CHARLES BABBAGE (1791-1871)
"The Father of the Computer"
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"One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a Table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the rooms, and seeing me half asleep, called out, 'Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?' to which I replied, 'I am thinking that all these Tables might be calculated by machinery.'" |
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In "On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery," Babbage for the first time demonstrated his new mechanical notation system, a system which would be essential for all the design work for his famous Difference Engine. By developing a detailed systematic method for labeling the parts of a machine and their relative motions, Babbage created "the most formal method of describing switching systems until Boolean algebra was applied to the problem in the middle of the twentieth century" (Hyman). |
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| "It was reserved for the profound genius of Mr.
Babbage, to make the greatest advance in mechanical calculation by
embodying in a machine the principles of the calculus of differences...
Mr. Babbage has shown that material machinery is capable, in theory at
least, of rivalling the labours of the most practised mathematicians in
all branches of their science. Mind thus seems able to impress some of
its highest attributes upon matter and to create its own rival in the
wheels and levers of an insensible machine."
--W.S. Jevons, On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference. p. 498. |
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BABBAGE, Charles. "On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery, " pp. 250-265 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the year 1826, Part II (Babbage article extracted from volume). London: W. Nicol, 1826. Small quarto, modern gray wrappers. Illustrated with four engraved plates. First printing. Inoffensive library stamps on back of plates. A clean copy with only light browning to the margins of plates. |