The Information - James Gleick [38]
Babbage invented his own machine, a great, gleaming engine of brass and pewter, comprising thousands of cranks and rotors, cogs and gearwheels, all tooled with the utmost precision. He spent his long life improving it, first in one and then in another incarnation, but all, mainly, in his mind. It never came to fruition anywhere else. It thus occupies an extreme and peculiar place in the annals of invention: a failure, and also one of humanity’s grandest intellectual achievements. It failed on a colossal scale, as a scientific-industrial project “at the expense of the nation, to be held as national property,”♦ financed by the Treasury for almost twenty years, beginning in 1823 with a Parliamentary appropriation of £1,500 and ending in 1842, when the prime minister shut it down. Later, Babbage’s engine was forgotten. It vanished from the lineage of invention. Later still, however, it was rediscovered, and it became influential in retrospect, to shine as a beacon from the past.
Like the looms, forges, naileries, and glassworks he studied in his travels across northern England, Babbage’s machine was designed to manufacture vast quantities of a certain commodity. The commodity was numbers. The engine opened a channel from the corporeal world of matter to a world of pure abstraction. The engine consumed no raw materials—input and output being weightless—but needed a considerable force to turn the gears. All that wheel-work would fill a room and weigh several tons. Producing numbers, as Babbage conceived it, required a degree of mechanical complexity at the very limit of available technology. Pins were easy, compared with numbers.
It was not natural to think of numbers as a manufactured commodity. They existed in the mind, or in ideal abstraction, in their perfect infinitude. No machine could add to the world’s supply. The numbers produced by Babbage’s engine were meant to be those with significance: numbers with a meaning. For example, 2.096910013 has a meaning, as the logarithm of 125. (Whether every number has a meaning would be a conundrum for the next century.) The meaning of a number could be expressed as a relationship to other numbers, or as the answer to a certain question of arithmetic. Babbage himself did not speak in terms of meaning; he tried to explain his engine pragmatically, in terms of putting numbers into the machine and seeing other numbers come out, or, a bit more fancifully, in terms of posing questions to the machine and expecting an answer. Either way, he had trouble getting the point across. He grumbled:
On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.♦
Anyway, the machine was not meant to be a sort of oracle, to be consulted by individuals who would travel from far and wide for mathematical answers. The engine’s chief mission was to print out numbers en masse. For portability, the facts of arithmetic could be expressed in tables and bound in books.
To Babbage the world seemed made of such facts. They were the “constants of Nature and Art.” He collected them everywhere. He compiled a Table of Constants of the Class Mammalia: wherever he went he timed the breaths and heartbeats of pigs and cows.♦ He invented a statistical methodology with tables of life expectancy for the somewhat shady business of life insurance. He drew up a table of the weight in Troy grains per square yard of various fabrics: cambric, calico, nankeen, muslins, silk gauze, and “caterpillar veils.” Another table revealed the relative frequencies of all the double-letter combinations in English, French, Italian, German, and Latin. He researched,