Talk about people who were born ahead of their time. Consider the sad case of Charles Babbage whom some have called "The father of computing". Born in London in 1791, Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who taught math at Cambridge from 1828-39. He spent most of his life attempting to build two calculating machines. One was a contraption he called a ‘difference engine’ which was intended for the calculation of logarithm tables and similar functions by repeated additions using trains of gear wheels. An unfinished portion of the machine can be seen today at the Science Museum in London. Babbage’s second gadget was an “analytical engine” which was designed to perform many different computations, using punched cards. In essence, Babbage had conceived the idea of the modern electronic computer, but the hardware necessary to implement his idea was more than 100 years away. Babbage was a man with a dream which would never be realized in his lifetime simply because his thinking was too far ahead of the hardware of the day. In Babbage’s day, there were NO electronic media. It would be more than 100 years (1844) before the most rudimentary of electronic media (the telegraph) would be invented. It would be another 85 years before the transistor--the forerunner of the integrated circuit and the basis of all digital technology-would make its entrance. The only hardware Babbage had to implement his great vision was steam-driven wheels, gears, sprockets, axles and such. If Babbage had been born 150 years later, he might have been another Bill Gates, a Steve Wozniak or a Stephen Jobs. But alas, fate can be very fickle. Despite the bad karma history handed him, Babbage was a colorful character in his own eccentric way. It has been said that Babbage, commenting on Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Vision of Sin”, and referencing the couplet:
Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born
wrote the great poet and noted:
“I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise (at a standstill), whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:
Every minute dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born
I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.” (Source)
Now there is a true mathematician for you! In essence, Babbage was saying to Lord Alfred: “To hell with poetic license! Get your calculations correct, then write your poetry!” In the late seventies, NASA scientists named a crater on the moon Lake Babbage in his honor. Perhaps history felt that was a small consolation for a man whose dream of a machine which would change humankind forever would never be realized during his lifetime. History can be incredibly cruel. Poor Charles Babbage!
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