40 Fun Facts About Charles Babbage

When Charles Babbage started designing calculating engines in the 1820s, what did the word 'computer' mean?

A person who did sums by hand was called a computer, and the errors such people left in printed tables are what drove Babbage to hand the work to machinery.

Which part of Charles Babbage's body is kept in two halves at the Hunterian Museum and the Science Museum in London?

His brain was removed after he died in 1871, and the autopsy report lay undiscovered until 1983, when it turned up and was later published by his great-great-grandson.

Which retail chain began in Dallas in 1984 as a software store named Babbage's after Charles Babbage?

GameStop only took that name in 1999; the first Babbage's opened in a Dallas shopping mall with the businessman Ross Perot as an early investor.

Charles Babbage waged a long public campaign in Victorian London against which kind of street musician?

Organ grinders enraged Babbage so much that he logged 165 street nuisances in 80 days, arguing that the noise robbed intellectual workers of their time.

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron published detailed notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843?

Ada Lovelace wrote notes about three times longer than the paper she was translating, and Babbage called her 'The Enchantress of Number'.

What did London's Science Museum prove in 1991 by building a Charles Babbage engine to 19th-century tolerances?

It would have worked, and the finished engine returned results to 31 digits, ending a long argument over whether Victorian workshops could have made the parts.

Charles Babbage openly borrowed the punched cards that would program his Analytical Engine from which textile machine?

The Jacquard loom wove patterns into cloth by reading a chain of punched cards laced together, and Babbage planned to feed his engine its instructions the same way.

Charles Babbage proposed an early version of which attachment for the front of a steam locomotive?

The cowcatcher Babbage proposed was never built, and the first practical one is credited to the American engineer Isaac Dripps, who fitted it to the locomotive John Bull.

Charles Babbage has been called an iconic figure of which science fiction genre?

Steampunk imagines a past in which machines like Babbage's engines were actually built, the premise of the 1990 novel The Difference Engine.

Which Cambridge professorship, once Isaac Newton's, did Charles Babbage hold through the 1830s without giving a lecture?

The Lucasian chair of mathematics later passed to Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking, and Babbage won it at his fourth attempt while travelling in Rome.

Charles Babbage appears as a character in the two-part story Spyfall in which long-running science fiction series?

Doctor Who brought its time traveller to Babbage's home in 1834, where a strange figurine offered her a route back to the 21st century.

On which body in the solar system does an ancient, eroded crater carry the name of Charles Babbage?

The Moon has carried Babbage's name since the 19th century, on a worn formation joined to the rim of a larger crater named after Pythagoras.

Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine design was 'complete' in a computing sense named after which later mathematician?

Alan Turing set out the idea a century later, and the engine's loops and conditional branching would have met it, a first for any mechanical design.

Which backer gave Charles Babbage about £17,000 for his Difference Engine before abandoning the project in 1842?

The British government paid for more than a decade of work, yet no full engine was finished and the Treasury finally lost confidence in its inventor.

Which output device, the first of its kind, did Charles Babbage design for his Difference Engine?

A printer of Babbage's design pressed type into soft plaster to make plates for a press, so that no copyist or typesetter could slip an error into the tables.

An image of Charles Babbage was added in 2015 to the cultural icons section of which British document?

The passport redesign of 2015 gave Babbage a place among Britain's cultural icons, a public honor for a man who had turned down both a knighthood and a baronetcy.

Charles Babbage's student Extractors Club at Cambridge pledged to rescue one another from what kind of place?

A madhouse was the fate the Extractors Club guarded against, and Babbage also joined the Ghost Club, which looked into supernatural happenings.

Charles Babbage twice stood as a reform candidate in Finsbury in the 1830s, hoping to win which position?

Member of Parliament was a prize he never won: in 1832 he came third of five in a two-seat contest, and in 1834 he finished last of four.

Charles Babbage hosted famous soirées for London's scientists, authors and aristocrats on which evening of the week?

Saturday evenings at Babbage's house ran from 1828 into the 1840s, and he is credited with importing the scientific soirée from France.

Charles Babbage said the idea of calculating by machinery struck him at Cambridge over an error-filled table of what?

Logarithms filled the table in front of him in 1812, and French teams had already shown the way by splitting such work into simple sums done by dozens of human calculators.

Which astronomer, the son of the discoverer of Uranus, co-founded the Analytical Society with Charles Babbage in 1812?

John Herschel stayed so close a friend that Babbage left him to manage the engine project while he travelled through Italy in 1828.

Charles Babbage helped found which learned body in London in 1820, four years before it gave him a Gold Medal?

The Royal Astronomical Society honored him for inventing an engine to calculate mathematical tables, a machine he had barely begun to build.

Which medical instrument did Charles Babbage build in 1847, before Hermann von Helmholtz invented it independently?

The ophthalmoscope Babbage made for looking into the eye went to a surgeon for testing, who simply ignored it, so the credit waited for Helmholtz.

Charles Babbage broke which cipher, long called indecipherable, during the Crimean War without publishing his method?

The Vigenère cipher fell to Babbage in the 1850s, but he never published his method, so credit went to the Prussian officer Friedrich Kasiski and Babbage's priority was not established until 1985.

In which Italian city did Charles Babbage give his only public lectures on the Analytical Engine, in 1840?

Turin heard the lectures because the astronomer Giovanni Plana invited him, and a young engineer in the audience took the notes that became the first published account.

Which sequence was the target of the famous algorithm in the 1843 notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine?

Bernoulli numbers were the goal of the step-by-step method in Note G, often called the first published computer program, which might have run correctly had the engine been built.

The method of finite differences let Charles Babbage's Difference Engine build whole tables using only which operation?

Addition was all the wheels had to do, since adding a few starting differences over and over gives each new value of a polynomial without ever having to multiply.

A father and son from which country built working difference engines from the 1840s, inspired by Charles Babbage?

Sweden's Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard built a machine about the size of a piano, showed it at the Paris World's Fair and sold it to an observatory in New York.

Which American university received a demonstration piece of the Difference Engine from Charles Babbage's son Henry?

Harvard's piece was later discovered there by Howard Aiken, the pioneer who went on to build the university's Mark I calculator.

Which author of Neuromancer co-wrote The Difference Engine, a 1990 novel in which Charles Babbage's machines get built?

William Gibson wrote it with Bruce Sterling, imagining the Information Age dawning more than a century ahead of schedule in an alternative Victorian era.

Which engineer's Great Western Railway used the broad gauge that Charles Babbage backed with studies around 1838?

Brunel was a family friend: Babbage knew his father Marc through the Royal Society, and Babbage's eldest son later became one of Isambard's railway engineers.

Which author drew on Charles Babbage's 1832 book about factories when writing on machinery and the factory system?

Karl Marx took Babbage's side against Adam Smith on motive, arguing that factory owners organise their workshops for profit rather than productivity.

The 'Babbage principle' in Charles Babbage's 1832 book on factories describes the gains from dividing up what?

Labor split by skill lets a manufacturer pay top wages only for the hardest tasks, an idea later built into Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management.

What did Charles Babbage call the arithmetic unit of his Analytical Engine, which drew its figures from the 'store'?

The mill did the arithmetic while the store held the figures, the same split between processor and memory that later machines would rediscover.

At Dudmaston Hall in Shropshire, where he lived as a newlywed, Charles Babbage engineered which household system?

Central heating was Babbage's gift to the house he shared with Georgiana Whitmore after their wedding in 1814, a year before the couple moved to London.

Besides a curve plotter and punched cards, which sound-making output did Charles Babbage plan for his Analytical Engine?

A bell was on the list of outputs for a machine whose memory was meant to hold a thousand values of forty decimal digits each.

Which Devon town, where Charles Babbage attended grammar school, put him on its local pound note in 2007?

Totnes chose Babbage for the five-pound note of a town currency that circulated from 2007 until 2019, when it was withdrawn in an increasingly cashless economy.

Which master toolmaker did Charles Babbage hire in 1823 to build the Difference Engine, then fall out with over costs?

Joseph Clement could charge for the elaborate machine tools he made for the job and then keep them, under the trade custom of the day, which soured the partnership.

Which future prime minister of Italy published the first account of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1842?

Luigi Menabrea was an engineer and mathematician when he wrote it, and a quarter of a century later he became the seventh prime minister of Italy.

Charles Babbage's 1837 book on God and natural law was an uninvited ninth volume in a series funded by which nobleman?

The Earl of Bridgewater had paid for eight treatises by invited scientists, and Babbage, who was not among them, answered with an unauthorised ninth of his own.