Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage 

Charles Babbage was born in London, 26 December 1791, St. Stephan day in London. He was the son of Benjamin Babbage, a banking partner in Ecclesiastes, who owned the Bitton Estate in Teignmouth and Betsy Plumleigh Babbage. It was around 1808 when Babbage family decided to move into the old Rowden House, located in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a traffic warden in the nearby church of St. Michael.

His father Charles was a wealthy man, so it was possible for Charles to receive instruction from several elite schools and teachers during his basic training. He was about eight, when he had to move to a rural school to get out of a dangerous fever. His parents decided that his "brain was not being taxed too much"; Babbage wrote: "This great

idleness may have led to some of my childish reasoning's." 

Thereafter, he joined King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, a thriving comprehensive school, which still operates today, but his fragile health forced him back to private lessons in one period. When he finally joined a 30-student academy closed number led by Reverend Stephen Freeman. Academy had a big library where Babbage used to study mathematics by himself, and learned to love it. He had two more personal tutors after leaving the academy. One was a priest in Cambridge, and about him Babbage said: "I am afraid I am not from all the advantages that I could have done.". The second was an Oxford tutor, who taught Classics Babbage, so he could be accepted to Cambridge. 

Babbage arrived at Trinity College in Cambridge in October 1810th He had a great culture - he knew Lagrange, Leibniz, Lacroix, and Simpson ... and he was very disappointed with the mathematics programs available at Cambridge. So he, with J. Herschel, G. Peacock, and other friends, decided to form the Analytical Society. 

When, in 1812, Babbage transferred to Peter House, Cambridge, he was best at math, but

he failed to graduate with honors. 

He received an honorary degree later, without even being examinated, in 1814. 

In 1814, Charles Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. His father, for some reason never gave his approvation. They lived in peace with 5 Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London. Only three of their 8 children were grown. 

Tragically, Charles' father, his wife and one of his sons all died in 1827. 

Children:

Benjamin Herschel Babbage (1815) 

Charles Babbage Whitmore (1817) 

Georgiana Whitmore Babbage (1818) 

Edward Stewart Babbage (1819) 

Francis Moore Babbage (1821) 

Dugald Bromheald Babbage (1823) 

Henry Prevost Babbage (1824) 

Alexander Forbes Babbage (1827) 

Timothy grants Babbage (1829) 

Design of computers: 

In Babbage's time, there was a very high percentage of error in the calculation of mathematical tables, Babbage once planned to find a new method that can use to make it mechanically, removing human error factor. This idea began to tickle his brain very early in 1812. 

Three different elements influenced him in the decision he disliked disorder and unprecision, he was very skilled with logarithmical tables, he was inspired by an existing work on calculators W. Schickard, Pascal B. and G. Leibniz. 

He discussed the main principles of a calculating engine in a letter he wrote to Sir H. Davy at the beginning of the 1822nd 

Difference Engine: 

   Babbage presented with something he called "Difference Engine" to the Royal Astronomical Society, 14 Jun 1822, and in a document entitled "Memo on the use of a machine to calculate the astronomical and mathematical tables." 

It was able to calculate polynomials using a numerical method called the differences

method. 

Society approved the idea, and the government gave him £ 1500 to build it in 1823. Charles Babbage converted one room in her home for a workshop and hired Joseph Clement overseeing construction of the engine. Each part must be formed by hand using custom tools, many of which Babbage himself designed. He took extensive tours in the industry to better understand manufacturing processes. Based on these tours, and his experience with the difference engine, Babbage published on the economy of machinery and production in 1832. It was the first publication of what we would now call operations research. 

Georgiana's death, Babbage's father, and a little son interrupted construction in 1827. Work was already heavily taxed Babbage, and he was on the verge of collapse. John Herschel and several other friends convinced Babbage to take a trip to Europe to recuperate. He went through Holland, Belgium, Germany and Italy, visiting universities and manufacturing facilities. 

In Italy he learned that he had been appointed to the Lucasian professor of mathematics. He originally wanted to turn down the position, but several friends convinced him to accept. He moved to 1 Dorset Street back to England in 1828. 

The difference engine project had come under fire during Babbage's absence. Rumors had spread that Babbage had wasted public money, the machine did not work and that it had no practical significance if it did. John Herschel and the Royal Society publicly defended the engine. The government continued its support, promotion £ 1500 on 29 April 1829, £ 3000 on 3 December and 3000 pounds, 24 February 1830th Work continued, but Babbage would have continued difficulty getting money from the Treasury. 

Babbage's problems with Treasury coincided with a long series of disagreements with Clemens. Babbage had built a two-storey, 50 foot wide garage behind his house. It had a glass roof for lighting and a fire-resistant, dust-free space to contain the machine.

Clement refused to move their business to the new workshop and demanded more money for the difficulty to travel around town to oversee construction. In response, suggested that Babbage Clemens draw his salary directly from the Treasury. Before this, Babbage would get money from the government that he would use to pay Clement. He often had to pay Clemens out of his own pocket when the bureaucracy lagged behind Clement's pay schedule. Clement refused the request and stopped working. 

Clement now refused to provide drawings and tools used to build the difference engine. After an investment of £ 23,000, including 6,000 pounds of Babbage's own money, work on the unfinished machine ended in 1834. Charles wrote: "The drawings and parts of the engine is at length in a safe place, I've almost worn out with disgust and annoyance at the whole affair." In 1842 the government officially abandoned the project. 

Analytical engine: 

While he was separated from the difference engine, Babbage began to think of an improved calculation engine. Between 1833 and 1842, he tried to build a machine that would be programmed to do all the calculations, not just those relating to polynomial equations. The first breakthrough came when he redirected the machine output to input for the further equations. He described this as the machine "eats its own tail." It did not take much longer for him to define the key points of his analytical engine. 

The mature analytical engine used punch cards adapted from the Jacquard loom to specify the inputs and calculations to perform. The engine consisted of two parts: the mill and shop. The turbine, which resembles a modern computer's CPU, the operations conducted on values from the store, we would consider memory. It was the world's first general-purpose computers. 

A design for this emerged from the 1835th The extent of the work that was truly amazing. Babbage and a handful of teams have created 500 large technical drawings, 1000 sheets of mechanical notation, and 7000 sheets of scribbles. The completed mill would measure 15 meters high and 6 meters in diameter. The 100-digit store would stretch to 25 meters long. Babbage built only small test parts for his new engine, a complete engine was never completed. In 1842, after repeated failures to obtain funding from the First Lord of the Treasury Babbage approached Sir Robert Peel for funding. Peel refused, and offered Babbage knight instead. Babbage refused. He would continue to modify and improve designs for many years. 

In October 1842, Federico Luigi, Conte Menabrea, an Italian general and mathematician, published a paper on the analytical engine. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, a lifelong friend of Babbage, translated the paper into English. Charles suggested that she add notes to accompany the paper. In a series of letters between 1842 and 1843 cooperated couple of seven notes, the total length of which was three times longer than the actual paper. In a note Ada prepared an overview of the performance of a program that Babbage wrote to calculate Bernoulli numbers. In another, she wrote about a generalized algebra engine that can perform operations on symbols and numbers. Lovelace was perhaps the first to understand the broader objectives of Babbage's machine, and some consider her the world's first computer programmer. She began working on a book describing the analytical engine in more detail, but it was never finished. 

Second Difference Engine: 

Between October 1846 and March 1849 Babbage started designing a second difference engine using knowledge from the analytical engine. It used only about 8000 parts, three times fewer than the first. It was a marvel of engineering industry. 

In contrast to the analytical engine, which he constantly refined and modified, he did not try to improve the second difference engine after completing the initial design. Babbage made no attempt to actually build the machine. 

The 24 schematics remained Science Museum archives until a full-size replica was built 1985-1991 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth. It measured 11 meters long, 7 feet tall and 18 inches deep and weighs 2.6 tones. Limits of precision was limited to those achievable by Babbage. 

Babbage's results: 

In 1824 Babbage won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society "for his invention of an engine for calculating mathematical and astronomical tables". 

From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific journals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical Society in 1820, and the Statistical Society in 1834. 

In 1837, in response to the official eight Bridgewater Treatises "On the power of wisdom and goodness of God manifested in creation", he released his ninth Bridgewater treatise presents the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create a divine legislator to make laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book contains extracts from correspondence he had with John Herschel

on the subject. 

Charles Babbage also achieved notable results in cryptography. He broke Vigen's Auto key cipher and the much weaker cipher list called Vigen cipher today. Auto key cipher was generally called "the undecipherable cipher list", but due to popular confusion, many thought that the weaker polyalphabetic digit list was the "undecipherable" one. Babbage discovery was used to aid English military campaigns, and was not published until several years later, as a result credit for the development was instead given to Friedrich Kasiski that made the same discovery some years after Babbage. 

Babbage also invented the pilot (also called a cow-catcher), the metal frame attached to the front of locomotives that clears the tracks of obstacles in 1838. He has also conducted several studies on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway. 

He only once tried to get into when public life in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. He came in last in the polls. 

Parts of Babbage's uncompleted mechanisms are available to visit in London Science Museum. In 1991, a difference engine was completed, from Babbage's original plans, and it worked perfectly.