The Information - James Gleick [210]
♦ WE POSSESS NOW A MORE COMPLETE DICTIONARY: John Simpson, ed., The First English Dictionary, 24.
♦ “WHAT I SHALL HEREAFTER CALL MONDEGREENS”: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1954, 48.
♦ “THE INTERESTING THING ABOUT MONDEGREENS”: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 183.
4. TO THROW THE POWERS OF THOUGHT INTO WHEEL-WORK
♦ The original writings of Charles Babbage and, to a lesser extent, Ada Lovelace are increasingly accessible. The comprehensive, thousand-dollar, eleven-volume edition, The Works of Charles Babbage, edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, was published in 1989. Online, the full texts of Babbage’s Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), and The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) can now be found in editions scanned from libraries by Google’s book program. Not yet available there (as of 2010), but also useful, is his son’s volume, Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them (1889). As interest grew during the era of computing, much of the useful material in these books was reprinted in collections; most valuable are Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (1961); and Anthony Hyman’s Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (1989). Other manuscripts were published in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (1978). The notes that follow refer to one or more of these sources, depending on what seems most useful for the reader. The translation and astounding “notes” on L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” by Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, have been made available online at http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html thanks to John Walker; they are also reproduced in the Morrisons’ collection. As for the Lovelace letters and papers, they are in the British Library, the Bodleian, and elsewhere, but many have been published by Betty Alexandra Toole in Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (1992 and 1998); where possible I try to cite the published versions.
♦ “LIGHT ALMOST SOLAR HAS BEEN EXTRACTED”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), 300; reprinted in Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Anthony Hyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200.
♦ THE TIMES OBITUARIST: “The Late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.,” The Times (London), 23 October 1871. Babbage’s crusade against organ-grinders and hurdy-gurdies was not in vain; a new law against street music in 1864 was known as Babbage’s Act. Cf. Stephanie Pain, “Mr. Babbage and the Buskers,” New Scientist 179, no. 2408 (2003): 42.
♦ “HE SHOWED A GREAT DESIRE TO INQUIRE”: N. S. Dodge, “Charles Babbage,” Smithsonian Annual Report of 1873, 162–97, reprinted in Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 4 (October–December 2000), 20.
♦ NOT “THE MANUAL LABOR OF ROWING”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 37.
♦ “ ‘THE TALL GENTLEMAN IN THE CORNER’ ”: Ibid., 385–86.
♦ “THOSE WHO ENJOY LEISURE”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), v.
♦ HE COMPUTED THE COST OF EACH PHASE: Ibid., 146.
♦ “AT THE EXPENSE OF THE NATION”: Henry Prevost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History and Construction (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889), 52.
♦ “ON TWO OCCASIONS I HAVE BEEN ASKED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 67.
♦ TABLE OF CONSTANTS OF THE CLASS MAMMALIA: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings, ed. Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), xxiii.
♦ “LO! THE RAPTURED ARITHMETICIAN!”: Élie de Joncourt, De Natura Et Praeclaro Usu Simplicissimae Speciei Numerorum Trigonalium