Customer Reviews

The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer

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This book has 2 basic parts. First, is the discussion of Babbage's life and his computing engines. Second, is the author's modern-day story of attempting to complete Babbage's Difference Engine, a feat which Babbage himself was unable to do. I picked up this book for the first part. I wanted to learn about Babbage and how his engines worked. While the author gives a wonderful account of Babbage's life and methodology, he does not clearly describe HOW these engines function. I realize that the engines are extremely complex, but a chapter on the functioning of the Difference Engine trial piece and some diagrams on its operations would have been much appreciated. Unfortunately, as were Babbage's contemporaries, we are left mainly in dark as to how simply turning a crank can produce the necessary additions. The author also never fully explains the "method of finite differences" upon which the function of the difference engine is based.

The most amazing part of the book is the overview of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine- the first programmable computer. It is amazingly similar in concept to today's modern computers, but it uses motion through metal gears and cams, instead of electricity through logic gates and wires. I expected to be bored by the modern-day story, but I actually was interested in the process of reconstructing this 19th century machine. It was enlightening to see how the same problems Babbage faced 150 years before troubled engineers today.

Overall, I recommend this book for those curious about Babbage and his engines. However, the writing seems jerky and unorganized in parts, and there is little technical description of the engines' functionality.

What if we had had computers a hundred and fifty years ago? It could have happened. The plans were drawn up for a computer that would have been very much like those of today, except it would have run on cogs, gears, levers, springs, and maybe steam power. We only got around to computers a hundred years later, but things could have worked out much differently, if the work of Charles Babbage had taken off. Doron Swade knows just how well such an engine could have worked. He built one. Or rather, his team within the London Science Museum built a calculating engine that Babbage had designed. It worked, just as Babbage knew it would. Swade tells the story of Babbage and his amazing machines in _The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer_ (Viking). Babbage's accomplishments turned out to be futile in the end, but Swade shows us how there is much to admire in his quest, successful or not.

Babbage wrote papers on chess, taxation, lock-picking, philosophy, submarines, archeology, cryptanalysis, and many other diverse efforts. He was an unstoppable inventor and tinkerer; he invented (but didn't get credit for) the ophthalmoscope every doctor has used, and the cowcatcher installed on the front of locomotives. But what he loved most of all were his computing machines. The Industrial Revolution was making everything else by steam; why not calculations, and perfect tables of them? He designed just such a calculating engine, and although because of various problems it didn't get built, he never stopped tinkering with it, and he designed an even bigger calculation machine that would have done, in its cogwheel way, all the basics that computers now do.

Babbage is sometimes called the grandfather of the computer, but he is more like an uncle. There is no evidence that any of his intricate and visionary machines influenced the design of electronic computers. Swade's engrossing book gives a good capsule biography of a fascinating man, but more importantly, it shows a hands-on appreciation for the machines he had dreamed up. Babbage knew that his dreams were doomed for his own time, but he had an inkling of what was to come; he wrote of the inventor's lot, "The certainty that a future age will repair the injustice of the present, and the knowledge that the more distant the day of reparation, the more he has outstripped the efforts of his contemporaries, may well sustain him against the sneers of the ignorant, or the jealousy of rivals." He was right again.

Ahhh, the fascinating story of Charles Babbage. For 100 years he was a footnote to mathematical history, for the next 40 years his story was a required paragraph in the preface of every Computer Science text book. In the last few decades there has finally been serious study of his work. Now with this book we have a highly readable compendium of his life and work, with the added excitement of a modern day adventure.

The first 210 pages provide the best description of Babbage's life yet. All the bits and pieces I've read in numbers of other books on Babbage are here, as told by a modern expert who puts it all in perspective. That perspective is essential, as Babbage's life was filled with controversy and conflict.

The last 100 pages of the book tell the story of building one of Babbage's planned-but-never-built calculating engines in the museum where the author works. It is this personal experience with building a working machine from the 150 year old plans that adds the magic "hands on" touch to the author's analysis of Babbage's tale.

This is a highly readable and fascinating book and undoubtedly the best single volume on the legacy of Charles Babbage.

This book is another in a growing and continuing series of biographies of influential but sometimes obscure historic figures who've made significant contributions to science and the arts. Sobel's "Longitude" and Winchester's "The Map That Changed the World" are similar efforts. I hope the list gets longer.

This is one of the best of the type. Babbage--the subject of the book--is not so obscure since his role in the development of the modern computer is popular science dogma.

In good lucid prose, Swade explains the visionary aspect of Babbage's mind and provides context and texture--social and historical--to make Babbage's story compelling and believable. There is no hero worship or hyperbole. Babbage's critics are given the same fair-minded handling as the book's central subject.

Woven into the biographical narrative, Swade deals with the complexities of building Babbage's First Difference Engine--a part of the book I found fascinating. We live in a world in which every screw, girder, plate and bolt is manufactured to internationl standards of size, shape and strength. Babbage undertook bulding his First Difference Engine using thousands of hand-made small parts during an era when there were absolutely no standards for any machinery.

Swade also deals gracefully with the role Lord Byron's daughter, Ada, played in Babbage's career. Her work consisted of an annotated translation from Italian of a report on Babbage's machine. Alas, she wasn't the avatar of modern analysis.

After the biography proper, Swade describes how--during the 1980s--the London Science Museum undertook building the first complete version of a Babbage Difference Engine. I found the detail about financing the project hard slogging, but the descriptions of building the huge 19th century machine using 19th century standards were engaging and interesting because the modern builders even though equipped with all we've learned since Babbage's death confronted all the unexpected difficulties Babbage himself would have encountered had any of his machines been completed during his lifetime.

The best part of the book is the very end in which Swade summarizes Babbage's contribution to computing. His conclusion will surprise many readers. After finishing the book, I took down my 1968, 200th anniversary edition of the Brittanica and read there that Babbage was indeed the father of modern computing--pace Swade. Interestingly, Alan Turing doesn't have an entry.

Author, engineer, visionary, genius. Charles Babbage. The man born to lead humankind into a utopian era propelled by automatic computation machines. But by some cosmic prank he was born not at the first glow of the electrified age, but much earlier in a coal-fired industrial age in which neither precision production machine tools nor even the standard screw thread existed. And electricity? The triode, the fundamental active device at the root of the electronics big bang, was just being nudged to life a full generation after Babbage's death. Today, countless bits of silicon at our fingertips and spread across the globe and above our heads pulse with programs which manage everything from communications to transportation to entertainment. Inspiration for our globally connected engineers and scientists springs from the incredible developments in communications, analytical tools, and nano and bio-technologies. Babbage's muse was a Victorian lady adorned in steam power.
Author Doron Swade's description of the analysis of Babbage's drawings and of the trials engaged in the actual modern day build of Difference Engine #2 leaves me with a bit of a sense of sorrow for old Charles. It just doesn't seem plausible that he could have pulled this off had he a dozen 19th century lifetimes. Production of the thousands and thousands of precision mechanical parts needed for the construction of his machine would have challenged the industrial capacity of Babbage's day. And even if all the parts had been delivered, did he foresee the time required for the assembly and testing of the machine? The author experienced that the modern day building and debugging of the engine proceeded slowly and with numerous fits and starts. Additionally, Charles may have been flawed with an inability to maintain a consistent focus on the development of his difference engine; he puttered with incessant design changes and was often distracted by any number of scientific developments occurring in his lifetime in the middle half of the 19th century. But his genius and sense of mortality drove him to the only workable solution, that being the preparation of detailed mechanical drawings for a subsequent generation of enthusiasts to discover and execute. So whatever sorrow I felt is now displaced by respect for someone who retreated from his dogged passion for assembling and publicly operating his computational engine into the more solitary labor of transferring his concept to a full set of mechanical drawings. These were the drawings which author Swade and his team used to build the machine nearly a century and a half later.
This is an interesting and educational read for anyone curious about the state of technology and the associated politics in Victorian times. The reader will meet personalities who will be remembered because we have honorably linked their names to important developments including screw threads (Whitworth), a software language (Ada), and a space telescope (Herschel).
So, no, today's world is not driven by fleets of "Babbage engines". He could not have foreseen a future reliant on millions of transistors modulating nano-amps on a device smaller than your thumbnail, and these devices replicated by the millions in our cars, phones, iPods, and dishwashers. I agree with my friend's conclusion that Babbage engines, had they been built and mass produced, would have "died out" with the rise of electronics. It is amazing, however, that Babbage foresaw the configuration of his mechanical Analytical Engine as consisting of two unique but connected components; one, a mechanical entity for carrying out arithmetic operations, and two, a mechanical contrivance where numeric values would be stored. Amazing, because his concept, although relegated to mechanical implementation, predated by a century the concepts detailed by Von Neumann who viewed the configuration of modern computer architecture as consisting of those two fundamental interfaced components - the arithmetic logical unit or central processor, and the computer memory.
Kudos to Swade for bringing the life and times of Charles Babbage to the fore, and for his years of involvement and dedication to the actual construction of Difference Engine #2. There are numerous YouTube entries where you can see the machine operating. Or perhaps you were lucky enough to be awed, as I was, as an actual witness to the operation of Babbage's dream onsite at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This is a terrific book. Beyond that, I have nothing to add to the previous excellent reviews, except to note that it seems to be precisely the same book as Doron Swade's The Cogwheel Brain. I nearly bought both until I checked the tables of contents...

Charles Babbage and John Herschel, the astronomer, were preparing tables for the astronomical society. They needed to check the work of computations by humans, by different computers. The need for tables was particulary important for navigators. The source of error in the tables was clear, human fallibility. The manual production of tables, calculation, transcription, typesetting, and proofreading created opportunities for error. The engine of change in 1821 was the steam engine. Charles Babbage wanted to produce a machine to produce error-free tables.

Babbage entered Trinity in 1810. He studied on his own the work of the French mathematicians. His father was a well-to-do London banker. Charles married and received from his father an allowance of three hundred pounds. In London he established himself in scientific circles. By the spring of 1822 he had a small working model of his first design. Computing devices of the time required manipulation and were limited as to the size of the numbers the devices could handle. Babbit first used the method of differences, addition, in his design. He sent a brief announcement to the Astronomical Society about his invention. He received a mandate from the government and was prepared to build a new machine. He hired Joseph Clement for precision engineering work. Clement and Babbage devised new tools and modified machines. There was a need to produce large numbers of similar parts. Babbage conceived of his machine when manufacturing was in transition. By 1826 Babbage was wholly absorbed in the design of his Difference Engine. The machine was eight feet by seven feet by three feet.

In 1826 Babbage published a book on life assurance. While traveling in Europe following the death of his wife, he learned of his election as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He never resided in Cambridge and gave no lectures. Babbage expressed a view on the decline of science In England. Undoubtedly science was more professional in Prussia and France. Babbage's position alienated some of his supporters. In 1832 part of the engine was put on display in his drawing room. Clement was to leave the project. Work was not resumed. The Treasury Department spent more than seventeen thousand pounds on it.

There is a curious affinity between mathematics, mind, and computing. After the break with Clement, Babbage moved from the Difference Engine to the Analytical Engine. He devised the first automatic mechanisms for multiplication and division. He had in fact designed a general purpose four function calculator. In 1836 he opted for punch cards to control the engine. The Analytical Engine was never built. Babbage worked in isolation. With the Analytical Engine Babbage was seduced by the intellectual quest.

After twenty years the Treasury axed the Difference Engine and wrote off the expense. Between 1846 and 1849 Babbage designed Difference Engine No. 2. Maurice Wilkins believed the Analytical Engine was one of the great accomplishments of the 19th century. The Science Museum in Britain built a version of the Difference Engine No. 2 for an exhibit on Babbage.

Charles Babbage's achievements were lost to history -- or at least lost to most of us -- for more than a century. A handful of people who loved the history of technology or who were experts on life in Georgian London were aware of this man's astounding range of activities. But for the rest of us, blissfully wasting our time on Facebook and Netflix, thoughts of how we got to this point are few and far between. "The Difference Engine" helps to bridge that gap and to give us some understanding of the astounding achievements of the scientific era.

The first 2/3 of the book looks at the life of Babbage, with a special focus on his efforts to develop the first truly automated calculating machine. Others prior to Babbage and working as his contemporaries in the early 19th century tried to do the same thing, but Babbage took it a step further by developing designs for a machine that truly could do complicated calculations without the intervention of a skilled intermediary. Anyone with a very minimal working knowledge of math could operate his Difference Machine -- if the machine could be built.

The author of "Difference Machine" explains with great clarity the importance of the machine and its advances as compared to competing machines. He also explains that extraordinary work done by Babbage and draftsmen and machinists he hired to fashion the necessary 12,000 parts to tiny tolerance levels with hand tools. And the author shows how close Babbage came to realizing his dream.

It's quite a story. The failures of Babbage over more than 40 years to build his machine to a full scale are the human-interest side of the story. While Babbage was a gifted mathematician and inventor, his vision was so far beyond the manufacturing skills of the day that his machine became impossibly costly to build. When his technical demands were coupled with his astoundingly abrasive personality, Babbage lost support of goverment agents about a decade into his work.

Rather than going away, however, Babbage then embarked on an even more incredible pair of quests. First, he expanded the capabilities of his Difference Machine by designing an Analytical Machine, which arguably was the precursor to programmable computers. He was one small leap (and he wrote a couple of cryptic statements that indicated he had made the leap) from using his Analytical Machine to manipulate numbers to using it to manipulate symbols -- that is, what we consider a computer today.

Alas, the Analytical Machine never made it past the stage of incomplete, but detailed drawings. And so, Babbage returned to the Difference Machine, this time greatly improving its efficiency with ingenius designs for storing and carrying numbers and recording the result of each answer.

Along the way, he invented or greatly improved everything from drafting designs to train cow-catchers to an opthalmologic device, o a new theory to explain the presence of God (God is the ultimate computer programmer, so what we perceive of as a random event that God would not let happen, such as an earthquake, is actually part of God's programming to throw variation into the scheme). Oh, and he ran one of the most popular salons in London for two decades.

The book describes these other feats of Babbage in passing. And along the way, it does a great job of exploring and exploding myths about Babbage -- such as whether he really is the "father of the computer" (not really), whether he or his doubters were fools (neither), and whether much of his failure is due to his rash temper (yes).

But then the book takes this weird turn at the end. The author describes the achievement by the Science Museum in England to build his smaller Difference Engine in time to celebrate Babbage's 200th birthday. The author was the curator of computers at the time, and he gives a highly personal and strange tale of the project. Along the way, the author criticizes the museum's directors for charging admission, building exhibits that appeal to the public, pulling funds, and doing dog-and-pony shows for the board members. He also skewers IBM for backing out of a semi-promise to fund the project. And he writes about meetings in dank car parks and manipulating the press to achieve maximum attention and coloring Babbage's original drawings with tea bags (I would call this vandalizing them) in order to make them look more sepai-toned for photos. Very strange. And yet, you can see him on YouTube today, showing the operation of the Difference Machine in a shining glory that Charles Babbage could only envision in his lifetime.

This is the first book I've read on Charles Babbage, but I imagine that there are others that are better. First, this book seems to assume you've already read a book or two about Babbage before. It almost has an apologetic tone and seems to be an answer to what, I assume, have been slights against Babbage and his work. Second, this book is as much about the author and his quest to build a Difference Engine as it is about Babbage himself. If you want to hear about dealing with office politics in an British museum, you may find this interesting.

All in all, this is a fairly dry read. It was interesting at points, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it for your first book on Babbage.

I enjoyed this book very much. It was refreshing to step away from the technical library and read more about the people, machines, trials, and triumphs that occured as far back as the early 1800's.

Though it all you learn about a man who had such vision. His execution could be faulted for many reasons. But in the end the machine works! I can not wait to see the Difference Engine myself someday.