WI : Babbage and Lovelace complete the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine


That's what it was, thank you!

I wouldn't go so far as to say such a TL need be as steampunk as all that to still have early computing and internet play major roles in the economy and administration though.

I'm not convinced that it would happen (Then again, 30 years ago would you be convinced of the Internet to the point that internet is my career!), I'm certainly fascinated by the idea. So you'd somehow be connecting the analytical engine to a telegraph somehow? Telegraph-Punchcard Signals! Perversely, if we run with the idea, if someone could essentially telegraph in a request/command, then we could see something not unlike cloud-computing or early workstations. I.e. I want to do something, you do it for me, and I'll pick up the paperwork later / you send my printer the instructions of what to print. At that point you've basically had to convert mechanical memory into electrical digital memory, and back to mechanical. That could realistically lead to someone trying to maintain an electrical memory.

Unfortunately, I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the technical challenges involved. If it's possible to convert a telegraph signal into punchcard memory without a human operator at either end, then I think it could be an efficient system.
 
I can say that Difference Engine No. 2 is definitely possible, theoretically, as there was a successful project to build one from Babbage's designs. I say theoretically as I believe they made use of CAD/CAM to make some of the components, which Babbage obviously didn't have access to. It's doubtless that after his failure to produce either of the Difference Engines, after spending the equivalent of two HMS Victorys of investment funds, you will need a very wealthy benefactor with as much faith in the design as Babbage and Lovelace had, only then can you start worrying about the metallurgy and precision machining of the time being up to the job.

The problem with finding uses for it was that most of the Victorian Great and Good simply couldn't imagine the scale of its potential. Remember, in the 1830's machinery was only just about managing to mechanise the task of pulling along cargo, most people imagined machines as metal horses. Asking them to imagine a machine could think, but not quite the same way as a human, is a tall order. What didn't help was Babbage's loathing of explaining it to people, he knew that explaining it opened his machine to critique and he couldn't take it in stride, he was notoriously thin-skinned. Lovelace was better at explaining it, but she would die in around 1851 so has little time to write/lecture about it unless her cancer is butterflied away. Babbage also used his own notation in designing it, one he hoped would be used by a new generation of engineers taught it in school to advance his work, but he never published a text explaining what his mess of squiggles and lines actually meant, so even today efforts to build the Analytical Engine is frustrated by having to decipher his drawings.

But, once you have it made, and have it run a few programmes to compute numbers (logarithms, trig functions, Bernoulli Numbers, the last being the object of Lovelace's famous programme), then the publicity and demonstration of the Engine in action would help bring potential users out of the woodwork. The military could use it for ballistics calculations and encryption (not extremely useful until wireless telegraph, but I can see punch cards being used to form a 'private key' that is added/subtracted to messages transmitted as number code, i.e. you would need to have an identical set of cards on the other end if you wanted to unscramble the message. Babbage loved encryption, I could see him anticipating this), statisticians of all kinds would want it to compute trends from data they'd collected, like the correlation of crop yields to yearly rainfall for different areas, or population numbers of animals after changes to an environment (there's a reason that climate science and ecology crystallised during the 1970's, they are both fields that are voracious in number-cruching), engineering and chemical firms often have to deal with heavy functions and equations that demand absolutely perfect calculation, better to trust an Engine to crack it overnight than to get narcoleptic students to produce the tables, and as it has been said finance and the government would be interested in advances in record-keeping (remember, Babbage designed that thing to have 1000 50-digit numbers stored in, well, 'The Store', and he knew it would be trivial to make it larger), and tax-collection.

As for its speed, he predicted his design could add two numbers together a second. Multiplying them will take a minute. That's 5000 times slower than ENIAC, but it's still one addition a second, every second, with no mistakes until it either runs out of cards or suffers a jam. And those numbers will be, again, 50 digits long at most. No clerk or mathematician could ever compete with that.

The big debate would be on whether to keep using decimal notation or switch to binary when it comes along. A binary computer needs about three times the number of components as an equivalent decimal computer, but those components will be much simpler and less prone to error individually. Not to mention that decimal simply isn't as good on thermionic valves as it could be in gears, so you run into a ceiling on what you can use to represent the numbers.
 
Last edited:
I can't remember where I heard about this, (it might have been here), but one possible path I've heard proposed for a TL with a more successful Babbage and Lovelace is a Victorian proto-internet. Imagine those early machines connected by telegraph, able to communicate via a set standard. You could have finance and industry driven by the rapid tabulation of prices and delivery schedules, increasing efficiency. You could see consumer finance being standardized: A Victorian lady in a department store could make purchases on bank credit, with the store simply sending that data directly to the bank's engines via telegraph, which then calculates the changes to her (or her husband's) account..

Did you mean this thread on google history soc what if: What could you do with a Victorian Internet?
One of the best discussion's on Babbage in my opinion.

Just one example for the exchanges going on in the thread:
> Imagine the profits to be had if you can remove legions of bookkeepers and their flawed human calculations.ould the Victorians value automatically printed bank statements mailed directly to them?

Of course they would. That would relieve the household accounting pressure one reads about in the Victorian novel. From what I understandit was a real pain in the ass keeping one's affairs in order.> I don't know. I assume they would. It might just be me but I'd like to know > where my money went at the end of the month. And calculate yields. Don't forget, most people had a bias against investments outside of government bonds. If the middle class gets bank statements, they'll be able to better compare yields and have official transactional records which will help all around.

> But if the bank has the data, and the engine and the capacity to sequentially access stored memory it should be trivel for some bright Victorian inventor or innovator to come up with a continuous feed typewriter that gets its' 'keystrokes' from the data being fed through the machine at the time.

Absolutely.

> Once you got automatic bill printing you can start getting much more creative with Victorian banking.

EBPP over 100 years before OTL? I love it. Wiring funds can be done,with minimal risk of fraud, as everyone has their official bank statements and now a trail of money can be audited. This will globalize money over 100 years before OTL. If the cost of moving money only requires the fixed costs of a Babbage engine, a telegraph wire, and
standardized accounting methods (and the office, and the officials, which isn't trivial, I know...), then major cities can move money fairly freely between them.

using a jacquard system card would be even better
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
Jacquard was pretty much the real source for making Babbage think about versatility in a mechanical device using punched cards.

There is also this thread Vaucanson, Jacqaurd, and NC Machining. That explores this idea in depth.
 
Yes, there were a handful of similar machines that were produced in the mid to late 1800's. The biggest thing seems to be that they were never considered anything but huge calculators. They were used to produce things like logarithmic tables, that took tons of manual calculations, but that's about it. There was never much attempt to do more with them.

IIRC the machine sold in the US had its first use in resolving some questions regarding the orbit of Mars
 
If Babbage had the idea to make an Analytical Engine with binary rather than decimal, the machinery could be greatly simplified.

As for how this is done, perhaps get him in contact with Boole somehow.

As for the uses of an Analytical Engine, I expect they'd be similar to the uses of the first computers. For example, it could be used for censuses.
 
The Difference engine actually does not make much of a difference (pun intended), because there already exist lots of mechanical computers (including such monsters as the range-finders mounted in battleships), The main difference between the Babbage computer and the others is that this one is programmable, which is not of much use to most jobs (banking, artillery, etc) where purpose-built computers are sufficient (for example for accounting, additions seem enough - include a few exponentials if you care for interest rates). On the other hand the Babbage computer, being much more expensive to build and to maintain, would not be the first choice for these jobs.
 
If you want a POD, Lovelace did at one point write to Babbage asking him to give over dealing with other people to someone else (a friend of Lovelace, can't remember exactly who) and who would become a manager for Babbage. This is what he needs - someone to make sure Babbage does actually complete the machine and to deal with those giving Babbage the money to convince them to carry on supporting him. This includes the British government, who in fact gave Babbage quite a bit of money to get him started (Wikipedia says £17,000 and I no longer have my book on him). If the difference engine was built it would be just the government using it and would probably view it as governmental property, not Babbage's. But if the difference engine was finished then the government would be more willing to carry on supporting Babbage to build the analytical engine.
 
If Babbage's engines had been commercially successfully and sold throughout the Empire he could have called his company Imperial Babbage Machines.
 
I can't remember where I heard about this, (it might have been here), but one possible path I've heard proposed for a TL with a more successful Babbage and Lovelace is a Victorian proto-internet. Imagine those early machines connected by telegraph, able to communicate via a set standard. You could have finance and industry driven by the rapid tabulation of prices and delivery schedules, increasing efficiency. You could see consumer finance being standardized: A Victorian lady in a department store could make purchases on bank credit, with the store simply sending that data directly to the bank's engines via telegraph, which then calculates the changes to her (or her husband's) account.

I think I suggested something like that on SHWI years ago, after reading Standage's The Victorian Internet.
 
Top