The Information - James Gleick [57]
It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage, it must calculate interest and logarithms.… It is yet coming to render many higher services of a mechanico-intellectual kind.
Its wonders met disapproval, too. Some critics feared a rivalry between mechanism and mind. “What a satire is that machine on the mere mathematician!”♦ said Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. “A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; which turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!” They all spoke as though the engine were real, but it never was. It remained poised before its own future.
Midway between his time and ours, the Dictionary of National Biography granted Charles Babbage a brief entry—almost entirely devoid of relevance or consequence:
mathematician and scientific mechanician;… obtained government grant for making a calculating machine … but the work of construction ceased, owning to disagreements with the engineer; offered the government an improved design, which was refused on grounds of expense;… Lucasian professor of mathematics, Cambridge, but delivered no lectures.
Babbage’s interests, straying so far from mathematics, seeming so miscellaneous, did possess a common thread that neither he nor his contemporaries could perceive. His obsessions belonged to no category—that is, no category yet existing. His true subject was information: messaging, encoding, processing.
He took up two quirky and apparently unphilosophical challenges, which he himself noted had a deep connection one to the other: picking locks and deciphering codes. Deciphering, he said, was “one of the most fascinating of arts, and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves.”♦ To rationalize the process, he set out to perform a “complete analysis” of the English language. He created sets of special dictionaries: lists of the words of one letter, two letters, three letters, and so on; and lists of words alphabetized by their initial letter, second letter, third letter, and so on. With these at hand he designed methodologies for solving anagram puzzles and word squares.
In tree rings he saw nature encoding messages about the past. A profound lesson: that a tree records a whole complex of information in its solid substance. “Every shower that falls, every change of temperature that occurs, and every wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, indeed, and imperceptible, perhaps, to us, but not the less permanently recorded in the depths of those woody fabrics.”♦
In London workshops he had observed speaking tubes, made of tin, “by which the directions of the superintendent are instantly conveyed to the remotest parts.” He classified this technology as a contribution to the “economy of time” and suggested that no one had yet discovered a limit on the distance over which spoken messages might travel. He made a quick calculation: “Admitting it to be possible between London and Liverpool, about seventeen minutes would elapse before the words spoken at one end would reach the other extremity of the pipe.”♦ In the 1820s he had an idea for transmitting written messages, “enclosed in small cylinders along wires suspended from posts, and from towers, or from church steeples,”♦ and he built a working model in his London house. He grew obsessed with other variations on the theme of sending messages over the greatest possible distances. The post bag dispatched nightly from Bristol, he noted, weighed less than one hundred pounds. To send these messages 120 miles, “a coach and apparatus, weighing above thirty hundred weight, are put in motion, and also conveyed over the same space.”♦ What a waste! Suppose, instead, he suggested, post towns were linked by a series of high pillars erected