The Information - James Gleick [53]
I have done it by trying & observation & can now do it at any time, but I want to know if the problem admits of being put into a mathematical Formula, & solved in this manner.… There must be a definite principle, a compound I imagine of numerical & geometrical properties, on which the solution depends, & which can be put into symbolic language.♦
A formal solution to a game—the very idea of such a thing was original. The desire to create a language of symbols, in which the solution could be encoded—this way of thinking was Babbage’s, as she well knew.
She pondered her growing powers of mind. They were not strictly mathematical, as she saw it. She saw mathematics as merely a part of a greater imaginative world. Mathematical transformations reminded her “of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the world of Fiction.”♦ Imagination—the cherished quality. She mused on it; it was her heritage from her never-present father.
We talk much of Imagination. We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don’t know very exactly what we are talking about.…
It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds … may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.♦
She began to believe she had a divine mission to fulfill. She used that word, mission. “I have on my mind most strongly the impression that Heaven has allotted me some peculiar intellectual-moral mission to perform.”♦ She had powers. She confided in her mother:
I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.… The belief has been forced upon me, & most slow have I been to admit it even.
She listed her qualities:
Firstly: Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any.… Some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things;—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears & the ordinary senses.…
Secondly;—my immense reasoning faculties;
Thirdly;… the power not only of throwing my whole energy & existence into whatever I choose, but also bring to bear on any one subject or idea, a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant & extraneous sources. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.
She admitted that this sounded mad but insisted she was being logical and cool. She knew her life’s course now, she told her mother. “What a mountain I have to climb! It is enough to frighten anyone who had not all that most insatiable & restless energy, which from my babyhood has been the plague of your life & my own. However it has found food I believe at last.”♦ She had found it in the Analytical Engine.
Babbage meanwhile, restless and omnivorous, was diverting his energies to another burgeoning technology, steam’s most powerful expression, the railroad. The newly formed Great Western Railway was laying down track and preparing trial runs of locomotive engines from Bristol to London under the supervision of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the brilliant engineer, then just twenty-seven years old. Brunel asked Babbage for help, and Babbage decided to begin with an information-gathering program—characteristically ingenious and grandiose. He outfitted an entire railway carriage. On a specially built, independently suspended table, rollers unwound