If Charles Babbage had finished the Difference Engine in the Industrial Revolution

You can't mass-produce that thing. Not with nineteenth-century technology. And the question remains open where the demand for a mass-production output would come from, assuming it were possible. There aren't many people who need one.

Now, if he built it and used it and a few more were made, you'd probably see people come up with applications and derivations from the original that served their specific purposes. Once it works, the rest is engineering. But I'd expect such machines to remain rare, handmade, and usually one-of-a-kind for a long time.
 
I've got a novel idea where the Babbage Engines are built and exported to both France and the Confederacy.

The Confederacy uses its computing power to more efficiently organize its armies and govern and manages to successfully secede, but degenerates into a semi-fascist state verging on complete collapse within 50 or so years. Steampunk-style air piracy takes place in the border zones--the Indian territory, the SW, Arkansas, etc.

The French use it for the same purpose and defeat the Germans in 1871. There's a North Germany and an alliance of south German states friendly to France as a result.

WWI will happen and when it does, there will be airships.
 
If the Difference Engine was finished, it was placed into early factories, even smaller ones, shopping tills etc... then surely that would have started to generate a work force to support these machines, early programmers of sorts etc...
 
If Charles Babbage had managed to finish and mass produce the difference engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage

How would things be now?


I did a report on this way back in HS. As I understood he finished it but as another poster commented he couldn't mass produce it. I suspect many things that are now electrical would be driven by mechanical concepts instead. So instead of circuit boards we would have smaller difference engines. Also I think things would be driven by a more mechanical aspect so possibly less knowledge about physics but more advanced engineering and chemistry
 
If the Difference Engine was finished, it was placed into early factories, even smaller ones, shopping tills etc... then surely that would have started to generate a work force to support these machines, early programmers of sorts etc...

Well, okay, but what exactly would the device be calculating in these factories? Given the cost, only the biggest would be able to afford one for a great deal of time, but I'm not clear that they'd have much for the thing to accomplish. How much higher math was required to run a steel mill in 1880? I can do the basics on paper if I have a decent reference, and that without using post-1800 mathematics.

When did codes become national security obsessions? That'd be the obvious use (especially given the expense).
 
I've got a novel idea where the Babbage Engines are built and exported to both France and the Confederacy.

The Confederacy uses its computing power to more efficiently organize its armies and govern and manages to successfully secede, but degenerates into a semi-fascist state verging on complete collapse within 50 or so years. Steampunk-style air piracy takes place in the border zones--the Indian territory, the SW, Arkansas, etc.

The French use it for the same purpose and defeat the Germans in 1871. There's a North Germany and an alliance of south German states friendly to France as a result.

WWI will happen and when it does, there will be airships.

Why do you assume that France and the Confederacy would be better than Germany and the USA at utilizing Babbage engines? That seems completely ass-backwards to me. And I'm not even touching the airships thing.
 
Why do you assume that France and the Confederacy would be better than Germany and the USA at utilizing Babbage engines? That seems completely ass-backwards to me. And I'm not even touching the airships thing.

It's a joke.

You, sir, have been Stirtledoved.
 
Why do you assume that France and the Confederacy would be better than Germany and the USA at utilizing Babbage engines? That seems completely ass-backwards to me. And I'm not even touching the airships thing.

Perhaps because the Germans would not get them, or get them later due to British fears about Germany being a hegemonic power on the continent that, unlike France circa the Crimean War, isn't friendly with them.

The US is a trickier proposition, unless Britain refuses to sell them to the US out of fear of a threat to Canada.

Besides, the only way to get steampunk air pirates is to have a situation where the industrial base is sufficiently high but government control is sufficiently weak. A failing Confederacy losing control of its border zones fills this nicely. And airships could be a butterfly from the successful Babbage Engine.
 
ok, but what about first incorporating these into the banking systems? Then maybe after 10-15 years of usage, you will have a kind of computer programming job, this will only then fuel the need and want for smaller or more compact versions of the machine.
 
When did codes become national security obsessions? That'd be the obvious use (especially given the expense).

Well, Babbage was interested in cryptography in any case, so I can imagine using his Engine to help it with might well have occurred to him fairly early on, if it was actually built...
 
ok, but what about first incorporating these into the banking systems? Then maybe after 10-15 years of usage, you will have a kind of computer programming job, this will only then fuel the need and want for smaller or more compact versions of the machine.

But you fail to answer the question, what would they be used for?

IOTL, computers developed as calculators for aerospace applications, calculating missile dimensions and speed, and later guidances. The Apollo Program provided an incentive to shrink them down considerably, as did USAF and Red Air Force demand for guided missiles.

But ITTL, what is the incentive to develop the difference engine and use it in industrial applications?
 
But you fail to answer the question, what would they be used for?

IOTL, computers developed as calculators for aerospace applications, calculating missile dimensions and speed, and later guidances. The Apollo Program provided an incentive to shrink them down considerably, as did USAF and Red Air Force demand for guided missiles.

But ITTL, what is the incentive to develop the difference engine and use it in industrial applications?

Calculations and data entry, perhaps? Inventory?
 
You seem to be confusing Babbage's Difference Engine with his Analytical Engine. The Difference Engine was a special-purpose machine for tabulating polynomial functions. The Analytical Engine was a programmable general-purpose computer.

The problem with using the Analytical Engine for real-time applications such as industrial controls is that it would not be fast enough. Babbage predicted that it would be able to multiply two twenty-digit numbers together in 3 minutes. I doubt that any purely mechanical computer could be built to be fast enough for real-time controls.
 
I would still consider that a start though. Placing these machines into banks, code breaking, security enhancement?

Forget the devices themselves though for a second and consider how the interfaces would mostly improve along with a growing population in the 1850's that can program and build these machines. It could have started a motion to build basic digital systems to speed the process up to something more usable?
 
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