The Philosophical Breakfast Club (21 page)

Herschel quoted Bacon’s exhortation that “knowledge is power,” counseling the practicing man of science to keep this in mind at all
times.
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This was particularly important, he noted, in the science of political economy. There, “great and noble ends are to be achieved … by bringing into exercise a sufficient quantity of sober thought, and by a proper adaptation of means.”
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Proper method in this science could improve the lives of all those living in the nation.

Herschel’s book was an immediate success. As an eminent historian of science in the twentieth century put it, after the
Preliminary Discourse
was published, to be a man of science in England meant to be as much like Herschel as possible.
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That meant as well to be like Bacon, for Herschel had succeeded in one of the principal aims of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, disseminating a version of Bacon’s scientific method to the reading public. In his review of his friend’s book, Whewell praised him for promoting “an elevated impression” of “Bacon’s far-seeing sagacity.”
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The
Preliminary Discourse
appeared the very month that Darwin was sitting for his Tripos examination at Cambridge; he read it soon after, and was captivated by its depiction of the scientific life. He afterwards told anyone who would listen that he was inspired by Herschel’s book to devote himself to science. A quarter of a century down the road, his book
On the Origin of Species
would owe its scientific method to Herschel, as well as to Whewell’s later writings on the proper way to do science. Because of this, Darwin would admit to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley that “I sometimes think that general and popular Treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work.”
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Jones ribbed Herschel that he could sense his newlywed state in the “freshness and vigor about the style.”
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He more seriously predicted to Whewell that this book would end up being Herschel’s greatest work. Jones hoped Herschel would write others like it, and not allow astronomy to engross him, “for I can see nothing likely to come of it in either hemisphere which I think worthy of him.”
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L
IKE
J
OHN
and Margaret Herschel on their honeymoon, and thousands of others, Babbage was visiting factories, as a way of learning manufacturing methods that could be useful in the construction of the Difference Engine. As usual with Babbage, once he began to learn about something, he threw himself into it: he became an expert on manufacturing processes, and later wrote one of the first books on the topic. In that book,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
, finally published in 1832, he
urged others to take factory tours: “Those who enjoy leisure can scarcely find a more interesting and instructive pursuit than the examination of the workshops of their country.”
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He even included a blank “skeleton” form that could be filled in by anyone during a factory visit, showing what questions to ask and what kinds of answers would be valuable.
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Babbage had this idea from Herschel, who had discussed the worth of skeleton forms for making and recording scientific observations in the
Preliminary Discourse
.
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Ada Byron, the pretty and precocious daughter of the poet, who would soon begin to collaborate with Babbage on publicizing his calculating engines, was taken on a factory tour by her mother, with, we may imagine, one of these skeleton forms in hand.

Babbage had turned to studying factories as a kind of tonic after suffering a dismal year in 1827, when he was thirty-six. In February his father, Benjamin, died; the generally very kindhearted Georgiana wrote to Herschel that “to feign sorrow on so happy a release would in me be an hypocrisy.”
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Charles inherited an estate worth £100,000, an enormous fortune in those days. Their happiness at this development was short-lived; in July their second son—his namesake, Charles—died at age ten. It was not the only time the Babbages buried a child; five of their eight children would die before adulthood. But even in those days of high infant mortality it was a severe blow to lose a child. Soon afterwards, Georgiana fell ill, while pregnant with their eighth child. Babbage took her to Worcestershire, to the home of her sister and brother-in-law. She died in childbirth there on September 4, aged thirty-five, along with the baby, Alexander.

Babbage was devastated. Herschel rushed to Worcestershire and brought his friend back with him to Slough. Babbage’s mother wrote to Herschel, “You give me great comfort in respect to my son’s bodily health. I cannot expect the mind’s composure will make hasty advance. His love was too strong and the dear object of it too deserving.”
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The depth of Babbage’s feelings for Georgiana may perhaps be plumbed by noting the fact that he never again mentioned her, in any of his letters, in his autobiographical works, or in his travel notebooks. He could not bear to speak of her at all. Reading through the hundreds of letters he wrote during his lifetime, it is clear that after her death his personality changed abruptly—the very tone of his letters is markedly different, becoming more sarcastic, impatient, critical. Jones wrote to Whewell with the news. “Poor Babbage—what an insufferable blow,” Jones commiserated. “I hope he will bear up against it bravely but I feel anxious to hear of him.”
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Herschel whisked Babbage off on a tour of Ireland, where they visited Maria Edgeworth, who had befriended all four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club during her long visits to London. While they were in Ireland, Herschel persuaded Babbage to take an extended tour on the Continent to distract him and help to relieve his sorrow.

Ever mindful of the duties of building his Difference Engine, Babbage first secured permission from the government to suspend his work on the project for a time and leave the country. Babbage put Herschel in charge of the ongoing manufacturing of parts for the machine, giving him an additional £1,000 as an advance on Clement’s charges. The children were left with relatives. Babbage left for Europe in October with one of his workmen, Richard Wright, as a traveling companion.

For over a year the two men toured Europe, roaming through Holland, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. They visited tourist sites, factories, workshops, and universities. Babbage would often leave Wright behind to dine with the intellectual and social elite. In Italy he was introduced to members of the Bonaparte family, exiled from France; he already knew Napoleon’s brother Lucien, who lived in Worcestershire, but in Rome he met one of Lucien’s sons and his daughters Lady Dudley Stuart and the Princess Gabrielli. In Bologna he was introduced to Lucien’s stepdaughter, the Princess Ercolani.
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In Florence, Babbage visited with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, who received him “with a kindness and consideration which I can never forget.”
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In Vienna, Babbage ordered a four-wheeled, horse-drawn “caleche” of his own design, in which he could sleep, with many of the conveniences of a modern recreational vehicle: a lamp for cooking breakfast, large flat drawers in which he could store papers, underclothing, and dress coats, and hanging pockets for keeping different currencies, books, and telescopes and other instruments. At the end of his journey he sold it for half the price he had paid to have it constructed.
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During his trip, Babbage received a letter from his mother with happy news: he had been appointed the Lucasian professor at Cambridge. G. B. Airy, Babbage’s nemesis, had been appointed two years earlier (while Whewell was considering the position), but had just resigned to take up the Plumian Chair in Astronomy, a better-paid professorship.

Herschel and Whewell had canvassed hard for Babbage to receive the appointment, believing that holding the position would help him recover from his wife’s death. Babbage gratefully wrote Herschel, “The unceasing
exertions of your friendship have become so habitual to me through life that I could not for a moment doubt the prime mover in an event which I look upon with feelings of the highest pride and gratification.”
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He would later report, with more than a little bitterness, that this appointment was the only honor ever bestowed upon him by his country. Babbage held the chair until he resigned it at the end of 1838. The duties were not onerous—the Lucasian professor was not even required to give lectures, though some previous holders of the chair did so. Babbage annoyed Whewell by never delivering one lecture, even though Whewell had promised the electors that Babbage would not hold the position as a mere sinecure. Babbage did at least appear at Cambridge annually when it was time to examine candidates for the Smith’s prize in mathematics.

When he returned from Europe, Babbage began to focus attention on the manufacturing system, and on political economy in general. Echoing the work of his friends, Babbage called for a reform of the method used by political economists to reach their conclusions. Economists should not be “closet philosophers” who theorized in the absence of facts. Rather, they should turn to the factory owners for information about manufacturing processes.
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By visiting factories throughout the world, he advised, the economist could learn the facts needed to make proper inductive inferences to economic theories. Babbage’s own study had led him to the conclusion that the English economy had begun to depend more on factory manufacturing than on agriculture, against Ricardo’s expectations. Adam Smith had made agriculture in general the cornerstone of Britain’s wealth; Ricardo had focused on corn—that is, the agricultural staples; but it was Babbage who placed the factory at center stage.
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Political economy as a science had not, until Babbage, kept pace with the Industrial Revolution.

In his book, Babbage rhapsodized on the global effects of England’s manufacturing economy: “The cotton of India is conveyed by British skill in the factories of Lancashire: it is again set in motion by British capital; and, transported to the very plains whereupon it grew, is repurchased by the lords of the soil which gave it birth, at a cheaper price than that at which their coarser machinery enables them to manufacture it themselves.”
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Even in Kozhikade, India, known to Europeans as “Calicut” (from which the cloth called calico derived its name), they now bought cloth made on British looms. While Karl Marx—who recorded seventy-three excerpts of Babbage’s book in 1845, as he and Engels sat in
the Cheetham Hill library working their way through the British political economists—would later see something obscene in this destruction of the Indian cotton-weaving trade, Babbage saw it as part of a technological revolution that would benefit the whole world.
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After all, the Indians could buy better cloth at lower prices, thus freeing up their capital for other economic ventures. Babbage saw globalization as not only inevitable but desirable.

Babbage’s book provided an answer to what was being called by other writers on political economy “the machinery question”: Would the new labor-saving machines—mechanized weaving looms; machine tools such as the lathe, the planing machine, and the shaping machine; the threshing machine—reduce the demand for manual labor? By 1821 Ricardo had come to believe that the answer was yes; this was one reason for his pessimistic view of the future of the laboring poor. Babbage saw, correctly, that the answer was no—that workers would actually benefit from the mechanization of labor, just as mathematicians would benefit from a calculating machine. Many economic historians today believe that the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution were unskilled laborers: they were able to purchase a wider assortment of manufactured goods at lower prices, and their labor remained invaluable. As today, there were many tasks that could not be performed by machines, especially those requiring dexterity or “social intelligence,” the ability to interact with others.
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And machines still required workers to run and maintain them.

Babbage dissented from Ricardo’s claim that the interest of the worker and that of his or her employer were opposed.
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In 1832, when he ran for a seat in Parliament as a liberal reformer for the borough of Finsbury (he was roundly defeated), Babbage told the voters that a member of Parliament should be able to explain “the complicated relations which bind in one common interest the various classes of a great community.”
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Because their interests were bound up with their employers, workers should not fear new machinery. Indeed, Babbage reassured the worker, what generally happens is that while human labor in one type of work might be displaced, other needs are opened up and new work can be found in another employment. So, for example, when the crushing mill superseded the labor of young women who had worked hard in breaking ores with flat hammers, no distress followed, because the women were soon engaged in dressing the ores (separating the valuable minerals from the rest), which was more skilled, better paid, and less physically demanding work.

Babbage sternly reprimanded those who harbored the Luddite impulse to break machinery. It was not possible to escape the future; causing harm to factory owners would only wreak havoc on the lives of the workers. Lord Byron, in his maiden speech before Parliament in 1812, had decried the dehumanizing effects of technology, pleading the plight of the workers in the lace mills of Nottingham. With the benefit of hindsight, Babbage more pragmatically pointed out that when the workers rose up and destroyed the lace frames, the factory owners simply moved their manufactories to Devonshire, leaving heavier unemployment behind (no doubt many of those unemployed lace makers ended up in the workhouse at Upton).
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At the same time, however, Babbage urged factory owners to consider enacting various profit-sharing schemes to give the workers a financial stake in increasing productivity; similar systems were in place in the mines of Cornwall, as Whewell had reported to him, as well as on whaling ships in America, where every member of the crew, from the captain to the cook’s assistant, held some share in the eventual profits at the end of the journey.