The Information - James Gleick [212]
♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock & Joy, 1822), 1.
♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43.
♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834), 282; and Edward Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447.
♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69.
♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282.
♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52.
♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62.
♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to John Herschel, 10 August 1814, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31.
♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94.
♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53.
♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264.
♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219.
♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300.
♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65.
♦ “I NEED HARDLY POINT OUT TO YOU THAT THIS CALCULATION”: Quoted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, xxiii. The Morrisons point out that Tennyson apparently did change “minute” to “moment” in editions after 1850.
♦ “THE PROS AND CONS IN PARALLEL COLUMNS”: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 129.
♦ “IF YOU SPEAK TO HIM OF A MACHINE FOR PEELING A POTATO”: Quoted in Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 132.
♦ “I THINK IT LIKELY HE LIVES IN A SORT OF DREAM”: Quoted in ibid., 38.
♦ FOR A GUINEA, SHE COULD SIT: Advertisement in The Builder, 31 December 1842, http://www.victorianlondon.org/photography/adverts.htm (accessed 7 March 2006).
♦ “THE CHILD OF LOVE,…—THOUGH BORN IN BITTERNESS”: Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” canto 3, 118.
♦ “IS THE GIRL IMAGINATIVE?”: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47.
♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25.
♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27.
♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55.
♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33.
♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89.
♦ “I DO NOT CONSIDER THAT I KNOW”: Ada to Dr. William King, 24 March