The Information - James Gleick [56]
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality).
Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.
No one knows what almost awful energy & power lie yet undevelopped in that wiry little system of mine. I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under certain circumstances.…
I am doggedly attacking & sifting to the very bottom, all the ways of deducing the Bernoulli Numbers.… I am grappling with this subject, & connecting it with others.♦
She was programming the machine. She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not exist. The complexities she encountered for the first time became familiar to programmers of the next century:
How multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence. To adjust each to every other, and indeed even to perceive and trace them out with perfect correctness and success, entails difficulties whose nature partakes to a certain extent of those involved in every question where conditions are very numerous and inter-complicated.♦
She reported her feelings to Babbage: “I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration.”♦ And nine days later: “I find that my plans & ideas keep gaining in clearness, & assuming more of the crystalline & less & less of the nebulous form.”♦ She knew she had achieved something utterly new. Ten days later still, struggling over the final proofs with “Mr Taylors Printing Office” in Fleet Street, she declared: “I do not think you possess half my forethought, & power of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike).—… I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.”♦
Who would have used this machine? Not clerks or shopkeepers, said Babbage’s son, many years later. Common arithmetic was never the purpose—“It would be like using the steam hammer to crush the nut.”♦ He paraphrased Leibniz: “It is not made for those who sell vegetables or little fishes, but for observatories, or the private rooms of calculators, or for others who can easily bear the expense, and need a good deal of calculation.” Babbage’s engine had not been well understood, not by his government and not by the many friends who passed through his salon, but in its time its influence traveled far.
In America, a country bursting with invention and scientific optimism, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “What shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can … render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors?”♦ Ralph Waldo Emerson had met Babbage in London and declared in 1870, “Steam is an apt scholar