About Time
The BBC reports that Babbage Analytical Engine designs to be digitised
A project to construct one of the earliest mechanical computers based on sketches by its designer, Charles Babbage, has received a major boost.
The Science Museum in London has agreed to help by digitising the mathematician’s original plans.
Eventually the images will be used to create a full working model of the Analytical Engine.
Conceived in the late 1830s, it foreshadowed the modern computer revolution by more than a century.
IBM had a portion of the Analytical Engine built just to see if it would work, and it did. The basic problem that Babbage had was that the precision machining necessary for his design didn’t exist during his lifetime.
It will be the ultimate ‘steampunk’ computer.
7 comments
Excellent news Bryan!
I got to see the recreation of his Difference Engine in action here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where it was on loan for a year. It was a huge event when it was publicly unveiled here, standing room only in the front foyer auditorium of the former SGI conference center (the Museum’s current location) where it was set up for display. That was one impressive hunk of machinery, but probably the limits of what could be hand-cranked (it was about the size of a minivan). Thus why the Analytical Engine concept was steam-powered. Somehow, though, I doubt the reproduction will be… it’ll probably have an electric motor driving the belt end that would have been attached to the steam engine’s flywheel on the original concept. So it goes.
I know that the military was still using an unknown [to me] number of vacuum tube analog computers when I was in. They had very specific functions and were an order of magnitude more accurate than the best digital computers of the time.
This is one of those great ‘what if’ events, i.e. ‘What if it could have been built?’ How would history have been altered?
Badtux, the Brits are doing it, and if a steam engine was specified, they will build the steam engine too. When they do reproductions, they don’t settle for half measures. They would really go for authenticity. They might never fire up the steam engine again, after testing the system, but they would really want to see if it worked. Think reenactors on steroids.
Bryan, likely the power source was not explicitly specified. While it would have been presumed that a steam engine was the most likely power source, it was not unheard of to use a water wheel as the power source instead. Factories of the day transmitted power from a single power source, whether steam or waterwheel, to all the various tools and machines via a complicated set of belts that ran on pullys. Think your car’s accessories belts on steroids.
I had the privilege of seeing one of these early machine shops run by water power when I visited one of our state museums, the belts are all there, as is the Pelton water wheel which powered it (and later on I hiked upstream to where the water came from for the Pelton wheel, it was piped from a height of approximately 300 feet above the machine shop to get sufficient head to drive the water wheel fast), and following the arrangement of belts from the wheel up to a rotating shaft that has pullies on it and down to the individual machine tools is fascinating. Well, early factories were like that, scaled up by a factor of 1,000, but if they weren’t built near a source of water that could be tapped that way, a steam engine got put in place of the Pelton wheel instead.
– Badtux the Steampunk Penguin
The belt system is still used on farms throughout the world, and may be powered by a waterwheel, or turbine, or by a jacked-up tractor [as my neighbor in Germany did]. There are a lot of farms in New York state that still use waterwheels to power a lot of things.
One of my earliest jobs was in a factory that had shafts running the length of the shop I worked in, with various pieces of equipment run by belts dropping down from the shaft. As I was young and stupid, I would be sent up the ladder to throw a belt over a pulley on the shaft when a belt broke, or a new piece of equipment needed to be used.
From what I have read, Babbage would go off on tangents, and might well have decided to build a new type of steam engine while he was working on the Analytical Engine. The government was constantly complaining that he wasn’t what we would now call ‘goal oriented’.
After they’re done with Babbage, they’ll rebuild working Hollerith census equipment, so that the right-wing nutjobs will have something from their own era to mistrust. /snark
Ah, yes, Steve, the return of the ‘hanging chad’, that would be so much fun.