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The Engineer’s Charles Babbage obituary - .PDF file.
Charles Babbage may now be famous as the father of computing, but to his contemporaries at The Engineer he was a difficult, forbidding figure better known for his failures than his successes
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.’
Babbage, it seems, was ‘often wholly deficient in the larger sense and use of tact, sometimes severe in his condemnations and, even when enchanting by the brilliancy of his conversation, chilling by a certain sombreness of temperament that repelled many friends.’
This temperament, the obituary claims, was the reason for Babbage’s failure to complete his computer. ‘Had we but space at command it would be easy to show that the calculating machine owed its abortiveness mainly to Mr Babbage’s own incapability of working with other men, and to that want of mental perspective which induced him to waste his own time and energy in attempting to acquire the skills of a working mechanic, which he might have sufficiently commanded in the person of any one of a thousand clockmakers in Europe.’

‘What but failure,’ the article asks, ‘could attend the man who given national assistance to build a given machine — the Difference Engine — goes a certain length with it and then suddenly proposes to abandon it because he had invented the Analytical Engine, one of enormously greater power?’
The article compares Babbage unfavourably with the eminent geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, who died in the same week. Murchison, who was the first to describe the geological evolution of the rocks of the Silurian era, was ‘the very personification of courtliness, and to all men urbane and gentle… with mental powers greatly below those of Babbage, he was far the superior in the possession of a sound faculty of judgement.’
Despite this, the obituary ends in a note of clear-sightedness. ‘If Murchison had been in life the more brilliant and fortunate,’ it says, ‘we are inclined to think that, whatever may have been his failings, the fame of Babbage will be the more enduring.’
Today he would be recognised as having Asperger’s syndrome.
To paraphrase Shakespeare;
The successes that men have is oft interred with their bones while there failures live on.
Perhaps we just have to accept that being ahead of the ‘pack’ invites stabs from behind by lesser beings. Intellectual pigmys will always seek to topple their betters Though of all, surely the treatment (in several senses of that word!) given out to Alan Touring must be the worst.
The cover-up of the contribution he and his colleagues at Bletchley Park made (Winston C’s insistence that it should be hidden for 50 years and indeed the very machines that were created must be destroyed) must rank as the most disgraceful failure to acknowledge the contribution to the ascent of mankind offered by science and technology… ever.
When will they ever learn?
Not until forced to do so by the new Golden Age of mind over matter?
Mike B
And we think the media is harsh today!
Dear Editor,
In fact I tried to hint at the punishment/ treatment? you describe that Alan Touring received, in my post!
As I believe all of us with the privilege of an education and a career in science, technology et al (or the opportunity to write about such in trade publications) will recognise, we still have to live in a world dominated by persons who do not!
I believe that some 70% of ALL persons who have ever been trained in the sciences in every country/society are alive at the moment, and of these I gather over 80% are still in employment.
Yet we still have to abide by ‘silly rules’ made-up during a time when
commerce was primarily related to land, estates, agriculture..and
the administration of the State was clerical (offering hell-fire and everlasting damnation unless the Party line was toed!) or legal -held within a tight clique who retained power by restricting the interpretation of the silly rules to themselves. Come to think of it, has anything changed?
Various other nations have successfully gone past the past! into new technology led places-and consequently take the top economic slots worldwide:
others have fallen back and down into ‘deep’ religious: pits and have also jumped-up on the spikes, getting totally impaled.
Are these analogys or similes: I am but a simple Engineer?
Turing, not ‘Touring’
The malicious obituary of the genius Babbage shows again that it takes noble spirits to acknowledge greatness in others.
But I am an Engineer and excused such trivia as an ability two spel. Hopefully the spirit, if not the letter of my comment is more important than the munutae. And as I write in the same manner that I speak, any listner does not know how I spell a word when they hear it! My understanding of our use of the phrase “Hear, Hear” when agreeing with someone’s comment is that it has its roots in the era when those amongst the landed-aristocracy who could not read or write would be ‘told’ their accounts/worth/value: and when they had accepted some comment would say “I hear, I hear” indicating that they were ready for the next one. Surely many of our present problems have their roots in differences in the perceptions, meanings between individuals of what is supposed to be the same word! Patents a classical example.