BABBAGE, Charles

(1792-1871)

   UK mathematician and inventor, a founder of the Analytical Society in 1812, and a Fellow of the Royal Society from 1816. His recognition of the necessity for accurate calculation of mathematical tables, as used in navigation and astronomy, led in 1820-22 to his designing and building a calculating machine, using which he soon generated a table of logarithms for the positive integers up to 108,000. He then worked on a far more sophisticated machine, a full-size Difference Engine, intended to use punched cards in the computation and printing of mathematical tables. Impatient and not unduly practical, he abandoned this device before it was completed in favour of the far more ambitious Analytical Engine which, if built, would have been the world's first COMPUTER. It was this machine for which Ada, Countess Lovelace, wrote programs, as described in Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers - A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and her Description of the First Computer (1992) ed Betty A.Toole. (Much later the computer language Ada was so-named in her honour.) CB spent decades on the project, deriving many of the basic principles of the digital computer, but 19th-century technology restricted him to mechanical rather than electronic components, and consequently the machine was never finished - indeed, it was probably by definition unfinishable. The Difference Engine remains on view in the Science Museum, London. Writers who have extrapolated a full-blown success of Babbage's machines into alternate histories (ALTERNATE WORLDS; STEAMPUNK) include Michael F.FLYNN, in In the Country of the Blind (1990), and William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK), which transfers Ada's interest to the earlier machine.