Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? I've been better. I'm in severe pain. I think I may have a kidney stone, but I had not yet recorded today's episode, and I definitely wanted to get something out to y'all, and so before I head off to an urgent care center to get checked out. The sad thing with kidney stones is, unless it's a really big one, there's not much they're going to be able to do except maybe pack me full of saline and await the dreadful end. But you know, before I head off, I thought i'd bring you a nice little classic episode, not even a classic episode, an episode from just two years ago called Excess Babbage. This episode originally published Monday, January eighteenth, twenty twenty one. It is about Charles Babbage, a man ahead of his time, and yeah, I hope you enjoy it, and hopefully by tomorrow I'll be right as rain and I'll be ready to do news episodes. For the time being, I'm gonna sign off and take some painkillers and then head over to urgent care. Many years ago, when tech Stuff was in a very different format, our show talked a bit about Charles Babbage and his various engines, that is, devices intended to perform different mathematical processes. We also did an episode about Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers. But the show was so different back then that I thought it might be good to do some thorough examinations of who these people were and the contributions they made to technology in general and arguably computing in particular. And they are all the more remarkable in that those contributions all took place in the early to mid nineteenth century, nearly one hundred years before we would get the first programmable, electronic and general purpose computer. But we've got a lot of ground to cover before we get there, so let us begin with the life and accomplishments of one Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage was born on December twenty sixth, seventeen ninety one, although his obituary said it was seventeen ninety two. Spoiler alert, I guess Babbage is not alive anymore. He was remarkable, but he was not an immortal. Anyway, there's a record of his baptism that actually dates back to January seventeen ninety two, so unless he was baptized nearly a full year before or he was born, I think it is probably safe to say that the seventeen ninety one date is the correct one. His grandfather was Benjamin Babbage Senior, who was a man of some standing in Tautness, a market town in Devonshire itself, a region in the southwest of England. It's a port town. It's about the same distance from Exeter as it is from Plymouth, and Plymouth might be the first location that my fellow Americans recognize. Benny Senior served as mayor of Tautness for a year, indicating that he must have been at least a little bit important in that town. His son, Benji Junior, would become a goldsmith and a tradesman, and later on a banker. Junior was a bit of a career man, which is putting it lightly. He was someone who apparently did not have time for the other aspects of life, as he was in his late thirties when he married Elizabeth Betsy plummet Teep, who came from a likewise prominent family in Devonshire. They were married in seventeen ninety. Benjamin Babbage Junior and Betsy moved from Devonshire to London, where Benny secured a position at the Bitton Estate banking firm. The following year, Charles Babbage was born. His father continued to rise in the ranks of the banking industry, becoming junior partner of the banking house of prad Digby Box Babbage and Company, though most people referred to it as Prad and Company for the sake of Brevity, which as we know, is the soul of wit. The bank was on Fleet Street, where there was also a barber of some renown, but that's a tale for a different time. Swing ear raiser High Sweeney. His family was religious, adhering to the Anglican faith, and Charles would also become a religious man. He had two brothers, who sadly did not survive infancy. He also had a sister named Mary Ann, who was seven years younger than he and would be one of his close friends as he was growing up. His early education came from private tutors, but Charles was also plagued with health problems described as violent fevers. And his parents worried that the realities of living in London at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Remember this is in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, that maybe all that was a little too taxing on young Chuck. So they decided that he should be sent off to attend school in a rural schoolhouse in the countryside, far from the noise and pollution of the city, and they hoped that there his health would be able to improve. So in eighteen o three, Ben Junior relocated his family back to Devon and Charles would move his studies to a village named Alphington outside of Exeter. His school consisted of six students, including Charles. Their teacher was a member of the local clergy. Charles' health did improve and his curiosity became one of his defining traits. He was keenly interested in puzzles and ciphers and clockwork devices. And this again was in the early eighteen hundreds. England's Industrial Revolution was in full swing, so this was an era of innovation, of urbanization and automation. Joseph Murrie Jacquard had invented a machine that would later serve as one of the foundational elements to one of Babbage's own inventions. This would be the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards as a way to create specific woven patterns. The Jacquard loom is a fascinating piece of technology and a truly ingenious invention. It allowed weavers to program a woven pattern, and assuming you operate the loom properly, the machine would follow the program exactly, creating the just as you had programmed it. Now, the way this worked mechanically is super cool, but it's also something that I don't think I can easily explain without visual aids because there are a lot of moving parts. Ultimately, the punch cards would determine which threads in the loom would lift up for each pass of a loom's shuttle. So quick explanation here, just because it will clear some stuff up. Let's imagine you've got a series of threads arranged vertically, and let's say they're all white. This is the background of your woven pattern. Let's say you're making a rug. Well, you would weave by moving a new thread, probably a different color, horizontally across these vertical strings, right, and you would alternate when you would go over or under threads, and which threads you go over or under would be dependent upon whatever pattern you are trying to make. This is painstakingly slow to do by hand, so a loom speeds us up by lifting some threads while keeping other threads down. So imagine that the loom is lifting up every odd numbered thread and all the even numbered threads stay down. Then you could pull a horizontal thread across the width of all these vertical lines, and then switch which threads are up and which ones are down and pull the thread across again. That's the job of the shuttle. The shuttle holds the thread that goes back and forth horizontally across the lines of vertical threads. So doing this and alternating it over and over again that is weaving. It's much faster than doing the over under, over under, over under by hand. Now, the punch cards were important because they would give more specific instructions about which threads would lift up and which ones would stay down with each pass. And the end result of this is that you would have a specific woven pattern at the end, like an intricate design, something that would have taken ages to do by hand. And Babbage would later find a different use for punch cards later in his own career. However, let's get back to young Chuckers. He really was seeking understanding of the universe in general, and that included the spiritual realm. So one of my favorite stories about Babbage is about the time he tried to summon the devil. Yep, you heard me now. According to the story, a teenage Charles Babbage, because of course he was a teenager, decided that he was going to sneak out of his room one night, creep toward an unoccupied home that wasn't too far away, go up to the attic with a lantern and knife in hand, and there he pricked his finger to draw blood. He used that blood to draw up a circle, and then, according to the story, he walked into the circle and began to recite the Lord's prayer in reverse, keeping an eye out for any signs of the devil. And while the devil did not show up, tenacious deed totally did and they rocked out for the rest of the night. All right, that part was a lie, but the story about Babbage trying to summon the devil is apparently true, and of course nobody actually showed up there are other stories of Babbage using his ingenuity to attempt to create devices that would allow him to simulate the miracles mentioned in the Bible. So in a way, you could think of Charles Babbage as kind of an early model for MythBusters as he tried to replicate biblical tales. You know, if you've watched MythBusters, you've seen that sometimes they're not testing a myth, they're trying to replicate the results of a myth. That was kind of what Babbage was doing. He was thinking, well, how could I walk on water? And he would try to make stuff that would allow him to do that. More often than not he failed. In eighteen oh six, when he was fifteen and just a couple of years after Jacquard had invented his famous loom, Babbage enrolled in a school called Forty Hill in Enfield, a northern region of London, nearly two hundred miles away from his home. Forty Hill had thirty students, so it was positively teeming compared to the tiny school that Babbage had previously attended, and Babbage met a mentor who would encourage his curiosity further, a man named Stephen Freeman, Reverend Freeman was a mathematician and an amateur astronomer, and soon Babbage would dive into those subjects with the same enthusiasm he had shown in trying to summon Lucifer. Babbage did become something of a troublesome student, acting out on occasion and committing small acts of vandalism. After about a year, he was sent back home to study once more with tutors as he prepared for university, focusing primarily on mathematics. In eighteen ten, he was accepted into Trinity College at Cambridge. He had a pretty easy go of it there. His family was well to do, so Babbage even had a personal maid who was paid for by his family. She would look after him, she would cook for him and clean for him, and he had an allowance of three hundred pounds sterling each year, which today would be equivalent to around thirty thousand dollars. So yeah, if you want to talk privilege, this guy fits the bill. But Babbage also found the subject matter of his studies to be lacking, complaining that the college was teaching outdated material. He sought out on his own the works of more contemporary mathematicians, mostly from the continent. His desire to learn pushed him to spend a significant amount to acquire calculus textbooks that came from France, which was pretty hard to do because at the time there was this little scuffle going on called the Napoleonic Wars. Babbage formed, as a bit of a joke a mathematics club at Trinity College that looked toward Europe and the mathematicians there as superior to the ones that they were studying while they were in class. Most of the mathematicians they were studying were English because England was extremely nationalistic. Now. One of his fellow club members was a guy named John Herschel that was a son of William Herschel, the astronomer who first discovered uranus. So this was prestigious company he was in, and the club became known as the Analytical Society. They pulled their books together and they formed their own society library from their collected textbooks. Babbage transferred from Trinity College to Peterhouse. Both colleges are part of University of Cambridge, with Peterhouse the oldest of the constituent colleges. That one was founded way back in twelve eighty four. Trinity College by comparison is positively youthful, having been founded in fifteen forty six. For those unfamiliar with universities like Cambridge, the university as a whole is made up of more than thirty semi autonomous colleges, and the colleges don't share a single campus. Rather, they are found throughout the city of Cambridge. So while Babbage was still part of the University of Cambridge as a whole, he was no longer studying at Trinity College with his buddies in the Analytical Society. Babbage also continued to be interested in the paranormal. He joined a ghost club at Peterhouse. However, he also must have recognized that such beliefs were viewed as let's call it eccentric, because he also joined a club called the Extraction Club, which boy, okay, all right. So the Extraction Club had a rule. Ever, member of the club was meant to send a handwritten letter including their current address, to the club's secretary every six months. Failure to do so would result in the club turning its full resources to extract that member from an asylum. Because it was assumed that if you were unable to respond to this demand, that you send a letter every six months that you must have been committed to an asylum for being very eccentric, we'll say, and that they would use any means necessary to get the member out of the asylum, legal or otherwise. So Babbage's college years were very different from my own. Chuck received an honorary diploma from Peter House. The reason for the honorary status is another ridiculous story, but I feel I've been a little too indulgent in his college years already. And he also married the woman he had been courting for three years. She was Georgina Whitmore, someone who sounds to me like she was genuinely a good person. However, Charles's father, Benji Junior, took issue with his son marrying so young in life. Now remember, Charles's father wait until he was in his late thirties before he got married, and he felt that Charles was making a big mistake for not securing his career before settling into domesticity. His father actually liked Georgina, but he hated the idea of his son getting married so young, and that put a strain upon the familial bonds. Charles, for his part, lamented this father was quote uncommonly fond of money end quote. Though heck, this is the same Charles Babbage who had an allowance equivalent to thirty grand a year while he was in college, so you know, glass houses. And heck Dadams was still sending the three hundred pounds a year and received one hundred and fifty pounds a year from her family, So the two already had a pretty decent income without you know, having to work for it. In eighteen sixteen, two years after he graduated university, the twenty four year old Charles Babbage would give an impressive lecture to a group of distinguished gentlemen in London, with an outcome that ultimately discouraged Babbage. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. Charles Babbage presented a two part lecture on calculus and an essay titled Demonstrations of some of Doctor Matthew Stewart's General Theorems to the Royal Society of London. This institution is dedicated, ostensibly anyway, to the furthering of human knowledge in the various sciences. Babbage had hoped to gain entry into this influential society, which would give him valuable connections and Potenti victually have him linked up with a really good position that befitted his skills, and his presentations proved to be just the ticket to get in. However, he soon became disillusioned with the Royal Society. He felt that rather than pursuing knowledge and pushing back the boundaries of what we don't know, the society was being really indulgent. They were spending most of their time having fancy dinners, then holding various ceremonies in which some members of the society would give medals to some other members of the group, not exactly what he was hoping to sign up for. For the next few years, Babbage sought out a position at a college, but had no real luck. In eighteen nineteen, he traveled to Europe and encountered the infamous mechanical hoax called the Turk. Longtime listeners have heard the story of the Turk how a man named Wolfgang von Kimplin, determined to impress Austrian Impress Maria Theresa, created what he claimed to be an auton the miss mechanical chess playing figure in the form of a Turk, and this figure would play games against all comers and when far more often than it would lose, and that von Kimplin would open up the cabinet that was below the figure to reveal that there were a bunch of gears and cogs supposedly working the device. Now, Babbage himself played two matches against the Turk, and he lost both of them. He was intrigued by the idea of a machine that could be able to process information independently of a human, but at the same time he dismissed the Turk itself as a hoax. He theorized that there must be some human player hidden within the machine that was making all the moves, and as it turns out, he was right. That's exactly what was going on, as the world would learn a few decades later. In eighteen twenty, after publishing more works about mathematics, Babbage received an invitation to join the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but he felt that this version of the Royal Society also failed to meet his expectations, and so he decided to be like Bender in Futurama, I'll make my own society with math and astronomy. So he and several of his friends and peers, including John Herschel, his former schoolmate created the Astronomical Society of London, a sort of rival club to the Royal Society. One of the first projects that they tackled was to revise the Nautical Almanac, a publication that gave detailed information on the position of certain celestial bodies throughout the year for the purposes of navigation. The Almanac has within it many many mathematical tables, and some of those tables had errors in them, and so the goal was to try and create an error free version of the Almanac. The work was done manually, with two clerks working on each table independently of each other. When they were both done were working on a table, their results would be compared against one another to look for disparities. Now that helped, but did not eliminate error, and it may have been around this time that Babbage first started thinking about the possibility of creating a machine that would be able to replicate a precise mathematical process perfectly over and over for the purposes of generating mathematical tables error free. In eighteen twenty one, Babbage began to plan out such a machine, which would become known as the Difference Engine Number one, or sometimes the differential engine number one. It would allow an operator to calculate polynomial functions. And if you're like me and it's been a while since you've taken trigonometry or a calculus, it might be helpful to have a reminder as to what these functions are. Things changing so scory nowadays and everybody quick to forget. So the word polynomial literally means many terms, and it is a mathematic expression that can contain constant stance, that is, terms that have a specific and unchanging value, you know, like five. They can also have variables, that is, terms that can have one of many values, the classic being x. And they can have exponents that is, the power to which the associated quantity is raised, like two to the fourth power, which is the same as two times two times two times two or sixteen. So you could have a polynomial expression look something like four x plus two ynus twenty five. The end value of that expression depends upon the individual values of those variables. There are a lot of functions that boil down to polynomial expressions, and so you could create tables that gave the result of those expressions based on the values of the variables and that's what Babbage wanted to do. He wanted to make a machine that, when you set it for specific values within a polynomial function, you could operate it to generate the results of that function steady and reliably. Each time the machine would generate an answer, it would advance the gears and the machinery so that the variables would have new values. So let's say that you're working with X as you're variable, and it shows up a couple of times in your polynomial function like two x plus x to the second power plus twenty. Well, you would need to figure out what the value of that function is based on the value of x. Then you could just keep on going, all right, Well, what if x is one, What if x is two, What if x is three? And so on. He wanted a machine where he could do this very much automatically. To put it another way, and really to oversimplify things. Let's say you have a calculator and it happens to have a quirk where if you press the plus button twice, it automatically adds the last number you entered into the calculator to whatever the last result is. And let's say you did the simple calculation of three plus three, so your result is six. But then you hit the plus button two times and it automatically adds three to that result. Now you've got nine. You hit the plus button twice again, and now you've got twelve. So the calculator is repeating that step exactly and it never makes a mistake no matter how frequently you do this. And that's sort of what Babbage was thinking. He wanted a device that was consistent and dependable, and most importantly, reliable for accurate results. It must have been an enticing thought being able to generate all sorts of mathematical tables for various publications and never having to worry if they contained errors, Because this was something Babbage was really passionate about. He would compare different textbooks containing tables of logarithmic functions and things of that nature, and he would despair when they didn't agree with one another, because it indicated that someone was wrong somewhere. But because the results of these tables require a lot of manual work to calculate, it was a laborious process to figure out which of the two or more textbooks was the right one. And worse than that, they could both be wrong in different ways. The whole purpose of the tables was to make work easier for clerks doing calculations by hand. They represented kind of a short cut to common tasks. But if the shortcut is wrong, everything that follows it will also be wrong. Babbage's desired to know things for certain and his intolerance for error drove his creativity when it came to devising a machine that could do the work infallibly. He got to work building a small prototype of what he had in mind. He used a lathe to build some of the basic components, and then he hired on a workshop to make some of the more complicated fiddly bits that were beyond his skill to produce. It was nearly summer in eighteen twenty two when he had a small but working version of his idea. It was a very limited, one word prototype, and when compared to what Babbage had in mind, it was very tiny, but it still had a ton of moving parts. There were twenty four axles, upon which there were ninety six wheels. The wheels geared would fit together, and the gears had different ratios between them, so that a rotation of one wheel would translate to either more or fewer rotations of another wheel. Gear ratios are really important in mechanical systems, and we see them used in everything from clocks to vinyl record turntables to car transmissions. And it's pretty easy to understand. Let's just imagine two gears and one has a circumference of ten inches and the other one has a circumference of five inches, and the two interlocked together, so that turning one will make the other one turn as well. If you were to rotate the ten inch gear once, the five inch gear would have two full rotations. Likewise, if you were to rotate the five inch gear one time, the ten inch gear will go through just half a rotation. So by combining gears of different sizes, and by the way, this isn't just different circumferences, we're also talking about the number of teeth each gear has. I'm just oversimplifying here, but anyway, you can precisely determine the mechanical motions of a device by pairing these different gears and different ratios. Gear ratios are also important when it comes to stuff like the amount of torque you generate that's rotational force. But that's enough about gear ratios for now. Babbage's prototype could only calculate a table based on the polynomial formula x to the second power plus x plus forty one. What's more, it was limited to just the first thirty values of that calculation, and the variables could only have whole integers as values. A crank provided the rotational force needed to operate the machine, which could generate results at a speed of thirty three digits per minute, so it took about two seconds for the machine to produce a digit. It didn't have a way to print the results either, you had to read it right off the machine. Now, the full version he helped to build would include a printer, but that was beyond his abilities. At this point, he gathered his fellow members of the Astronomical Society and he showed off his work in June eighteen twenty two. His peers offered some feedback, and he took it into account for his more grandiose plans. He then penned a letter titled Note on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables and sent it to the President of the Royal Society of London that would be Sir Humphrey Davy as a quick aside. Sir Humphrey is best known today for his experiments in which he used electricity to isolate various elements like boron, calcium, strontium, sodium, and potassium, among others. He's also famous for creating the Davy lamp, which is an oil lamp that had a fine metal mesh surrounding the flame and that would allow air to pass through to feed the process of burning, but it prevented the flame from escaping, which was incredibly useful in areas that had flammable gases present, like in coal mines. He would also do some early work with arc lamps, which uses an arc of electricity to provide light. Anyway, Sir Humphrey Davy was a super important dude, and one day I'll have to do a full episode about him. Babbage's letter included not only a description of his difference engine, but also Babbage's thoughts on more advanced machines that would be able to do much more, including multiply any number of figures by any other number, and a means by which he could generate a table of prime numbers from zero to ten million, and most importantly, by using the machines, he could be certain that the tables would be free of error. Now, big prime numbers are something that's really useful in cryptography. A pretty common method of encrypting it information involves creating a key system that uses two extremely large prime numbers. Then you multiply those two numbers together to create an even bigger number, which is used in the encryption process. So to decrypt the information, you need to know those two big prime numbers, and it's really hard to work backward from the product of multiplication to figure out which two really big prime numbers were used to generate that product. This is the basis for much of modern cryptography, including the mining process for bitcoins, among other things. Though Babbage was not that into bitcoins since they hadn't been invented yet. He was more concerned about creating tools that would allow for more efficient and accurate calculations for future work. The Royal Society responded to Babbage's letter with enthusiasm, commending Babbage on his ingenuity, but Chuck had hit pretty much the limit of how far he could go on his own. He had been funding his work on his own, but he needed financial support if he was going to continue, and so he sought out a meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer to see if he could get some public funding for his work. When we come back, i'll talk more about how that turned out, but first let's take a quick break. Babbage's meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer probably caused Chuck a bit of anxiety. After all, it was one thing to communicate with fellow mathematicians and the scientifically minded and agree upon the utility of Babbage's invention. To them, it would be obvious. But it's another matter to convince someone who's holding the purse strings. That person may or may not share that same mindset. Babbage brought with him a letter of recommendation from the Royal Society of London, and that went a long way, and so ultimately he was granted an advanced somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred pounds. Not all accounts actually agree on the exact amount, but it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in today's money, a princely sum. In return, Babbage was meant to complete a difference engine capable of computing quote six orders of differences each of twenty places of figures end quote, and do so at a rate of forty four digits per minute, and he had three years to do it. Babbage would do some of the construction work in his own workshop. He turned much of his own home into additional workspaces, and he hired on an engineer named Joseph Clement to oversee additional work at a professional manufacturing facility. Unfortunately, the building process did not go as quickly or as smoothly as Babbage had hoped. Three years came and went and he was still working on it. He took on additional jobs in the meantime as work continued, and occasionally he would fund his own work. In eighteen twenty seven, Babbage suffered a pretty severe mental breakdown because it was a very tragic year for him. In that one year, he lost his father, with whom he had had that difficult relationship. His wife and his newborn son passed away that year, and his ten year old son also passed away that year, so he lost four family members in the space of a year. His friends were able to convince him to take a break from his work on the difference engine and told him that he should travel to help kind of deal with his grief, and so he sent his children to stay with his mother. He had several children with his wife, and his surviving children went to his mom to stay with her, and then John Herschel, his good friend from school, took over the job of overseeing progress on the difference engine while he was traveling. Babbage would return to England in eighteen twenty eight, after having visited various colleges and universities and research facilities throughout Europe. He secured a professor position in Cambridge and he resumed overseeing the construction of the difference engine. The monstrosity now had nearly twenty five thousand parts. If it were to be finished, it would have weighed four tons. It had also gone well over budget, but the Royal Society of London helped Babbage recoup expenses, convincing the UK government to send more financial support toward Babbage. So Babbage would foot the bill and then over time he would get money from the UK government that helped offset his costs, but that support only stretched so far. By eighteen thirty two, the government had kind of had enough At that point, it had invested around seventeen thousand pound into this effort. Babbage himself had contributed around six thousand pounds of his own money into the project, and it was nowhere close to being finished, so the government chose to suspend support, deeming it a waste of resources. For the time being, it technically was still in the books, but all actual financial support was suspended. Babbage decided to expand his workshop space at his home and to move all operations into that workspace. This was something that rubbed the engineer Clement the wrong way, and the two were unable to find a compromise, and so Clement and Babbage parted ways. By the end of all this, Babbage had started to grow really disenchanted with the whole process. He still had a really far way to go. Three quarters of the work was yet to be done, and the setbacks he had encountered and the personal losses he had endured had discouraged him to the point that he decided to give up on the project. However, something else happened in eighteen thirty two that would be a positive change in his life, a significant one. In an effort to expand his social circles, he began to host parties. These parties were meant not only to help him make new connections with influential people, but also introduce his growing children to influential families as well. Something that's important if you're trying to do things like you know, potentially set up a possible marriage in the future. And it was one of these parties that a seventeen year old woman named Augusta Ada Byron, better known to us as Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, walked into his life. Now. The accounts say that at the party, Babbage demonstrated to his guests a more recent prototype of his difference engine. This one had two thousand moving parts, and Lovelace was absolutely fascinated by this. She, like Babbage, had a love of mathematics and logic, and the two found they shared many interests. It wasn't long before they became fast friends, and that Lovelace would become a professional partner to Babbage. In some ways, she was like a daughter to him, particularly after the tragic loss of Babbage's own daughter, Georgiana in eighteen thirty four, Babbage continued to work and host parties despite experiencing tremendous personal loss in his life, he was known to be a little bit irascible as well. There's a wonderful story that I want to share. Babbage famously once wrote a letter criticizing Alfred Lord Tennyson's for a verse in the vision of sin. Babbage's message to Tennyson said, in your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads every moment dies a man, every moment one is born. If this were true, the population of the world would be the standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that the next version of your poem should read every moment dies a man, every moment one one sixteenth is born. And he probably wasn't joking about that. Lovelace, by contrast, was much better at dealing with the human side of life while still maintaining a keen mind for the mathematic and scientific, and the two worked very well together. Babbage turned his mind to other types of invention as well. He created the cowcatcher aka the pilot. This is the wedge frame that extends in front of a locomotive, and it's designed to push obstacles out of the way of the train. If something happens to be on the tracks, it's meant to move it out of the way so it doesn't derail the train. He also invented a railway vehicle called the dynamometer, which could measure train performance. Babbage was obsessed with quantifying various phenomena, even stuff that might seem to be unquantifiable. It was in eighteen forty that Babbage would travel to France, whereupon he encountered the Jacquard Looms i mentioned earlier. This is where Babbage first saw the use of punch cards, and before long he began to imagine new uses for that type of technology. He thought of a machine that could use punch cards to carry out specific instructions, something even more advanced than the difference engine design of his. He called this new machine design the analytical engine. Lovelace quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of this idea, and she took it even further. While Babbage was thinking of a machine capable of performing complicated mathematical processes, Lovelace envisioned a world in which all sorts of things, from language to music could be translated into mathematics and then manipulated or even created through such a machine. Imagined music made by machine. In other words, Lovelace was imagining computer science nearly a century before we would see the first programmable general purpose machines. Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine was both more audacious than the Difference Engine and more elegant. It would be steam powered, it would be able to store one thousand digits with fifty decimal places. It would be able to perform any type of mathematical function, and Babbage and Lovelace worked together to create a very long pamphlet, more than sixty pages in length, describing the design of the Analytical Engine in eighteen forty three. By this time, the UK government had officially canceled funding for the Difference Engine. It was no longer just suspended. The project itself was no more. Babbage, however, hadn't quite let go of the idea, and he began to work on a new proposal for such a device. The Difference Engine number two would be mechanically simpler than the original machine. He had able to do more than his first design, while Engine number one had more than twenty five thousand parts before it had been canceled. And remember it was only about a quarter finished. The new design called for a machine with eight thousand parts. He would work on that in between his work with Lovelace on the Analytical Engine. Little side adventure here. Babbage was, among other things, an enthusiastic patron of the theater, and there's a story that says he was watching an opera and noticed light playing upon the lace bonnet of his friend who attended the show with him, and that gave him an idea. He contacted his buddy Michael Faraday, who also deserves his own episode, to go over a concept. He wanted to use liquids of different colors, you know, jars of these liquids, so you have like a jar of amber liquid, a jar of blue liquid, and so on, and then place those jars in front of a limelight lamp. Essentially, he wanted to create a primitive series of color filters for theatrical lights to create a specific effect. He even went to the trouble of making a ballet called Alethes and Iris to show this off, complete with a cast of sixty young women in white costume so that the light would play upon their outfits. While rehearsing this piece, the theater manager got second thoughts because he started to worry about the possibility of a fire with so much liquid near powerful electric lamps, and so the piece was never actually performed for the public. Tragedy returned to Babbage's life in eighteen fifty two, when Ada Lovelace would pass away from illness. She was only thirty six years old. Babbage once again was left behind. He continued to work, completing blueprints for a prototype version of the analytical engine in eighteen fifty six, but he failed to find funding for either the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine. The government had become really wary of his history of going over budget without producing a final working piece of equipment. They did offer him a knighthood, but he declined that offer. He grew increasingly unpleasant as he aged in the eighteen sixties. He was generally disliked by his neighbors, and he could be the patron saint of Get Off My Lawn. He was known in particular for his dislike of street performers and musicians, and I really do mean he was known for it because he wrote a pamphlet about it, listing all the sins of quote encouragers of street music, and among whose numbers he counted gen shops, coffee shops, tourists, children, and ladies of doubtful virtue. His grouchiness led to the passing of what became known as the Babbage Act, which made it a crime for street musicians who interfered with any citizen's ordinary occupation. So, in other words, if they didn't cut out that racket, and you couldn't get any work done, you could call in the coppers and they could get clapped for it. Nice guy, that Babbage. He never finished his difference Engine nor his analytical engine. He passed away on October eighteenth, eighteen seventy one. While he never saw either machine completed within his lifetime, others would later take his designs and build their own versions of the machine. His youngest son, Henry, managed to finish a section of the second difference Engine, and others would build replicas of his designs much later on. You can find some in museums like the Computer History Museum. The models work complete with a working printer, and they are all mechanical in operation. Babbage's life was one filled with incredible innovation and terrible loss. I always thought of him as a really smart, sourpuss, someone who was really intelligent, but generally unlikable by most people. It was only after reading a much more detailed biography of his life and diving into his past that I got a deeper appreciation for the challenges he faced and those that he overcame. And I haven't covered all those challenges. I haven't covered all of his accomplishments. I haven't covered all the tragedy of his life. He invented other things as well, like an ophthalmoscope that's a medical device. He did a lot in his lifetime. The fact that Babbage did have close and lifelong friends tells me that he wasn't nearly the curmudgeon I originally thought him to be, at least not throughout his entire life. He certainly grew more grouchy as he aged, but considering the setbacks he experienced both personally and professionally, and those terrible losses that he had endured, I think we should be able to forgive him for that. And the fact that he was more interested in seeing his work completed than getting an honorific title like a knighthood says a lot about his priorities and his character, and that wraps up this look at Charles Babbage, a truly influential figure in the history of technology. I will have to do, as I said, more episodes about some of his contemporaries. Maybe I'll do another one about Ada Lovelace. She again is a fascinating person in her own right, and in fact, we have Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate her work and the inspiration she has given to countless generations of young women who themselves have become prolific coders. And a lot of that was work that was foreseen by Ada Lovelace. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that episode of tech Stuff from twenty twenty one. My apologies for not having a new episode out today. I really wanted to do it, but it's just it's gotten more painful as I've been here, and I want to take care of all that. Yay, Okay. Well, I hope all of you are well. I hope none of you are going through this kind of discomfort, and I will be sure to talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you? I've been better. I'm in severe pain. I think I may have a kidney stone, but I had not yet recorded today's episode, and I definitely wanted to get something out to y'all, and so before I head off to an urgent care center to get checked out. The sad thing with kidney stones is, unless it's a really big one, there's not much they're going to be able to do except maybe pack me full of saline and await the dreadful end. But you know, before I head off, I thought i'd bring you a nice little classic episode, not even a classic episode, an episode from just two years ago called Excess Babbage. This episode originally published Monday, January eighteenth, twenty twenty one. It is about Charles Babbage, a man ahead of his time, and yeah, I hope you enjoy it, and hopefully by tomorrow I'll be right as rain and I'll be ready to do news episodes. For the time being, I'm gonna sign off and take some painkillers and then head over to urgent care. Many years ago, when tech Stuff was in a very different format, our show talked a bit about Charles Babbage and his various engines, that is, devices intended to perform different mathematical processes. We also did an episode about Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers. But the show was so different back then that I thought it might be good to do some thorough examinations of who these people were and the contributions they made to technology in general and arguably computing in particular. And they are all the more remarkable in that those contributions all took place in the early to mid nineteenth century, nearly one hundred years before we would get the first programmable, electronic and general purpose computer. But we've got a lot of ground to cover before we get there, so let us begin with the life and accomplishments of one Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage was born on December twenty sixth, seventeen ninety one, although his obituary said it was seventeen ninety two. Spoiler alert, I guess Babbage is not alive anymore. He was remarkable, but he was not an immortal. Anyway, there's a record of his baptism that actually dates back to January seventeen ninety two, so unless he was baptized nearly a full year before or he was born, I think it is probably safe to say that the seventeen ninety one date is the correct one. His grandfather was Benjamin Babbage Senior, who was a man of some standing in Tautness, a market town in Devonshire itself, a region in the southwest of England. It's a port town. It's about the same distance from Exeter as it is from Plymouth, and Plymouth might be the first location that my fellow Americans recognize. Benny Senior served as mayor of Tautness for a year, indicating that he must have been at least a little bit important in that town. His son, Benji Junior, would become a goldsmith and a tradesman, and later on a banker. Junior was a bit of a career man, which is putting it lightly. He was someone who apparently did not have time for the other aspects of life, as he was in his late thirties when he married Elizabeth Betsy plummet Teep, who came from a likewise prominent family in Devonshire. They were married in seventeen ninety. Benjamin Babbage Junior and Betsy moved from Devonshire to London, where Benny secured a position at the Bitton Estate banking firm. The following year, Charles Babbage was born. His father continued to rise in the ranks of the banking industry, becoming junior partner of the banking house of prad Digby Box Babbage and Company, though most people referred to it as Prad and Company for the sake of Brevity, which as we know, is the soul of wit. The bank was on Fleet Street, where there was also a barber of some renown, but that's a tale for a different time. Swing ear raiser High Sweeney. His family was religious, adhering to the Anglican faith, and Charles would also become a religious man. He had two brothers, who sadly did not survive infancy. He also had a sister named Mary Ann, who was seven years younger than he and would be one of his close friends as he was growing up. His early education came from private tutors, but Charles was also plagued with health problems described as violent fevers. And his parents worried that the realities of living in London at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Remember this is in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, that maybe all that was a little too taxing on young Chuck. So they decided that he should be sent off to attend school in a rural schoolhouse in the countryside, far from the noise and pollution of the city, and they hoped that there his health would be able to improve. So in eighteen o three, Ben Junior relocated his family back to Devon and Charles would move his studies to a village named Alphington outside of Exeter. His school consisted of six students, including Charles. Their teacher was a member of the local clergy. Charles' health did improve and his curiosity became one of his defining traits. He was keenly interested in puzzles and ciphers and clockwork devices. And this again was in the early eighteen hundreds. England's Industrial Revolution was in full swing, so this was an era of innovation, of urbanization and automation. Joseph Murrie Jacquard had invented a machine that would later serve as one of the foundational elements to one of Babbage's own inventions. This would be the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards as a way to create specific woven patterns. The Jacquard loom is a fascinating piece of technology and a truly ingenious invention. It allowed weavers to program a woven pattern, and assuming you operate the loom properly, the machine would follow the program exactly, creating the just as you had programmed it. Now, the way this worked mechanically is super cool, but it's also something that I don't think I can easily explain without visual aids because there are a lot of moving parts. Ultimately, the punch cards would determine which threads in the loom would lift up for each pass of a loom's shuttle. So quick explanation here, just because it will clear some stuff up. Let's imagine you've got a series of threads arranged vertically, and let's say they're all white. This is the background of your woven pattern. Let's say you're making a rug. Well, you would weave by moving a new thread, probably a different color, horizontally across these vertical strings, right, and you would alternate when you would go over or under threads, and which threads you go over or under would be dependent upon whatever pattern you are trying to make. This is painstakingly slow to do by hand, so a loom speeds us up by lifting some threads while keeping other threads down. So imagine that the loom is lifting up every odd numbered thread and all the even numbered threads stay down. Then you could pull a horizontal thread across the width of all these vertical lines, and then switch which threads are up and which ones are down and pull the thread across again. That's the job of the shuttle. The shuttle holds the thread that goes back and forth horizontally across the lines of vertical threads. So doing this and alternating it over and over again that is weaving. It's much faster than doing the over under, over under, over under by hand. Now, the punch cards were important because they would give more specific instructions about which threads would lift up and which ones would stay down with each pass. And the end result of this is that you would have a specific woven pattern at the end, like an intricate design, something that would have taken ages to do by hand. And Babbage would later find a different use for punch cards later in his own career. However, let's get back to young Chuckers. He really was seeking understanding of the universe in general, and that included the spiritual realm. So one of my favorite stories about Babbage is about the time he tried to summon the devil. Yep, you heard me now. According to the story, a teenage Charles Babbage, because of course he was a teenager, decided that he was going to sneak out of his room one night, creep toward an unoccupied home that wasn't too far away, go up to the attic with a lantern and knife in hand, and there he pricked his finger to draw blood. He used that blood to draw up a circle, and then, according to the story, he walked into the circle and began to recite the Lord's prayer in reverse, keeping an eye out for any signs of the devil. And while the devil did not show up, tenacious deed totally did and they rocked out for the rest of the night. All right, that part was a lie, but the story about Babbage trying to summon the devil is apparently true, and of course nobody actually showed up there are other stories of Babbage using his ingenuity to attempt to create devices that would allow him to simulate the miracles mentioned in the Bible. So in a way, you could think of Charles Babbage as kind of an early model for MythBusters as he tried to replicate biblical tales. You know, if you've watched MythBusters, you've seen that sometimes they're not testing a myth, they're trying to replicate the results of a myth. That was kind of what Babbage was doing. He was thinking, well, how could I walk on water? And he would try to make stuff that would allow him to do that. More often than not he failed. In eighteen oh six, when he was fifteen and just a couple of years after Jacquard had invented his famous loom, Babbage enrolled in a school called Forty Hill in Enfield, a northern region of London, nearly two hundred miles away from his home. Forty Hill had thirty students, so it was positively teeming compared to the tiny school that Babbage had previously attended, and Babbage met a mentor who would encourage his curiosity further, a man named Stephen Freeman, Reverend Freeman was a mathematician and an amateur astronomer, and soon Babbage would dive into those subjects with the same enthusiasm he had shown in trying to summon Lucifer. Babbage did become something of a troublesome student, acting out on occasion and committing small acts of vandalism. After about a year, he was sent back home to study once more with tutors as he prepared for university, focusing primarily on mathematics. In eighteen ten, he was accepted into Trinity College at Cambridge. He had a pretty easy go of it there. His family was well to do, so Babbage even had a personal maid who was paid for by his family. She would look after him, she would cook for him and clean for him, and he had an allowance of three hundred pounds sterling each year, which today would be equivalent to around thirty thousand dollars. So yeah, if you want to talk privilege, this guy fits the bill. But Babbage also found the subject matter of his studies to be lacking, complaining that the college was teaching outdated material. He sought out on his own the works of more contemporary mathematicians, mostly from the continent. His desire to learn pushed him to spend a significant amount to acquire calculus textbooks that came from France, which was pretty hard to do because at the time there was this little scuffle going on called the Napoleonic Wars. Babbage formed, as a bit of a joke a mathematics club at Trinity College that looked toward Europe and the mathematicians there as superior to the ones that they were studying while they were in class. Most of the mathematicians they were studying were English because England was extremely nationalistic. Now. One of his fellow club members was a guy named John Herschel that was a son of William Herschel, the astronomer who first discovered uranus. So this was prestigious company he was in, and the club became known as the Analytical Society. They pulled their books together and they formed their own society library from their collected textbooks. Babbage transferred from Trinity College to Peterhouse. Both colleges are part of University of Cambridge, with Peterhouse the oldest of the constituent colleges. That one was founded way back in twelve eighty four. Trinity College by comparison is positively youthful, having been founded in fifteen forty six. For those unfamiliar with universities like Cambridge, the university as a whole is made up of more than thirty semi autonomous colleges, and the colleges don't share a single campus. Rather, they are found throughout the city of Cambridge. So while Babbage was still part of the University of Cambridge as a whole, he was no longer studying at Trinity College with his buddies in the Analytical Society. Babbage also continued to be interested in the paranormal. He joined a ghost club at Peterhouse. However, he also must have recognized that such beliefs were viewed as let's call it eccentric, because he also joined a club called the Extraction Club, which boy, okay, all right. So the Extraction Club had a rule. Ever, member of the club was meant to send a handwritten letter including their current address, to the club's secretary every six months. Failure to do so would result in the club turning its full resources to extract that member from an asylum. Because it was assumed that if you were unable to respond to this demand, that you send a letter every six months that you must have been committed to an asylum for being very eccentric, we'll say, and that they would use any means necessary to get the member out of the asylum, legal or otherwise. So Babbage's college years were very different from my own. Chuck received an honorary diploma from Peter House. The reason for the honorary status is another ridiculous story, but I feel I've been a little too indulgent in his college years already. And he also married the woman he had been courting for three years. She was Georgina Whitmore, someone who sounds to me like she was genuinely a good person. However, Charles's father, Benji Junior, took issue with his son marrying so young in life. Now remember, Charles's father wait until he was in his late thirties before he got married, and he felt that Charles was making a big mistake for not securing his career before settling into domesticity. His father actually liked Georgina, but he hated the idea of his son getting married so young, and that put a strain upon the familial bonds. Charles, for his part, lamented this father was quote uncommonly fond of money end quote. Though heck, this is the same Charles Babbage who had an allowance equivalent to thirty grand a year while he was in college, so you know, glass houses. And heck Dadams was still sending the three hundred pounds a year and received one hundred and fifty pounds a year from her family, So the two already had a pretty decent income without you know, having to work for it. In eighteen sixteen, two years after he graduated university, the twenty four year old Charles Babbage would give an impressive lecture to a group of distinguished gentlemen in London, with an outcome that ultimately discouraged Babbage. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. Charles Babbage presented a two part lecture on calculus and an essay titled Demonstrations of some of Doctor Matthew Stewart's General Theorems to the Royal Society of London. This institution is dedicated, ostensibly anyway, to the furthering of human knowledge in the various sciences. Babbage had hoped to gain entry into this influential society, which would give him valuable connections and Potenti victually have him linked up with a really good position that befitted his skills, and his presentations proved to be just the ticket to get in. However, he soon became disillusioned with the Royal Society. He felt that rather than pursuing knowledge and pushing back the boundaries of what we don't know, the society was being really indulgent. They were spending most of their time having fancy dinners, then holding various ceremonies in which some members of the society would give medals to some other members of the group, not exactly what he was hoping to sign up for. For the next few years, Babbage sought out a position at a college, but had no real luck. In eighteen nineteen, he traveled to Europe and encountered the infamous mechanical hoax called the Turk. Longtime listeners have heard the story of the Turk how a man named Wolfgang von Kimplin, determined to impress Austrian Impress Maria Theresa, created what he claimed to be an auton the miss mechanical chess playing figure in the form of a Turk, and this figure would play games against all comers and when far more often than it would lose, and that von Kimplin would open up the cabinet that was below the figure to reveal that there were a bunch of gears and cogs supposedly working the device. Now, Babbage himself played two matches against the Turk, and he lost both of them. He was intrigued by the idea of a machine that could be able to process information independently of a human, but at the same time he dismissed the Turk itself as a hoax. He theorized that there must be some human player hidden within the machine that was making all the moves, and as it turns out, he was right. That's exactly what was going on, as the world would learn a few decades later. In eighteen twenty, after publishing more works about mathematics, Babbage received an invitation to join the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but he felt that this version of the Royal Society also failed to meet his expectations, and so he decided to be like Bender in Futurama, I'll make my own society with math and astronomy. So he and several of his friends and peers, including John Herschel, his former schoolmate created the Astronomical Society of London, a sort of rival club to the Royal Society. One of the first projects that they tackled was to revise the Nautical Almanac, a publication that gave detailed information on the position of certain celestial bodies throughout the year for the purposes of navigation. The Almanac has within it many many mathematical tables, and some of those tables had errors in them, and so the goal was to try and create an error free version of the Almanac. The work was done manually, with two clerks working on each table independently of each other. When they were both done were working on a table, their results would be compared against one another to look for disparities. Now that helped, but did not eliminate error, and it may have been around this time that Babbage first started thinking about the possibility of creating a machine that would be able to replicate a precise mathematical process perfectly over and over for the purposes of generating mathematical tables error free. In eighteen twenty one, Babbage began to plan out such a machine, which would become known as the Difference Engine Number one, or sometimes the differential engine number one. It would allow an operator to calculate polynomial functions. And if you're like me and it's been a while since you've taken trigonometry or a calculus, it might be helpful to have a reminder as to what these functions are. Things changing so scory nowadays and everybody quick to forget. So the word polynomial literally means many terms, and it is a mathematic expression that can contain constant stance, that is, terms that have a specific and unchanging value, you know, like five. They can also have variables, that is, terms that can have one of many values, the classic being x. And they can have exponents that is, the power to which the associated quantity is raised, like two to the fourth power, which is the same as two times two times two times two or sixteen. So you could have a polynomial expression look something like four x plus two ynus twenty five. The end value of that expression depends upon the individual values of those variables. There are a lot of functions that boil down to polynomial expressions, and so you could create tables that gave the result of those expressions based on the values of the variables and that's what Babbage wanted to do. He wanted to make a machine that, when you set it for specific values within a polynomial function, you could operate it to generate the results of that function steady and reliably. Each time the machine would generate an answer, it would advance the gears and the machinery so that the variables would have new values. So let's say that you're working with X as you're variable, and it shows up a couple of times in your polynomial function like two x plus x to the second power plus twenty. Well, you would need to figure out what the value of that function is based on the value of x. Then you could just keep on going, all right, Well, what if x is one, What if x is two, What if x is three? And so on. He wanted a machine where he could do this very much automatically. To put it another way, and really to oversimplify things. Let's say you have a calculator and it happens to have a quirk where if you press the plus button twice, it automatically adds the last number you entered into the calculator to whatever the last result is. And let's say you did the simple calculation of three plus three, so your result is six. But then you hit the plus button two times and it automatically adds three to that result. Now you've got nine. You hit the plus button twice again, and now you've got twelve. So the calculator is repeating that step exactly and it never makes a mistake no matter how frequently you do this. And that's sort of what Babbage was thinking. He wanted a device that was consistent and dependable, and most importantly, reliable for accurate results. It must have been an enticing thought being able to generate all sorts of mathematical tables for various publications and never having to worry if they contained errors, Because this was something Babbage was really passionate about. He would compare different textbooks containing tables of logarithmic functions and things of that nature, and he would despair when they didn't agree with one another, because it indicated that someone was wrong somewhere. But because the results of these tables require a lot of manual work to calculate, it was a laborious process to figure out which of the two or more textbooks was the right one. And worse than that, they could both be wrong in different ways. The whole purpose of the tables was to make work easier for clerks doing calculations by hand. They represented kind of a short cut to common tasks. But if the shortcut is wrong, everything that follows it will also be wrong. Babbage's desired to know things for certain and his intolerance for error drove his creativity when it came to devising a machine that could do the work infallibly. He got to work building a small prototype of what he had in mind. He used a lathe to build some of the basic components, and then he hired on a workshop to make some of the more complicated fiddly bits that were beyond his skill to produce. It was nearly summer in eighteen twenty two when he had a small but working version of his idea. It was a very limited, one word prototype, and when compared to what Babbage had in mind, it was very tiny, but it still had a ton of moving parts. There were twenty four axles, upon which there were ninety six wheels. The wheels geared would fit together, and the gears had different ratios between them, so that a rotation of one wheel would translate to either more or fewer rotations of another wheel. Gear ratios are really important in mechanical systems, and we see them used in everything from clocks to vinyl record turntables to car transmissions. And it's pretty easy to understand. Let's just imagine two gears and one has a circumference of ten inches and the other one has a circumference of five inches, and the two interlocked together, so that turning one will make the other one turn as well. If you were to rotate the ten inch gear once, the five inch gear would have two full rotations. Likewise, if you were to rotate the five inch gear one time, the ten inch gear will go through just half a rotation. So by combining gears of different sizes, and by the way, this isn't just different circumferences, we're also talking about the number of teeth each gear has. I'm just oversimplifying here, but anyway, you can precisely determine the mechanical motions of a device by pairing these different gears and different ratios. Gear ratios are also important when it comes to stuff like the amount of torque you generate that's rotational force. But that's enough about gear ratios for now. Babbage's prototype could only calculate a table based on the polynomial formula x to the second power plus x plus forty one. What's more, it was limited to just the first thirty values of that calculation, and the variables could only have whole integers as values. A crank provided the rotational force needed to operate the machine, which could generate results at a speed of thirty three digits per minute, so it took about two seconds for the machine to produce a digit. It didn't have a way to print the results either, you had to read it right off the machine. Now, the full version he helped to build would include a printer, but that was beyond his abilities. At this point, he gathered his fellow members of the Astronomical Society and he showed off his work in June eighteen twenty two. His peers offered some feedback, and he took it into account for his more grandiose plans. He then penned a letter titled Note on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Astronomical and Mathematical Tables and sent it to the President of the Royal Society of London that would be Sir Humphrey Davy as a quick aside. Sir Humphrey is best known today for his experiments in which he used electricity to isolate various elements like boron, calcium, strontium, sodium, and potassium, among others. He's also famous for creating the Davy lamp, which is an oil lamp that had a fine metal mesh surrounding the flame and that would allow air to pass through to feed the process of burning, but it prevented the flame from escaping, which was incredibly useful in areas that had flammable gases present, like in coal mines. He would also do some early work with arc lamps, which uses an arc of electricity to provide light. Anyway, Sir Humphrey Davy was a super important dude, and one day I'll have to do a full episode about him. Babbage's letter included not only a description of his difference engine, but also Babbage's thoughts on more advanced machines that would be able to do much more, including multiply any number of figures by any other number, and a means by which he could generate a table of prime numbers from zero to ten million, and most importantly, by using the machines, he could be certain that the tables would be free of error. Now, big prime numbers are something that's really useful in cryptography. A pretty common method of encrypting it information involves creating a key system that uses two extremely large prime numbers. Then you multiply those two numbers together to create an even bigger number, which is used in the encryption process. So to decrypt the information, you need to know those two big prime numbers, and it's really hard to work backward from the product of multiplication to figure out which two really big prime numbers were used to generate that product. This is the basis for much of modern cryptography, including the mining process for bitcoins, among other things. Though Babbage was not that into bitcoins since they hadn't been invented yet. He was more concerned about creating tools that would allow for more efficient and accurate calculations for future work. The Royal Society responded to Babbage's letter with enthusiasm, commending Babbage on his ingenuity, but Chuck had hit pretty much the limit of how far he could go on his own. He had been funding his work on his own, but he needed financial support if he was going to continue, and so he sought out a meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer to see if he could get some public funding for his work. When we come back, i'll talk more about how that turned out, but first let's take a quick break. Babbage's meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer probably caused Chuck a bit of anxiety. After all, it was one thing to communicate with fellow mathematicians and the scientifically minded and agree upon the utility of Babbage's invention. To them, it would be obvious. But it's another matter to convince someone who's holding the purse strings. That person may or may not share that same mindset. Babbage brought with him a letter of recommendation from the Royal Society of London, and that went a long way, and so ultimately he was granted an advanced somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred pounds. Not all accounts actually agree on the exact amount, but it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in today's money, a princely sum. In return, Babbage was meant to complete a difference engine capable of computing quote six orders of differences each of twenty places of figures end quote, and do so at a rate of forty four digits per minute, and he had three years to do it. Babbage would do some of the construction work in his own workshop. He turned much of his own home into additional workspaces, and he hired on an engineer named Joseph Clement to oversee additional work at a professional manufacturing facility. Unfortunately, the building process did not go as quickly or as smoothly as Babbage had hoped. Three years came and went and he was still working on it. He took on additional jobs in the meantime as work continued, and occasionally he would fund his own work. In eighteen twenty seven, Babbage suffered a pretty severe mental breakdown because it was a very tragic year for him. In that one year, he lost his father, with whom he had had that difficult relationship. His wife and his newborn son passed away that year, and his ten year old son also passed away that year, so he lost four family members in the space of a year. His friends were able to convince him to take a break from his work on the difference engine and told him that he should travel to help kind of deal with his grief, and so he sent his children to stay with his mother. He had several children with his wife, and his surviving children went to his mom to stay with her, and then John Herschel, his good friend from school, took over the job of overseeing progress on the difference engine while he was traveling. Babbage would return to England in eighteen twenty eight, after having visited various colleges and universities and research facilities throughout Europe. He secured a professor position in Cambridge and he resumed overseeing the construction of the difference engine. The monstrosity now had nearly twenty five thousand parts. If it were to be finished, it would have weighed four tons. It had also gone well over budget, but the Royal Society of London helped Babbage recoup expenses, convincing the UK government to send more financial support toward Babbage. So Babbage would foot the bill and then over time he would get money from the UK government that helped offset his costs, but that support only stretched so far. By eighteen thirty two, the government had kind of had enough At that point, it had invested around seventeen thousand pound into this effort. Babbage himself had contributed around six thousand pounds of his own money into the project, and it was nowhere close to being finished, so the government chose to suspend support, deeming it a waste of resources. For the time being, it technically was still in the books, but all actual financial support was suspended. Babbage decided to expand his workshop space at his home and to move all operations into that workspace. This was something that rubbed the engineer Clement the wrong way, and the two were unable to find a compromise, and so Clement and Babbage parted ways. By the end of all this, Babbage had started to grow really disenchanted with the whole process. He still had a really far way to go. Three quarters of the work was yet to be done, and the setbacks he had encountered and the personal losses he had endured had discouraged him to the point that he decided to give up on the project. However, something else happened in eighteen thirty two that would be a positive change in his life, a significant one. In an effort to expand his social circles, he began to host parties. These parties were meant not only to help him make new connections with influential people, but also introduce his growing children to influential families as well. Something that's important if you're trying to do things like you know, potentially set up a possible marriage in the future. And it was one of these parties that a seventeen year old woman named Augusta Ada Byron, better known to us as Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, walked into his life. Now. The accounts say that at the party, Babbage demonstrated to his guests a more recent prototype of his difference engine. This one had two thousand moving parts, and Lovelace was absolutely fascinated by this. She, like Babbage, had a love of mathematics and logic, and the two found they shared many interests. It wasn't long before they became fast friends, and that Lovelace would become a professional partner to Babbage. In some ways, she was like a daughter to him, particularly after the tragic loss of Babbage's own daughter, Georgiana in eighteen thirty four, Babbage continued to work and host parties despite experiencing tremendous personal loss in his life, he was known to be a little bit irascible as well. There's a wonderful story that I want to share. Babbage famously once wrote a letter criticizing Alfred Lord Tennyson's for a verse in the vision of sin. Babbage's message to Tennyson said, in your otherwise beautiful poem, one verse reads every moment dies a man, every moment one is born. If this were true, the population of the world would be the standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that the next version of your poem should read every moment dies a man, every moment one one sixteenth is born. And he probably wasn't joking about that. Lovelace, by contrast, was much better at dealing with the human side of life while still maintaining a keen mind for the mathematic and scientific, and the two worked very well together. Babbage turned his mind to other types of invention as well. He created the cowcatcher aka the pilot. This is the wedge frame that extends in front of a locomotive, and it's designed to push obstacles out of the way of the train. If something happens to be on the tracks, it's meant to move it out of the way so it doesn't derail the train. He also invented a railway vehicle called the dynamometer, which could measure train performance. Babbage was obsessed with quantifying various phenomena, even stuff that might seem to be unquantifiable. It was in eighteen forty that Babbage would travel to France, whereupon he encountered the Jacquard Looms i mentioned earlier. This is where Babbage first saw the use of punch cards, and before long he began to imagine new uses for that type of technology. He thought of a machine that could use punch cards to carry out specific instructions, something even more advanced than the difference engine design of his. He called this new machine design the analytical engine. Lovelace quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of this idea, and she took it even further. While Babbage was thinking of a machine capable of performing complicated mathematical processes, Lovelace envisioned a world in which all sorts of things, from language to music could be translated into mathematics and then manipulated or even created through such a machine. Imagined music made by machine. In other words, Lovelace was imagining computer science nearly a century before we would see the first programmable general purpose machines. Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine was both more audacious than the Difference Engine and more elegant. It would be steam powered, it would be able to store one thousand digits with fifty decimal places. It would be able to perform any type of mathematical function, and Babbage and Lovelace worked together to create a very long pamphlet, more than sixty pages in length, describing the design of the Analytical Engine in eighteen forty three. By this time, the UK government had officially canceled funding for the Difference Engine. It was no longer just suspended. The project itself was no more. Babbage, however, hadn't quite let go of the idea, and he began to work on a new proposal for such a device. The Difference Engine number two would be mechanically simpler than the original machine. He had able to do more than his first design, while Engine number one had more than twenty five thousand parts before it had been canceled. And remember it was only about a quarter finished. The new design called for a machine with eight thousand parts. He would work on that in between his work with Lovelace on the Analytical Engine. Little side adventure here. Babbage was, among other things, an enthusiastic patron of the theater, and there's a story that says he was watching an opera and noticed light playing upon the lace bonnet of his friend who attended the show with him, and that gave him an idea. He contacted his buddy Michael Faraday, who also deserves his own episode, to go over a concept. He wanted to use liquids of different colors, you know, jars of these liquids, so you have like a jar of amber liquid, a jar of blue liquid, and so on, and then place those jars in front of a limelight lamp. Essentially, he wanted to create a primitive series of color filters for theatrical lights to create a specific effect. He even went to the trouble of making a ballet called Alethes and Iris to show this off, complete with a cast of sixty young women in white costume so that the light would play upon their outfits. While rehearsing this piece, the theater manager got second thoughts because he started to worry about the possibility of a fire with so much liquid near powerful electric lamps, and so the piece was never actually performed for the public. Tragedy returned to Babbage's life in eighteen fifty two, when Ada Lovelace would pass away from illness. She was only thirty six years old. Babbage once again was left behind. He continued to work, completing blueprints for a prototype version of the analytical engine in eighteen fifty six, but he failed to find funding for either the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine. The government had become really wary of his history of going over budget without producing a final working piece of equipment. They did offer him a knighthood, but he declined that offer. He grew increasingly unpleasant as he aged in the eighteen sixties. He was generally disliked by his neighbors, and he could be the patron saint of Get Off My Lawn. He was known in particular for his dislike of street performers and musicians, and I really do mean he was known for it because he wrote a pamphlet about it, listing all the sins of quote encouragers of street music, and among whose numbers he counted gen shops, coffee shops, tourists, children, and ladies of doubtful virtue. His grouchiness led to the passing of what became known as the Babbage Act, which made it a crime for street musicians who interfered with any citizen's ordinary occupation. So, in other words, if they didn't cut out that racket, and you couldn't get any work done, you could call in the coppers and they could get clapped for it. Nice guy, that Babbage. He never finished his difference Engine nor his analytical engine. He passed away on October eighteenth, eighteen seventy one. While he never saw either machine completed within his lifetime, others would later take his designs and build their own versions of the machine. His youngest son, Henry, managed to finish a section of the second difference Engine, and others would build replicas of his designs much later on. You can find some in museums like the Computer History Museum. The models work complete with a working printer, and they are all mechanical in operation. Babbage's life was one filled with incredible innovation and terrible loss. I always thought of him as a really smart, sourpuss, someone who was really intelligent, but generally unlikable by most people. It was only after reading a much more detailed biography of his life and diving into his past that I got a deeper appreciation for the challenges he faced and those that he overcame. And I haven't covered all those challenges. I haven't covered all of his accomplishments. I haven't covered all the tragedy of his life. He invented other things as well, like an ophthalmoscope that's a medical device. He did a lot in his lifetime. The fact that Babbage did have close and lifelong friends tells me that he wasn't nearly the curmudgeon I originally thought him to be, at least not throughout his entire life. He certainly grew more grouchy as he aged, but considering the setbacks he experienced both personally and professionally, and those terrible losses that he had endured, I think we should be able to forgive him for that. And the fact that he was more interested in seeing his work completed than getting an honorific title like a knighthood says a lot about his priorities and his character, and that wraps up this look at Charles Babbage, a truly influential figure in the history of technology. I will have to do, as I said, more episodes about some of his contemporaries. Maybe I'll do another one about Ada Lovelace. She again is a fascinating person in her own right, and in fact, we have Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate her work and the inspiration she has given to countless generations of young women who themselves have become prolific coders. And a lot of that was work that was foreseen by Ada Lovelace. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that episode of tech Stuff from twenty twenty one. My apologies for not having a new episode out today. I really wanted to do it, but it's just it's gotten more painful as I've been here, and I want to take care of all that. Yay, Okay. Well, I hope all of you are well. I hope none of you are going through this kind of discomfort, and I will be sure to talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,