The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to introduce in that University, and thereby among the scientific men of the country in general, a knowledge of the refined analytic methods of mathematical reasoning which had so long prevailed over the Continent, whereas we in our insular position, for the most part, were content with what has been styled ‘the cramped domain of the ancient synthesis.’ The youthful triumvirate, it must be owned, made a successful inroad on the prejudices and predilections which had prevailed up to that time. Keeping this object steadily in view, in the first place they translated and edited the smaller treatise on the Calculus by Lacroix, with notes of their own, and an Appendix (mainly, if not wholly, from the pen of Sir John Herschel) upon Finite Differences. They next published a solution of exercises on all parts of the Infinitesimal Calculus, a volume which is still of great service to the mathematical student, in spite of more recent works with a similar aim. To this publication Mr. Babbage contributed an independent essay on a subject at that time quite new, the solution of Functional Equations.

      By steps and stages, of which the records at our command are scanty, these pursuits graduallyled Mr. Babbage on to that practical application of mathematical studies which may justly be considered to be his crowning scientific effort – we mean, of course, the invention and partial construction of the famous calculating engine or machine which the world has associated with his name. As a writer in the Dictionary of Universal Biography remarks:-

      ‘The possibility of constructing a piece of mechanism capable of performing certain operations on numbers is by no means new; it was thought of by Pascal and geometers, and more recently it has been reduced to practice by M. Thomas, of Colmar, in France, and by the Messrs Schütz, of Sweden; but never before or since has any scheme so gigantic as that of Mr. Babbage been anywhere imagined.’

      His achievements here were twofold; he constructed what he called a Difference Engine, and he planned and demonstrated the practicability of an Analytical Engine also. It is difficult, perhaps, to make the nature of such abstruse inventions at all clear to the popular and untechnical reader, since Dr. Larduer, no unskilful hand at mechanical description, filled no less than twenty-five pages of the Edinburgh Review with but a partial account of its action, confessing that there were many features which it was hopeless to describe effectively without the aid of a mass of diagrams. All that can here be said of the machine is that the process of addition automatically performed is at the root of it. In nearly all tables of numbers there will be a law of order in the differences between each number and the next. For instance, in a column of square numbers – say, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, &c.– the successive differences will be 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, &c. These are differences of the first order. If, then, the process of differencing be repeated with those, we arrive at a remarkably simple series of numbers – to wit 2, 2, 2, 2, &c. And into some such simple series most tables resolve themselves when they are analyzed into orders of differences; an element – an atom, so to speak – is arrived at, from which by constant addition the numbers in the table may be formed. It was the function of Mr. Babbage’s machine to perform this addition of differences by combinations of wheels acting upon each other in an order determined by a preliminary adjustment. This working by differences gave it the name of the ‘Difference Engine.’ It has been repeatedly stated that the construction of this machine was suddenly suspended, and that no reason was ever assigned for its suspension. But the writer in the Dictionary already quoted above thus solves the mystery in which the matter has hitherto been shrouded:-

      ‘In spite of the favourable report of a Commission appointed to inquire into the matter, the Government were led by two circumstances to hesitate about proceeding further. Firstly, Mr. Clements the engineer or machinist employed as his collaborateur, suddenly withdrew all his skilled workmen from the work, and what was worse, removed all the valuable tools which had been employed upon it.’

      -an act which is justified as strictly legal by Mr. Weld in his History of the Royal Society, though a plain common-sense man of the world may reasonably doubt its equity, as the tools themselves had been made at the joint expense of Mr. Babbage and the Treasury. ‘Secondly,’ says the same authority, ‘the idea of the Analytical Engine – one that absorbed and contained as a small part of itself the Difference Engine – arose before Mr. Babbage.’ Of course he could not help the fact that ‘Alps upon Alps should arise’ in such matters and that, when one great victory was achieved, another and still greater battle remained to be faced and fought. But sooner did Mr. Babbage, like an honest man, communicate the fact to the Government that the then Ministers, with Sir Robert Peel and Mr. H. Goulburn at the head of the Treasury, took alarm, and, scared at the prospect of untold expenses before then, resolved to abandon the enterprise. Mr. Babbage, apart from all help from the public purse, had spent upon his machine, as a pet hobby, no small part of his private fortune – a sum which has been variously estimated between 6,000l. and 17,000l. And so, having resolved on not going further into the matter, they offered Mr. Babbage, by way of compensation, that the Difference Engine as constructed should remain as his own property – an offer which the inventor very naturally declined to accept. The engine, together with the drawings of the machinery constructed and not constructed, and of many other contrivances connected with it, extending, it is said, to some 400 or 500 drawings and plans, was presented in 1843 to King’s College, London, where we believe they are to be seen in the museum, bearing their silent witness to great hopes dashed down to the ground, or, at all events, to the indefinite postponement of their realization.

      In speaking at this length of Mr. Babbage’s celebrated machine, we have a little anticipated the order of events, and must return to our record of the leading facts of his life. In the year 1828 he was nominated to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics in his old University, occupying in that capacity a chair which had once been held by no less a man than Sir Isaac Newton. This chair he held during eleven years. It was while holding this Professorship, namely, at the general election of November, 1832 – which followed on the passing of the first Reform Bill – that he was put forward as a candidate for the representation of the newly-formed borough of Finsbury, standing in the advanced Liberal interest, as a supporter not only of parliamentary, financial, and fiscal reform, but also of ‘the Ballot, triennial Parliaments, and the abolition of all sinecure posts and offices.’ But the electors did not care to choose a philosopher; so he was unsuccessful, and we believe never again wooed the suffrages of either that or any other constituency.

      We have mentioned the fact that Mr. Babbage was the author of published works to the extent of some 80 volumes. A full list of these, however, would not interest or edify the general reader, and those who wish to study their names can see them recorded at full length in the new library catalogue of the British Museum. Further information respecting them will be found in the 12th chapter of Mr. Weld’s History of the Royal Society, which we have already quoted. One or two of them, however, we should specify. The best known of them all, perhaps is his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a work designed by him at once to refute the opinion supposed to be implied and encouraged in the first volume of that learned series, that an ardent devotion to mathematical studies is unfavourable to a real religious faith, and also to give specimens of the defensive aid which the evidences of Christianity may receive from the science of numbers, if studied in a proper spirit.

      Another of his works which has found a celebrity of its own is a volume called The Decline of Science, both the title and the contents of which give reason to believe that its author looked somewhat despondingly on the scientific attainments of the present age. The same opinion was still further worked out by Mr. Babbage in a book on the first Great Exhibition, which he published just 20 years ago. Another of his works which deserve mention here is one on The Economy of Manufactures, which was one result of a tour of inspection which he made through England and upon the Continent in search of mechanical principles for the formation of Logarithmic Tables.

      It is about 40 years since Mr. Babbage produced his Tables of Logarithms from 1 to 108,000, a work upon which he bestowed a vast amount of labour, and in the publication of which he paid great attention to the convenience of calculators, whose eyes, he well knew, must dwell for many hours at a time upon their pages. He was rewarded by the full appreciation СКАЧАТЬ