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The Difference Engine

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82 views2 pages

The Difference Engine

GIT

Uploaded by

Vill Alubong
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Difference Engine

Difference Engine

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician and inventor: he invented the cowcatcher, reformed the
British postal system, and was a pioneer in the fields of operations research and actuarial science. It was
Babbage who first suggested that the weather of years past could be read from tree rings. He also had a
lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls.

As a founding member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage had seen a clear need to design and
build a mechanical device that could automate long, tedious astronomical calculations. He began by
writing a letter in 1822 to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, about the possibility of
automating the construction of mathematical tables—specifically, logarithm tables for use in navigation.
He then wrote a paper, “On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables,” which he
read to the society later that year. (It won the Royal Society’s first Gold Medal in 1823.) Tables then in
use often contained errors, which could be a life-and-death matter for sailors at sea, and Babbage
argued that, by automating the production of the tables, he could assure their accuracy. Having gained
support in the society for his Difference Engine, as he called it, Babbage next turned to the British
government to fund development, obtaining one of the world’s first government grants for research and
technological development.

Babbage approached the project very seriously: he hired a master machinist, set up a fireproof
workshop, and built a dustproof environment for testing the device. Up until then calculations were
rarely carried out to more than 6 digits; Babbage planned to produce 20- or 30-digit results routinely.
The Difference Engine was a digital device: it operated on discrete digits rather than smooth quantities,
and the digits were decimal (0–9), represented by positions on toothed wheels, rather than the binary
digits that Leibniz favored (but did not use). When one of the toothed wheels turned from 9 to 0, it
caused the next wheel to advance one position, carrying the digit just as Leibniz’s Step Reckoner
calculator had operated.

The Difference Engine was more than a simple calculator, however. It mechanized not just a single
calculation but a whole series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem. It
went far beyond calculators in other ways as well. Like modern computers, the Difference Engine had
storage—that is, a place where data could be held temporarily for later processing—and it was designed
to stamp its output into soft metal, which could later be used to produce a printing plate.

Nevertheless, the Difference Engine performed only one operation. The operator would set up all of its
data registers with the original data, and then the single operation would be repeatedly applied to all of
the registers, ultimately producing a solution. Still, in complexity and audacity of design, it dwarfed any
calculating device then in existence.
The full engine, designed to be room-size, was never built, at least not by Babbage. Although he
sporadically received several government grants—governments changed, funding often ran out, and he
had to personally bear some of the financial costs—he was working at or near the tolerances of the
construction methods of the day, and he ran into numerous construction difficulties. All design and
construction ceased in 1833, when Joseph Clement, the machinist responsible for actually building the
machine, refused to continue unless he was prepaid. (The completed portion of the Difference Engine is
on permanent exhibition at the Science Museum in London.)

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