published more than a dozen learned papers, all of which were regarded as highly competent, though not of enormous importance. In
1815
Georgiana gave birth to a son, the first of at least eight children, of whom only three survived to maturity. The Babbages led a pleasant and varied social life, with visits to friends in the country and soirées to which they invited their friends and influential people. In due course, as we have seen, the Babbages’ soirées ranked among London’s most famous and glittering social occasions.
It was in
1819
that Babbage and Herschel made a trip to France, the first of many excursions they made to that country to exchange information and ideas with other men of science. The two men travelled as prosperous gentlemen intellectuals. John Herschel’s father Sir William was at the time one of the most famous astronomers in the world. He had taught himself astronomy and was so enthusiastic about this science that he had devoted enormous ingenuity and effort to make telescopes for himself at home that were actually superior to the ones used at the Greenwich observatory. His discovery of Uranus in
1781
had made him famous overnight; it was the first new planet to be discovered since prehistoric times. With Sir William’s reputation opening doors for the two young men, they were able to meet several 59