Babbage

Babbage, CHARLES, born 26th December 1791, at Totnes, Devonshire, entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1811, but graduated from Peterhouse in 1814. Two years later he was elected an F.R.S., and from 1828 to 1838 he filled the sinecure of Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He united, in the most happy combination, powers of invention and observation with thorough scientific culture. Foremost among his eighty writings is his extremely correct and well-arranged Table of Logarithms (1827), he being the first to make the method of constructing such tables the object of earnest study. As early as 1812 the idea had occurred to him of a Calculating Machine (q.v.); and by 1822 he had constructed a small model of one. Commissioned by government to superintend the construction of a larger and improved machine, after four years' operations he devoted a twelvemonth to visiting a great many workshops and factories on the Continent, in order to become acquainted with all the resources of mechanical art, and thus be in a position to use them in his great undertaking. This survey afforded him the necessary information for his able work On the Economy of Manufactures and Machinery (1832)—a book that in three years ran through four editions, and was translated into four languages. In it all mechanical processes are classified from the most scientific point of view, and the most interesting examples of the more important kinds of manufacture are described. Besides his Comparative View of the Various Life-assurance Societies (1826), Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), Decline of Science (1831), The Exposition of 1851 (1851), and the autobiographical Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), Babbage contributed many very interesting papers to the Transactions of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh. His calculating machine, which cost £6000 of his own money, and £17,000 of the nation's, was abandoned by government in 1842, after eight years of circumlocution, and is now preserved in an unfinished state in the South Kensington Museum. In his later years he was chiefly known by his fierce hostility to organ-grinders, in spite of whom he lived till 18th October 1871.