It Began with Babbage (7 page)

  
1
. I have appropriated the word
phylogeny
from evolutionary biology. In the words of biologist, paleontologist, and scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), phylogeny is “the evolutionary history of a lineage conventionally depicted as a sequence of adult stages” (S. J. Gould. (1977).
Ontogeny and phylogeny
(p. 483). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). In other words, phylogeny refers to the evolutionary history of a type of organism, a species, or a genus, seen through their adult forms.

  
2
. S. Dasgupta. (1996).
Technology and creativity
(p. 22). New York: Oxford University Press.

  
3
. L. F. Menabrea. (1842). “Sketch of the Analytical Engine”,
Bibliothéque Universelle de Genève
[On-line], October, no. 42. Available:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

  
4
. Letter from Charles Babbage to the Earl of Rosse, President, Royal Society, June 8, 1852 (pp. 77–81). In C. Babbage. (1994).
Passages from the life of a philosopher
(p. 79). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press (original work published 1864).

  
5
. C. Boyer. (1991).
A history of mathematics
(2nd ed., Rev., pp. 443–445). New York: Wiley.

  
6
. Menabrea, op cit.

  
7
. A.. A. Lovelace. (1842). Notes. In Menabrea, op cit.

  
8
. Menabrea, op cit.

  
9
. M.. Campbell-Kelly. (1994). Introduction (pp. 7–36). In Babbage, op cit., p. 23.

10
. Lovelace, op cit.

11
. M. B. Hesse. (1966).
Models and analogies in science
. London: Sheed & Ward; J. Holland, K. J. Holyoak, R. E. Nisbett, & P. R. Thagard. (1986).
Induction
(
Chapter 10
). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12
. S. Dasgupta. (1994).
Creativity in invention and design
(pp. 27–33). New York: Cambridge University Press.

13
. R. L. Hills. (1990). Textiles and clothing. In I. McNeil (Ed.),
An encyclopaedia of the history of technology
(pp. 803–854). London: Routledge (see especially pp. 822–823); J. Essinger. (2004).
Jacquard's web
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14
. Essinger, op cit. D. S. L. Cardwell. (1994).
The Fontana history of technology
. London: Fontana Press.

15
. Lovelace, op cit.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Ibid.

18
. C.. Babbage. (1837).
On the mathematical power of the calculating engine
. Unpublished manuscript, December 26, Oxford University, Buxton MS7, Museum of the History of Science; printed in B. Randell. (1975).
The origins of the digital computer
(2nd ed., pp. 17–52). New York: Springer-Verlag (see especially p. 21).

19
. R. Moreau. (1984).
The computer comes of age
(p. 15). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

20
. A. G. Bromley. (1982). Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, 1838.
Annals of the History of Computing, 4
, 196–217 (see especially p. 196).

21
. Ibid., p. 197.

22
. Bromley (op cit.) has several drawings that show some of the mechanisms designed by Babbage.

23
. M. V. Wilkes. (1981). The design of a control unit: Reflections on reading Babbage's notebooks.
Annals of the History of Computing, 3
, 116–120.

24
. Bromley, op cit., pp. 197–198.

25
. M. V. Wilkes. (1971). Babbage as a computer pioneer.
Historia Mathematica, 4
, 415–440.

26
. Wilkes, 1981, op cit.

27
. See
chapter 1
.

28
. Campbell-Kelly, op cit., p. 24.

29
. Babbage, 1994, op cit., p. 79.

30
. Ibid.

31
. The Age of Romanticism, circa 1770 to 1835, was a time when not only poetry, fiction, and art were imbued with the spirit of wonder about nature and ourselves, but also science was touched by the same spirit. See R. Holmes. (2008).
The age of wonder
. New York: Viking Books.

32
. G. Sturt. (1923).
The wheelwright's craft
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

33
. J. C. Jones. (1980).
Design methods: Seeds of human future
(2nd ed.). New York: Wiley; C. Alexander. (1964).
Notes on the synthesis of form
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

34
. S. Dasgupta. (1999).
Design theory and computer science
(pp. 368–379). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1991).

35
. L. Pyenson & S. Sheets-Pyenson (1999).
Servants of nature
(p. 336). New York: W. W. Norton.

36
. Nor is the history of art any better. See W. Chadwick. (2007).
Women, art and society
(4th ed.). London: Thames & Hudson.

37
. Pyenson & Sheets-Pyenson, op cit., pp. 342–344.

38
. Holmes, op cit.

39
. S. Wood (2010).
Mary Fairfax Somerville
[On-line] (original work published 1995). Available:
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/somer.htm

40
. Pyenson & Sheets-Pyenson, op cit., pp. 347–348.

41
. B. Toole (2011).
Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
[On-line]. Available:
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.htm

42
. Campbell-Kelly, op cit., p. 27.

43
. Babbage, 1994, op cit., p. 102.

44
. Lovelace, op cit., Note G.

45
. Babbage, 1994, op cit., p. 102.

46
. Ibid.

47
. Lovelace, op cit., Note G.

IN
CHAPTER 2
, I suggested that Babbage's place in the history of computing was twofold: first, because his Analytical Engine represented, for the first time, the
idea
of automatic universal computing and how this idea might be implemented, and second, because some of his design ideas—the store, mill, control, user interface via punched cards—anticipated some fundamental principles of the electronic universal computer that would be created some 75 years after his death. There is a modernity to his idea that makes us pause. Indeed, it led Babbage scholar Allan Bromley to admit that he was “bothered” by the architectural similarity of the Analytical Engine to the modern computer, and he wondered whether there is an inevitability to this architecture: Is this the only way a computer could be organized internally?
¹

Thus, Babbage's creativity lay not only in conceiving a machine that had no antecedent, but also it lay in his envisioning an idea of universal computing that disappeared and then reappeared many decades later, and came to be the dominant architectural principle in computing. This observation is, of course, present-centered; we might be perilously close to what Herbert Butterfield had called the “Whig interpretation of history” (see Prologue, section VII), for we seem to be extolling Babbage's achievement because of its resonance with the achievements of our own time. But were there any direct consequences of his idea? What happened after Babbage
?
Did he have any influence on those who came after? And, if not, what took place in the development of what we have come to call
computer science
?

In fact, there is a view that between Babbage's mechanical world of computing and the electronic age, nothing really happened—that the time in between represented the Dark
Ages in the history of computing. This is, of course, as misguided a view as another held by historians at one time that Europe, between the end of the Roman Empire (circa fifth century) and the Renaissance (the 15th–16th centuries)—the Middle Ages—was in a state of intellectual and creative backwardness. Which is why the Middle Ages was also once called the Dark Ages.

Just as modern historical scholarship revealed that the Middle Ages was anything but Dark,
²
so also must we discount vigorously the idea that the period between Babbage and the age of the electronic computer was a Dark Age in the history of computing. In fact, when we examine what transpired after Babbage, we find that it was a period when two very different and lively views of computing took shape. I will call these the
abstract
and the
concrete
views, corresponding—broadly—to the conception of computational artifacts that are abstract and physical, respectively.

Let us dwell, for the moment, on the concrete view. What we find is that this was a period (roughly between 1880 and 1939) during which several species of material computational artifacts were created. These species were linked in that they were invented with a common
purpose
: to automate computing as much as possible. Yet, the linkages differed in that, although some machines aspired to universal computing, others had more modest aspirations.

I use the word
species
metaphorically, of course. Biology offers us yet another metaphor. Ever since the 18th century (well before Darwin, Wallace, and the advent of their particular theory of evolution), physical anthropologists and natural historians
³
interested in the connection between man and ape have quested for the “missing link” between the two.
⁴
After Darwin, the very credibility of Darwinian natural selection rested, at least in part, on the discovery of missing links in the fossil record.
⁵
I am tempted to term collectively the period between Babbage's design of the Analytical Engine (circa 1840s) and the advent of the electronic computer (circa 1940s) the Age of Missing Links, for they constituted designs and inventions that paved pathways of ideas from Babbage's vision of a universal automatic computing engine to the practical realization of that vision.

The punched card, used by Jacquard for his loom and then Babbage's key to the universality of the Analytical Engine, developed an identity and a universality of its own. It became a repository of information or symbol structures—a memory device, in fact. And a whole new genus of machines, now powered by electricity, came into existence just to manipulate and process the contents of these punched cards. “Computing” not only signified esoteric mathematical computation, but also came to mean an activity called
data processing
—a genre of computing involving data pertaining to human beings; to human society, commerce, health, welfare, economy, and institutions. “Tables” meant not only tables of logarithms or trigonometric functions, but also printed tables of such data on
the nitty-gritty of individual life—name, place and date of birth, age, gender, religion, occupation, ethnicity, educational level, date of death, and so on.

And the United States entered the history of computing.

In 1890, Herman Hollerith (1860–1929), American-born son of German immigrants, inventor and statistician, submitted a dissertation bearing the title
In Connection with the Electric Tabulation System which Has Been Adopted by U.S. Government for the Work of the Census Bureau
to the Columbia University School of Mines, for which he received a PhD. This must surely be the first doctoral degree awarded in the field of computing, the first recognition of computing as an academically respectable discipline.

Hollerith obtained an engineering degree from the Columbia School of Mines in 1879; his academic record was such that, after graduating, one of his professors, William P. Trowbridge (1828–1892), appointed him his assistant. It was a fateful appointment. When Trowbridge became chief special agent in the U.S. Bureau of Census, Hollerith moved with him as a statistician. At the Bureau, Hollerith met John Shaw Billings (1839–1913), a surgeon in the U.S. Army who had been assigned to the Bureau earlier to help with statistical work related to census data. At the time Hollerith joined the agency, Billings was in charge of collecting and tabulating data for the 1880 U.S. census.
⁶

The history of computing repeatedly tells a story of dissatisfaction with the use of human mental labor for tasks of a mechanical nature. Thus it was with Babbage (as we saw); thus it was with Hollerith. Although accounts differ,
⁷
the essence of the story is the same: Billings, remarking in Hollerith's presence, that there ought to be a mechanical way of tabulating census statistics. Thus was planted a seed in Hollerith's mind. In 1882, he spent some time teaching in the mechanical engineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—between Babbage and Hollerith we find the first of many appearances of the two Cambridges in the history of computing—and during his brief tenure there (he left in 1884 to take a post in the U.S. Patent Office), he worked on the problem of converting information punched as configurations of holes in cards into electrical impulses that, in turn, would drive mechanical equipment. This was the beginning of
electromechanical computing
.

Analyzing the way census and other similar kinds of demographic data had been gathered before, Hollerith identified some basic data processing operations involved in the process:
sorting
data in some order,
counting
, and
tallying
such data.
⁸
The operations seem simple enough, involving mental activity that any literate, numerically competent person can carry out—clerical operations, in other words. The problem is that of volume.
The amount of data that may have to be sorted and tallied may be unmanageably vast. In the case of Census data—and this was the original
need
posed to Hollerith—it may entail records on the population of a city, a state, a whole country. Rather than process such massive volumes of data manually, perhaps this work could be done mechanically, as far as possible.
⁹
We are, once more, reminded of Leibniz's remark: “excellent men” should not have to waste time in the drudgery of calculation that could be “delegated” to machines.
¹⁰