78 Facts About Henry Babbage

Henry Babbage is considered by some to be "father of the computer".

Henry Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Henry Babbage's Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom.

Henry Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery.

Henry Babbage, who died before the complete successful engineering of many of his designs, including his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, remained a prominent figure in the ideating of computing.

Henry Babbage's birthplace is disputed, but according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he was most likely born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England.

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Henry Babbage was one of four children of Benjamin Henry Babbage and Betsy Plumleigh Teape.

In 1808, the Henry Babbage family moved into the old Rowdens house in East Teignmouth.

Around the age of eight, Henry Babbage was sent to a country school in Alphington near Exeter to recover from a life-threatening fever.

Henry Babbage then joined the 30-student Holmwood Academy, in Baker Street, Enfield, Middlesex, under the Reverend Stephen Freeman.

Henry Babbage studied with two more private tutors after leaving the academy.

The first was a clergyman near Cambridge; through him Henry Babbage encountered Charles Simeon and his evangelical followers, but the tuition was not what he needed.

Henry Babbage was brought home, to study at the Totnes school: this was at age 16 or 17.

The second was an Oxford tutor, under whom Henry Babbage reached a level in Classics sufficient to be accepted by the University of Cambridge.

Henry Babbage was already self-taught in some parts of contemporary mathematics; he had read Robert Woodhouse, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and Marie Agnesi.

Henry Babbage was the top mathematician there, but did not graduate with honours.

Henry Babbage instead received a degree without examination in 1814.

Henry Babbage had defended a thesis that was considered blasphemous in the preliminary public disputation, but it is not known whether this fact is related to his not sitting the examination.

Henry Babbage lectured to the Royal Institution on astronomy in 1815, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816.

That year Henry Babbage applied to be professor at the University of Edinburgh, with the recommendation of Pierre Simon Laplace; the post went to William Wallace.

Henry Babbage purchased the actuarial tables of George Barrett, who died in 1821 leaving unpublished work, and surveyed the field in 1826 in Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives.

Henry Babbage did calculate actuarial tables for that scheme, using Equitable Society mortality data from 1762 onwards.

Henry Babbage made a home in Marylebone in London and established a large family.

Henry Babbage was instrumental in founding the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820, initially known as the Astronomical Society of London.

Henry Babbage studied the requirements to establish a modern postal system, with his friend Thomas Frederick Colby, concluding there should be a uniform rate that was put into effect with the introduction of the Uniform Fourpenny Post supplanted by the Uniform Penny Post in 1839 and 1840.

From 1828 to 1839, Henry Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.

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Henry Babbage was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1832.

Henry Babbage was out of sympathy with colleagues: George Biddell Airy, his predecessor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, thought an issue should be made of his lack of interest in lecturing.

Henry Babbage twice stood for Parliament as a candidate for the borough of Finsbury.

Henry Babbage was its public face, backed by Richard Jones and Robert Malthus.

Henry Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, on the organisation of industrial production.

John Rennie the Younger in addressing the Institution of Civil Engineers on manufacturing in 1846 mentioned mostly surveys in encyclopaedias, and Henry Babbage's book was first an article in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, the form in which Rennie noted it, in the company of related works by John Farey Jr.

From An essay on the general principles which regulate the application of machinery to manufactures and the mechanical arts, which became the Encyclopædia Metropolitana article of 1829, Henry Babbage developed the schematic classification of machines that, combined with discussion of factories, made up the first part of the book.

Henry Babbage represented his work as largely a result of actual observations in factories, British and abroad.

Henry Babbage pointed out that training or apprenticeship can be taken as fixed costs; but that returns to scale are available by his approach of standardisation of tasks, therefore again favouring the factory system.

Henry Babbage took the unpopular line, from the publishers' perspective, of exposing the trade's profitability.

Henry Babbage went as far as to name the organisers of the trade's restrictive practices.

Henry Babbage's theories are said to have influenced the layout of the 1851 Great Exhibition, and his views had a strong effect on his contemporary George Julius Poulett Scrope.

Where Marx picked up on Henry Babbage and disagreed with Smith was on the motivation for division of labour by the manufacturer: as Henry Babbage did, he wrote that it was for the sake of profitability, rather than productivity, and identified an impact on the concept of a trade.

The Henry Babbage principle is an inherent assumption in Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management.

In 1837, responding to the series of eight Bridgewater Treatises, Henry Babbage published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, under the title On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.

Henry Babbage preferred the conception of creation in which a God-given natural law dominated, removing the need for continuous "contrivance".

Henry Babbage put forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator.

Mary Everest Boole argues that Henry Babbage was introduced to Indian thought in the 1820s by her uncle George Everest:.

Henry Babbage was raised in the Protestant form of the Christian faith, his family having inculcated in him an orthodox form of worship.

Henry Babbage stated, on the basis of the design argument, that studying the works of nature had been the more appealing evidence, and the one which led him to actively profess the existence of God.

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Against objections previously posed by David Hume, Henry Babbage advocated for the belief of divine agency, stating "we must not measure the credibility or incredibility of an event by the narrow sphere of our own experience, nor forget that there is a Divine energy which overrides what we familiarly call the laws of nature.

Henry Babbage wanted to go faster in the same directions, and had little time for the more gentlemanly component of its membership.

Henry Babbage's interests became more focussed, on computation and metrology, and on international contacts.

Project announced by Henry Babbage was to tabulate all physical constants, and then to compile an encyclopaedic work of numerical information.

Henry Babbage was a pioneer in the field of "absolute measurement".

Henry Babbage's ideas followed on from those of Johann Christian Poggendorff, and were mentioned to Brewster in 1832.

Henry Babbage carried out studies, around 1838, to show the superiority of the broad gauge for railways, used by Brunel's Great Western Railway.

In 1838, Henry Babbage invented the pilot, the metal frame attached to the front of locomotives that clears the tracks of obstacles; he constructed a dynamometer car.

Henry Babbage invented an ophthalmoscope, which he gave to Thomas Wharton Jones for testing.

Henry Babbage achieved notable results in cryptography, though this was still not known a century after his death.

Joseph Henry Babbage later defended interest in it, in the absence of the facts, as relevant to the management of movable type.

Henry Babbage's discovery was kept a military secret, and was not published.

However, in 1854, Henry Babbage published the solution of a Vigenere cipher, which had been published previously in the Journal of the Society of Arts.

In 1855, Henry Babbage published a short letter, "Cypher Writing", in the same journal.

Henry Babbage involved himself in well-publicised but unpopular campaigns against public nuisances.

Henry Babbage once counted all the broken panes of glass of a factory, publishing in 1857 a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows": Of 464 broken panes, 14 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys".

Henry Babbage especially hated street music, and in particular the music of organ grinders, against whom he railed in various venues.

Henry Babbage blamed hoop-rolling boys for driving their iron hoops under horses' legs, with the result that the rider is thrown and very often the horse breaks a leg.

Henry Babbage achieved a certain notoriety in this matter, being denounced in debate in Commons in 1864 for "commencing a crusade against the popular game of tip-cat and the trundling of hoops.

Henry Babbage directed the building of some steam-powered machines that achieved some modest success, suggesting that calculations could be mechanised.

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In Henry Babbage's time, printed mathematical tables were calculated by human computers; in other words, by hand.

At Cambridge, Henry Babbage saw the fallibility of this process, and the opportunity of adding mechanisation into its management.

Henry Babbage began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions.

Henry Babbage later produced detailed drawings for an improved version, "Difference Engine No 2", but did not receive funding from the British government.

Henry Babbage visited Turin in 1840 at the invitation of Giovanni Plana, who had developed in 1831 an analog computing machine that served as a perpetual calendar.

Since Henry Babbage's plans were continually being refined and were never completed, they intended to engage the public in the project and crowd-source the analysis of what should be built.

On 25 July 1814, Henry Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore, sister of British parliamentarian William Wolryche-Whitmore, at St Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon.

Henry Babbage's youngest surviving son, Henry Prevost Babbage, went on to create six small demonstration pieces for Difference Engine No 1 based on his father's designs, one of which was sent to Harvard University where it was later discovered by Howard H Aiken, pioneer of the Harvard Mark I Henry Prevost's 1910 Analytical Engine Mill, previously on display at Dudmaston Hall, is on display at the Science Museum.

Henry Babbage lived and worked for over 40 years at 1 Dorset Street, Marylebone, where he died, at the age of 79, on 18 October 1871; he was buried in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.

Henry Babbage argued against hereditary peerages, favouring life peerages instead.

In 1983, the autopsy report for Charles Henry Babbage was discovered and later published by his great-great-grandson.

Half of Henry Babbage's brain is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

Henry Babbage frequently appears in steampunk works; he has been called an iconic figure of the genre.