October 1871: Obituary of Charles Babbage

If you had to come up with a list of the people who had the greatest effect on the modern world, then Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the Victorian grandparents of computing, would be likely to near the top. But when Babbage died in 1871, just short of 80 years old, it wasn’t his achievements that The Engineer chose to memorialise in his obituary: it was his deficiencies of character.

We’ve noted before the bluntness of our 19th century predecessors’ obituaries; their hatchet job on the now all-but-canonised Isambard Kingdom Brunel was particularly eye-opening. When it comes to Babbage, whose career included a spell as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, co-founding the Analytical, Astronomical and Statistical Societies, inventing the Difference Engine – a mechanical computer remarkably similar in architecture to modern electronic computers – and devising the even more complex analytical engine, which was never built but would have been the first programmable computer, The Engineer summarised him as ‘devoid of sound judgement in every affair of life without mental perspective.’