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By Root 854 0

onerous. Babbage did not have to teach students, deliver lectures, or even live in Cambridge, and this was just as well, because he was also becoming a popular fixture of London social life. At home at One Dorset Street he hosted a regular Saturday soirée that drew a glittering crowd—politicians, artists, dukes and duchesses, and the greatest English scientists of the age: Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, and Charles Lyell, among others.♦ They marveled at his calculating machine and, on display nearby, the dancing automaton of his youth. (In invitations he would write, “I hope you intend to patronise the ‘Silver Lady.’ She is to appear in new dresses and decorations.”) He was a mathematical raconteur—that was no contradiction, in this time and place. Lyell reported approvingly that he “jokes and reasons in high mathematics.” He published a much-quoted treatise applying probability theory to the theological question of miracles. With tongue in cheek he wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to suggest a correction for the poet’s couplet: “Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born.”

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: “Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born.” I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.♦

Fascinated with his own celebrity, he kept a scrapbook—“the pros and cons in parallel columns, from which he obtained a sort of balance,”♦ as one visitor described it. “I was told repeatedly that he spent all his days in gloating and grumbling over what people said of him.”

But progress on the engine, the main source of his fame, was faltering. In 1832 he and his engineer Clement produced a working demonstration piece. Babbage displayed it at his parties to guests who found it miraculous or merely puzzling. The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.

He and his engineer fell into disputes. Clement demanded more and more money from Babbage and from the Treasury, which began to suspect profiteering. He withheld parts and drawings and fought over control of the specialized machine tools in their workshops. The government, after more than a decade and £17,000, was losing faith in Babbage, and he in the government. In his dealing with lords and ministers Babbage could be imperious. He was developing a sour view of the Englishman’s attitude toward technological innovation: “If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”♦ They no longer saw the point.

CHARLES BABBAGE (1860)

“What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?” Prime Minister Robert Peel wrote one of his advisers in August 1842. “Surely if completed it would be worthless as far as science is concerned.… It will be in my opinion a very costly toy.” He had no trouble finding voices inimical to Babbage in the civil service. Perhaps the most damning was George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal, a starched and methodical figure, who with no equivocation told Peel precisely what he wanted to hear: that the engine was useless. He added this personal note: “I think it likely he lives in a sort of dream as to its utility.”♦ Peel’s government terminated the project. As for Babbage’s dream, it continued. It had already