The Philosophical Breakfast Club (49 page)

A human computer can make this calculation, but obviously he or she would require a great deal of time to do so. Babbage’s Analytical Engine,
with its capacity to store so many numbers, and its ability to make recursive calculations, would be able to compute even the 1,000th number in the Bernoulli sequence with relative ease. Indeed, this ability is precisely what distinguished the Analytical Engine from the Difference Engine. Lovelace, who suggested to Babbage that she include a method for calculating the Bernoulli numbers in her notes, was right that it was an excellent example for illustrating the power and novelty of the Analytical Engine.
⁸⁹
On Lovelace’s direction, Babbage wrote the method for “programming” the machine to perform this calculation. Lovelace found an error in his first attempt, and sent it back to him for revision. While there is some exaggeration in calling Ada Lovelace the first computer programmer, it is fair to say she was responsible for the creation of the program and its inclusion in her notes.

Even more important, Lovelace recognized that the machine was capable of manipulating symbols of all kinds, not only numbers. In some ways this recognition can be said to mark the shift from understanding computing machines as calculators to seeing them as truly modern computers. As even Babbage had not done, Lovelace realized that in the future a machine like the Analytical Engine could have the capability to write music, with musical notes being another kind of symbol that could be manipulated by the mechanism:

“Many persons … imagine that because the business of the Engine is to give its results in
numerical notation
the
nature of its processes
must consequently be
arithmetical
and
numerical
, rather than
algebraic
and
analytical
. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were
letters
or any other
general
symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraic
notation
, were provisions made accordingly.”
⁹⁰

Babbage himself never expressed the workings of his Analytical Engine in such a way. It was Lovelace’s vision of a computer, rather than Babbage’s, that would be formalized by Alan Turing in the 1930s: the notion of a computer as a general-purpose symbol manipulator rather than as a number cruncher.
⁹¹

Lovelace appended only her initials, AAL, to the notes, because it was unseemly for a lady of her social rank to have written something scientific. But word soon got out that this work was by a woman, and this undoubtedly influenced the reception of it. The next year, when a work endorsing evolution called
Vestiges on the Natural History of Creation
was
published anonymously, Whewell’s friend Sedgwick would review the “beastly book” harshly, sneering that “it seems to have been written with the science gleaned at a ladies’ boarding school.” Although Sedgwick was a great favorite with the ladies, he still felt that the greatest insult he could make of the book was to suggest it was written by a woman. Indeed, he thought that Ada Lovelace might have written it. Babbage wondered as well; he recommended to Lord Lovelace that his wife read the
Vestiges
, “if she had not written it!”
⁹²

Whewell’s friend Richard Sheepshanks scoffed that Babbage was too lazy to write about his own machine and had left it to a foreign mathematician and an English countess to do it for him.
⁹³
Babbage had been feuding with Sheepshanks for decades over an observatory that had been built for Babbage and Herschel’s friend Sir James South—the expenses had overrun the original estimate, and South refused to pay the difference to the instrument maker, who was a good friend of Sheepshanks. So Sheepshanks was inclined to denigrate Babbage at any opportunity. But his comment does raise a crucial question: Why did Babbage himself refuse to publish anything on the Analytical Engine? Babbage gave an answer to this question in a letter to one of his Italian colleagues. “The discovery of the Analytical Engine is so much in advance of my own country, and I fear even of the age,” Babbage explained, “that it is very important for its success that the fact should not rest upon my unsupported testimony.”
⁹⁴

B
Y THE TIME
Ada Lovelace’s translation of and notes to Menabrea’s report appeared, it was effectively too late—all hopes of building the Analytical Engine with support from the British government had already been definitively squelched. Babbage had suspected as much already in 1839, when he wrote (in a draft of a letter to Arago), “It is very improbable that I shall ever possess the pecuniary means to undertake [the engine’s] execution. I have spent many thousands of my private fortune on this pursuit, and when the drawings are completed, the invention can never be lost.”
⁹⁵

Babbage was prepared to give Britain another chance. In January of 1842, while nervously awaiting the report of the Turin meeting, Babbage wrote to Robert Peel to reopen the question of funding for the Difference Engine, which he had ceased working on nine years earlier. Did he have any continued obligation to the project? he asked the Prime Minister.
Peel ignored the letter, and three more sent from Babbage by October. Finally, Peel realized he would have to deal with this issue. He sought advice from the geologist William Buckland, who sometimes counseled him on scientific issues. “What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?” Peel asked him plaintively.
⁹⁶

Buckland’s response no longer exists. Finally, Peel deputed his chancellor of the exchequer, Henry Goulburn, to find out what the scientific community really thought of the invention. Goulburn wanted the opinion of Herschel, still considered one of the leading men of science in Britain; however, perhaps knowing of the close relationship between Herschel and Babbage, Goulburn asked G. B. Airy to act as an intermediary, telling him he could give his own opinion of the machine as well.

Herschel’s response is not surprising. He wrote a long, detailed document, stating the benefits of the machine, while at the same time expressing concerns about the vast sums of money that had already been spent. Airy, on the other hand, offered a very damning assessment of Babbage’s invention. He pointed out that nepotism had besmirched the previous Royal Society committees. And he concluded by stating “without the least hesitation that I believe the machine to be useless, and that the sooner it is abandoned, the better it will be for all parties.”
⁹⁷

Airy had been against the engine all along; now was his chance to scuttle it, and he succeeded. On November 3, 1842, just weeks after the appearance of Menabrea’s report, Goulburn wrote to Babbage, killing the project, telling him (a bit cruelly) that he could keep the demonstration model and the parts in exchange for his labors. Babbage refused to keep the demonstration model; it was later displayed at the gallery of scientific instruments at King’s College on the Strand, and eventually ended up at the Science Museum in Kensington.
⁹⁸
Babbage sent a reply to Peel asking if, instead, the government would like to fund his Analytical Engine. “I infer however both from the regret with which you have arrived at the conclusion … that you would much more willingly assist at the creation of the Analytical Engine,” Babbage concluded, oddly optimistically. He was certain—he added with the hint of a threat—that Peel would not like to be the “cause of its total suppression or possibly of its first appearance in a foreign land.”
⁹⁹
Babbage asked for a personal meeting with the prime minister, which was offered on the following week.

On November 11, 1842, Babbage strode into the prime minister’s office with a vengeance. He launched into a tale of woe: he had given up
following his father into a lucrative banking career to devote himself to science, for the sake of his country. He had devoted twelve years of his life to an invention that could revolutionize science; building the Difference Engine ceased because of its machinist, not through any fault of Babbage’s own. He was then forced to rethink his design, and in the process invented an even more revolutionary machine. If the government refused to build this one, they should at least reward Babbage with money or honors like those that other men of science had received.

We can almost imagine Babbage in high dudgeon, going over his prepared speech. Herschel had been knighted and created a baronet. Whewell had an income of £2,000 in his new position as Master of Trinity College. Airy, as Astronomer Royal, had a house and £1,500. Peacock, as Dean of Ely, had £1,800 a year; Sedgwick, as Dean of Norwich, had £1,000. Only Babbage, who had devoted his entire life to the scientific welfare of the nation, had received nothing. “I then concluded with stating that on those grounds I had some claim to the consideration of the government,” Babbage later recalled. “Sir R.P. denied altogether that either of these claims entitled me to any thing. He observed that I had rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better.… I said that the general fact of machinery being superseded in several of our great branches of manufacturers after a few years was perfectly well known.”

Babbage noticed that “Sir RP seemed excessively angry and annoyed during the whole interview.” The prime minister refused to concede that he deserved more money, or any particular honors or position, for his work on the Difference Engine. “I then said,” Babbage recounted proudly, “Sir Peel, if those are your views, I wish you good morning.” And that was the end of the line for government funding for Babbage, and the end to any chance that the computer age would begin in the nineteenth, rather than the twentieth, century.
¹⁰⁰
Even the publication of the article on the Analytical Engine by his “good fairy” nine months later could not alter history.

A
LL OF
S
OUTHAMPTON WAS ABUZZ WITH THE LATEST TANTALIZING
gossip: a new planet, still unseen, was traveling around the sun beyond the orbit of Uranus. At the 1846 meeting of the British Association, Herschel referred to this planet obliquely, but everyone knew what he was talking about. “We see it,” Herschel announced dramatically, “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain. Its movements have been felt, trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis, with a certainty hardly inferior to that of ocular demonstration.”
¹

The planet’s existence had not been divined by any telescopic observations. Rather, its existence, position, and mass had been calculated mathematically, by two men working independently: U. J. J. Le Verrier, the famous French astronomer, and a little-known Englishman, John Couch Adams. Barely two weeks after Herschel’s comments, the astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle, at the Berlin observatory, working from Le Verrier’s calculations, found the planet, less than one astronomical degree from its predicted location. It was only the second planet ever discovered, and the first time a celestial body had been found after theoretical mathematical prediction of its existence. (The erstwhile planet Pluto would later be discovered in a similar way.)

It had all started in 1821, when the French astronomer Alexis Bouvard published astronomical tables for the planet Uranus. Applying Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Bouvard made predictions about the future position of the planet, based on the gravitational force Newton’s law dictated would be exerted on Uranus by the sun and the other known planets. Soon, however, it became clear to Bouvard, and to others, that the orbit of Uranus in fact deviated quite substantially from its predicted positions. After checking all his calculations, Bouvard became convinced that there must be a yet-unnoticed celestial body causing the deviations,
or “perturbations,” in the planet’s orbit by exerting additional gravitational force upon it. The only other possible explanation, barring observational error, was that Newton’s law of universal gravitation was not truly universal: perhaps, so far away from the sun, gravitational force is weaker or stronger than Newton’s law stipulated. Yet the work of William and John Herschel on binary stars had shown that Newton’s law held true as far away as the most distant stars, so most astronomers discounted this possibility.

Although astronomers soon became convinced that there must be some planet or other celestial body causing the perturbations of Uranus, finding it was another matter; the task was like seeking a tiny pebble amid the grains of sand in an entire beach—a pebble whose position would change each day of the search. It would help if one could somehow calculate the approximate position of the planet on a certain night or series of nights, so that astronomers could carefully and systematically search just one part of the sky. This kind of calculation, however, had never been done before. Astronomers were familiar with the problem of perturbations, a classic type of calculation in mechanics, whereby one calculates the effect of known bodies (of known positions and masses) on another given body. But this case was different; here, the disturbances upon a known body must somehow be used to infer the mass and position of the unseen perturbing body. This became known as the problem of “inverse perturbation.”
²

In June of 1841, a student at St. John’s College, Cambridge, was browsing in Johnson’s bookstore in Trinity Street. He came upon a copy of the proceedings of the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1832, and began to read Airy’s report on the current state of astronomy. In his report, Airy had noted that the difference between the predicted and actual positions of Uranus was nearly half a minute of arc, a value much too high to be explained by observational error alone. Airy had proposed that astronomers take up the challenge of finding the solution to this problem.

The student, John Couch Adams, was struck by the fact that nearly a decade had passed since Airy’s call to action, and the problem remained unsolved. He confided to his diary a few days later that, as soon as he took his degree, he would begin working on the irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, to tease out the secret of the invisible planet—“wh[ich] w[oul]d
probably lead to its discovery,” he predicted confidently.
³
After graduating as senior wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman in 1843, and receiving a fellowship from St. John’s, Adams began to tackle the problem.