The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder

Author:Laura J. Snyder [Snyder, Laura J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71617-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

AS BABBAGE WORKED on the new machine, he was well aware of the pieces of the Difference Engine gathering dust in his new fireproof storage room. His heart was no longer with that engine; he was spending most of his waking hours working on the new one. But Babbage felt duty-bound to alert the government to this new development. He wrote to the Duke of Wellington, then foreign secretary in the new Tory government, in December 1834. The tone of the letter is extraordinarily insolent. Babbage rehashed all his old grievances against how he and his invention had been mistreated over the years. He had spent thirteen years of his life on a project for the good of the nation, with nothing to show for it. He told the duke of his new engine, a “totally new engine possessing much more extensive powers.” He did not specifically ask for funding for the new engine, nor did he say whether he intended to continue working on the old one, so it is unclear what he hoped the letter would accomplish.

Babbage waited to hear back from the government. Meanwhile, in May 1835, a parliamentary debate was held on the Civil Contingencies fund, out of which Babbage was paid. As in modern congressional debates about “pork” in the budget, it was charged that some projects amounted to “unprincipled waste and squandering of public money.” Babbage’s project was specifically mentioned as one of those suspect projects. Thomas Spring Rice, the new chancellor of the exchequer (who would later be Whewell’s brother-in-law), defended the Difference Engine. Another member worried that Babbage’s desire to build the best machine with the most accuracy would lead him to successive improvements, on and on, forever, with no end.88

In a sense, the charge was accurate. For Babbage, the enemy of the good was always the better. Once he had begun devising the Analytical Engine, he lost interest in continuing work on the Difference Engine. And by this point the government was ready to call it quits as well. The final word cutting off all funding for Babbage’s engine would not come until 1842. Meanwhile, Babbage kept working on the plans of his more powerful computer. In December 1838, Babbage resigned from the Lucasian professorship, so that he could spend all his time on his new invention, and avoid making any trips to Cambridge, where he was bound to run into Whewell.

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