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Doron Swade

The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer Hardcover – September 1, 2001

by Doron Swade (Author)

4.6 35 ratings

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A portrait of early nineteenth-century mathematician Charles Babbage describes his efforts to construct the first computing machine more than one century before the invention of the modern computer. 22,500 first printing.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Viking Adult
Publication date

September 1, 2001
Dimensions

5.25 x 1.25 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0670910201
ISBN-13

978-0670910205
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What a difference a century makes. Doron Swade, technology historian and assistant director of London's Science Museum, investigates the troubles that plagued 19th-century knowledge engineers in The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer.

The author is in a unique position to appreciate the technical difficulties of the time, as he led a team that built a working model of a Difference Engine, using contemporary materials, in time for Babbage's 1991 bicentenary. The meat of the book is comprised of the story of the first computing machine design as gathered from the technical notes and drawings curated by Swade. Though Babbage certainly had problems translating his ideas into brass, the reader also comes to understand his fruitless, drawn-out arguments with his funders. Swade had it comparatively easy, though his depictions of the frustrating search for money and then working out how best to build the enormous machine in the late 1980s are delightful.

It is difficult--maybe impossible--to draw a clear, unbroken line of influence from Babbage to any modern computer researchers, but his importance both as the first pioneer and as a symbol of the joys and sorrows of computing is unquestioned. Swade clearly respects his subject deeply, all the more so for having tried to bring the great old man's ideas to life. The Difference Engine is lovingly comprehensive and will thrill readers looking for a more technical examination of Babbage's career. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791-1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets appended by more errata sheets. The inventive Babbage entered completely new territory in his struggle to design an automatic computing machine that could achieve an "absolute integrity of results," and in the 1820s he completed plans for the "Difference Engine." Swade (coauthor of The Dream Machine), an assistant director at the London Science Museum, offers an engaging biography of Babbage and his milieu (buttressed by 16 pages of b&w photos and illustrations). Babbage convinced the government to invest in his invention, but the technology of the day made it prohibitively expensive to complete the machine to his satisfaction. He went on to design the "Analytical Engine," a quicker, more advanced, more broadly applicable machine that could be programmed with punch cards to do computations and store data. Unfortunately, Babbage never got to build this second machine, either. His life was full of personal tragedy, political confrontations, the personal vendettas of colleagues and the frustration of being unable to build what he designed. In the 1980s, Swade gathered a team of experts and tried to make sense of Babbage's drawings and notes in a modern quest to construct what Babbage could not. Swade's able account of this gifted scientist, his cohorts and their curious endeavors enhances and broadens the growing body of literature on computer history. (Sept. 10)Forecast: The "technological frontier" parallels between Babbage's age and our own are becoming increasingly clear, and Swade's immersion in and love for Babbage's project comes through here (beyond some British reserve). Of all the books this season whose flap copy compares them to Longitude, this title has one of the best shots at a similar breakout.

From Library Journal

One of the first devices to be considered an automatic digital computer was conceived by the eccentric British mathematician Charles Babbage in 1822. In Babbage's time, teams of mathematicians working around the clock with primitive calculations generated complex logarithmic and trigonometric tables manually. Noting the large number of errors in these tables, Babbage proposed building an enormous mechanical calculator that he called a "Difference Engine" to calculate them automatically. Engineer and historian of technology Swade (coauthor, The Dream Machine) tells the story of Babbage's determined efforts to construct the first computing machine, which was, unfortunately, only partially completed despite financial backing from the British government. Nonetheless, Babbage's story, set against the politics and science of the early Victorian age, is fascinating. More than 150 years after its conception, one of Babbage's Difference Engines was constructed from original drawings by a team headed up by Swade at London's Science Museum. Recommended for an informed audience. Joe Accardi, William Rainey Harper Coll., Palatiane, IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Babbage is regarded as a pioneer in the computing field and has already been the subject of several biographies. Any new biographer would face a challenge in finding original material, but Swade amply answers the call. Swade became involved with a project in the late 1980s to mark Babbage's two-hundredth birthday by building one of his designs, the Difference Engine No. 2. The details of this construction, bedeviled by gremlins both mechanical and financial, provide an explanation for why Babbage never fully completed any of his calculating contraptions. A partial answer lies in the experience of Swade's construction group, which contended with a maddening variety of jams in the engine. And a partial answer lies in Babbage's difficult personality, for although he was well liked by many fellow scientists, he alienated the powerful people who could have aided his projects. Despite the lack of financial backing, Babbage kept working at his designs, and Swade's exemplary mediation of them for nontechnical readers will fascinate and inform anyone interested in the history of computers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A moving and fascinating account of a brilliant man... -- Kirkus, June 15, 2001

A moving and fascinating account of a brilliant man... -- Kirkus, June 15, 2001

About the Author

Doron Swade is Assistant Director and Head of Collections at the Science Museum in London.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking Adult (September 1, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670910201
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670910205
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.25 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #948,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #133 in Computer & Technology Biographies
- #2,047 in Scientist Biographies

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4.6 35 ratings

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Charles Hall

Wonderful combination of history and modern day triumph!

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2001

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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.

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Todd

Worth the read

Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2020

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This book gives a full account on a mans lifetime dedication to his Differential Machines. I learned so much more than I expected from having read the story of Charles Babbage and those he interacted with.

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dwc309

Well written engrossing book.

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2014

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This is a well written book that gives a really good feel for how the engine fit into the machining accuracy of the time, how Babbage developed the idea, why he didn't finish it, and how the engine fits into the big picture. I really enjoyed it.

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Amazon Customer

Easy read nice hard cover book

Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2014

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This was an easy Read.. Also very interesting.If your a geek like me you will like this book. Also if you like mechanics you will appreciate.... Charles Babbage...

One person found this helpful

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Dan K.

Anyone interested in the dawn of computing will be inspired ...

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2015

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Anyone interested in the dawn of computing will be inspired by the machine built by Charles Babbage. The requirements for the accuracy of his design brought about the need for hardware standardization. Giant leaps in technology all came about through Mr. Babbage's machine.

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Avid Reader

Well-done dip into computing history and personality

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2011

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.

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glen cochrane

The Babbage Machine - Then and Now

Reviewed in Canada on January 23, 2014

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A very interesting story, the book is divided into two distinct parts: that of Babbage (his life and his attempt to build his machines) and that of the author's lead role in building one of Babbage's machines in the 1980s-90s. After reading the former section, I wondered how the second, modern-day narrative would read. As it is, the description of the modern project illuminates much of the scope and many of the obstacles that Babbage faced, or didn't get the chance to face, a century and a half earlier. The modern day builders were up against a deadline, however, despite all of the technical advantages, and advantages of hindsight, the project was an incredible undertaking of funding and paperwork. The size of the machine and the amount of working parts make me wonder if Babbage really knew the extent of the project that he spent his life working on, or if his true genius lay in the concept and generating ideas for the future.

One of the great things about the book is the valid debate that it often alludes to - a question that was valid then as it is now: How is building such a machine justified?

The presence of the book (as the larger project) is the author's answer in itself. It was an interesting question for me to think about, as I read through the plight of Babbage and the context that he worked in. Several players in the tale strongly oppose the spending of resources to build a machine, and the book often admits that they are right to think so. This type of question, this book, made me think about the benefits of progress in different ways than intended, the need for people like Babbage to dream, take risks, and fail, for the benefit of a larger procession. And mostly, the separation of ideas and concepts for furthering knowledge, vs the practicality and means (not to mention time frame) for putting into motion ideas.

The book is honest and fair. It gave me a glimpse of a time in western culture where technology was a garden for invention and forward thought...not that much unlike now, in the age of rapidly advancing communication and information design. The two stories of the Difference Engine, then and now, are really a nice comparison of context.

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