What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

♦ “HE SHOWED A GREAT DESIRE TO INQUIRE”: N. S. Dodge, “Charles Babbage,” Smithsonian Annual Report of 1873, 162–97, reprinted in Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 4 (October–December 2000), 20.

  ♦ NOT “THE MANUAL LABOR OF ROWING”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 37.

  ♦ “ ‘THE TALL GENTLEMAN IN THE CORNER’ ”: Ibid., 385–86.

  ♦ “THOSE WHO ENJOY LEISURE”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), v.

  ♦ HE COMPUTED THE COST OF EACH PHASE: Ibid., 146.

  ♦ “AT THE EXPENSE OF THE NATION”: Henry Prevost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History and Construction (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889), 52.

  ♦ “ON TWO OCCASIONS I HAVE BEEN ASKED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 67.

  ♦ TABLE OF CONSTANTS OF THE CLASS MAMMALIA: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings, ed. Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), xxiii.

  ♦ “LO! THE RAPTURED ARITHMETICIAN!”: Élie de Joncourt, De Natura Et Praeclaro Usu Simplicissimae Speciei Numerorum Trigonalium (Hagae Comitum: Husson, 1762), quoted in Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 54.

  ♦ “TO ASTROLOGERS, LAND-MEASURERS, MEASURERS OF TAPESTRY”: Quoted in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 468.

  ♦ THIRTY-FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN: Mary Croarken, “Mary Edwards: Computing for a Living in 18th-Century England,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 4 (2003): 9–15; and—with fascinating detective work—Mary Croarken, “Tabulating the Heavens: Computing the Nautical Almanac in 18th-Century England,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25, no. 3 (2003): 48–61.

  ♦ “LOGARITHMES ARE NUMBERS INVENTED”: Henry Briggs, Logarithmicall Arithmetike: Or Tables of Logarithmes for Absolute Numbers from an Unite to 100000 (London: George Miller, 1631), 1.

  ♦ “TAKE AWAY ALL THE DIFFICULTIE”: John Napier, “Dedicatorie,” in A Description of the Admirable Table of Logarithmes, trans. Edward Wright (London: Nicholas Okes, 1616), 3.

  ♦ “NAPER, LORD OF MARKINSTON, HATH SET”: Henry Briggs to James Ussher, 10 March 1615, quoted by Graham Jagger in Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., eds., The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 56.

  ♦ A QUARTER HOUR OF SILENCE: “SPENT, EACH BEHOLDING OTHER”: William Lilly, Mr. William Lilly’s History of His Life and Times, from the Year 1602 to 1681 (London: Charles Baldwyn, 1715), 236.

  ♦ POLE STARRE, GIRDLE OF ANDROMEDA, WHALES BELLIE: Henry Briggs, Logarithmicall Arithmetike, 52.

  ♦ “IT MAY BE HERE ALSO NOTED THAT THE USE OF A 100 POUND”: Ibid., 11.

  ♦ “A SCOTTISH BARON HAS APPEARED ON THE SCENE”: Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” APL Quote Quad 15, no. 1 (1984): 14.

  ♦ THE MAJORITY OF HUMAN COMPUTATION: Michael Williams, A History of Computing Technology (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1997), 105.

  ♦ “IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROFESSOR”: Michael Mästlin, quoted in Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” 14.

  ♦ “THIS LADY ATTITUDINIZED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 17.

  ♦ INSTALLED IT ON A PEDESTAL: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 58.

  ♦ FROM A SPECIALTY BOOKSELLER: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 26–27.

  ♦ “A SIN AGAINST THE MEMORY OF NEWTON”: W. W. Rouse Ball, A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 117.

  ♦ “THE DOTS OF NEWTON, THE D’S OF LEIBNITZ”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 23.

  ♦ “TO THINK AND REASON IN A NEW LANGUAGE”: Ibid., 31.

  ♦ “A NEW KIND OF AN INSTRUMENT INCREASING THE POWERS OF REASON”: C. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 7 (Berlin: Olms, 1890), 12, quoted by Kurt Gödel in “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140.

  ♦ “BY THE APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF ARRANGING SIGNS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 25.

  ♦ “THE DOT-AGE OF THE UNIVERSITY”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 25.

  ♦ “WE HAVE NOW TO RE-IMPORT THE EXOTIC”: Charles Babbage, Memoirs of the Analytical Society, preface (1813), in Anthony Hyman, ed., Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–16.

  ♦ “THE BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144.

  ♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34.

  ♦ “I AM THINKING THAT ALL THESE TABLES”: Ibid., 42.

  ♦ “WHETHER, WHEN THE NUMBERS”: Ibid., 41.

  ♦ “WE MAY GIVE FINAL PRAISE”: “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multipicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur,” trans. M. Kormes, 1685, in D. E. Smith, A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 173.

  ♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock & Joy, 1822), 1.

  ♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43.

  ♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834), 282; and Edward Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447.

  ♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69.

  ♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282.

  ♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52.

  ♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62.

  ♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to John Herschel, 10 August 1814, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31.

  ♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94.

  ♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53.

  ♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264.

  ♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219.

  ♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300.

  ♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Londo
n 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65.

  ♦ “I NEED HARDLY POINT OUT TO YOU THAT THIS CALCULATION”: Quoted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, xxiii. The Morrisons point out that Tennyson apparently did change “minute” to “moment” in editions after 1850.

  ♦ “THE PROS AND CONS IN PARALLEL COLUMNS”: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 129.

  ♦ “IF YOU SPEAK TO HIM OF A MACHINE FOR PEELING A POTATO”: Quoted in Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 132.

  ♦ “I THINK IT LIKELY HE LIVES IN A SORT OF DREAM”: Quoted in ibid., 38.

  ♦ FOR A GUINEA, SHE COULD SIT: Advertisement in The Builder, 31 December 1842, http://www.victorianlondon.org/photography/adverts.htm (accessed 7 March 2006).

  ♦ “THE CHILD OF LOVE,…—THOUGH BORN IN BITTERNESS”: Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” canto 3, 118.

  ♦ “IS THE GIRL IMAGINATIVE?”: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47.

  ♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25.

  ♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27.

  ♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55.

  ♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33.

  ♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89.

  ♦ “I DO NOT CONSIDER THAT I KNOW”: Ada to Dr. William King, 24 March 1834, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 45.

  ♦ “GEM OF ALL MECHANISM”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 8 July 1834, ibid., 46.

  ♦ “PUNCHES HOLES IN A SET OF PASTEBOARD CARDS”: “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 55.

  ♦ “HOW THE MACHINE COULD PERFORM THE ACT OF JUDGMENT”: Ibid., 65.

  ♦ “I AM AT PRESENT A CONDEMNED SLAVE”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 22 June 1837, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 70.

  ♦ “THE ONLY OTHER PERSON WAS A MIDDLE-AGED GENTLEMAN”: Ada to Lady Byron, 26 June 1838, ibid., 78.

  ♦ “I HAVE A PECULIAR WAY OF LEARNING”: Ada to Babbage, November 1839, ibid., 82.

  ♦ “YOU KNOW I AM BY NATURE A BIT OF A PHILOSOPHER”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, ibid., 83.

  ♦ “AN ORIGINAL MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATOR”: Augustus De Morgan to Lady Byron, quoted in Betty Alexandra Toole, “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, an Analyst and Metaphysician,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996), 7.

  ♦ “I HAVE DONE IT BY TRYING”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 83.

  ♦ “OF CERTAIN SPRITES & FAIRIES”: Ada to Augustus De Morgan, 3 February 1841, ibid., 99.

  ♦ “WE TALK MUCH OF IMAGINATION”: Untitled essay, 5 January 1841, ibid., 94.

  ♦ “I HAVE ON MY MIND MOST STRONGLY”: Ada to Woronzow Greig, 15 January 1841, ibid., 98.

  ♦ “WHAT A MOUNTAIN I HAVE TO CLIMB”: Ada to Lady Byron, 6 February 1841, ibid., 101.

  ♦ “IT WILL ENABLE OUR CLERKS TO PLUNDER US”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 113. He added: “possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit …”

  ♦ “THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE”: Quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 185.

  ♦ “NOTIONS SUR LA MACHINE ANALYTIQUE”: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, no. 82 (October 1842).

  ♦ NOT TO “PROCLAIM WHO HAS WRITTEN IT”: Ada to Babbage, 4 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 145.

  ♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247.

  ♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES NOT OCCUPY COMMON GROUND”: Ibid., 252.

  ♦ “THE ENGINE EATING ITS OWN TAIL”: H. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” paper read at Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331.

  ♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”

  ♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147.

  ♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”

  ♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 149.

  ♦ “I FIND THAT MY PLANS & IDEAS”: Ada to Babbage, 22 July 1843, ibid., 150.

  ♦ “I DO NOT THINK YOU POSSESS HALF MY FORETHOUGHT”: Ada to Babbage, 30 July 1843, ibid., 157.

  ♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333.

  ♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230.

  ♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143.

  ♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11.

  ♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235.

  ♦ “EVERY SHOWER THAT FALLS”: “On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London: John Murray, 1837), in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 368.

  ♦ “ADMITTING IT TO BE POSSIBLE BETWEEN LONDON AND LIVERPOOL”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 10.

  ♦ “ENCLOSED IN SMALL CYLINDERS ALONG WIRES”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 447.

  ♦ “A COACH AND APPARATUS”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 273.

  ♦ “ZENITH-LIGHT SIGNALS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 460.

  ♦ “THIS LED TO A NEW THEORY OF STORMS”: Ibid., 301.

  ♦ “A DIFFERENT SENSE OF ANACHRONISM”: Jenny Uglow, “Possibility,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage, 20.

  ♦ “IF, UNWARNED BY MY EXAMPLE”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 450.

  ♦ “THEY SAY THAT ‘COMING EVENTS’ ”: Ada to Lady Byron, 10 August 1851, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 287.

  ♦ “MY BEING IN TIME AN AUTOCRAT”: Ada to Lady Byron, 29 October 1851, ibid., 291.

  5. A NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE EARTH

  ♦ “IS IT A FACT—OR HAVE I DREAMT IT”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), 283.

  ♦ THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM: They managed the traffic “easily, and not very continuously.” “Central Telegraph Stations,” Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers 4 (1875): 106.

  ♦ “WHO WOULD THINK THAT BEHIND THIS NARROW FOREHEAD”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” Quarterly Review 95 (1854): 118–64.

  ♦ HE WAS NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal of the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75.

  ♦ ALFRED SMEE: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’ ” 471.

  ♦ “THE DOCTOR CAME AN
D LOOKED”: “Edison’s Baby,” The New York Times, 27 October 1878, 5.

  ♦ “THE TIME IS CLOSE AT HAND”: “The Future of the Telephone,” Scientific American, 10 January 1880.

  ♦ “ELECTRICITY IS THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph: Including Its Rise and Progress in the United States (New York: Putnam, 1852), v.

  ♦ “AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, IMPONDERABLE AGENT”: William Robert Grove, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.

  ♦ “THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IS NOT AGREED”: Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph, revised and rewritten by Edward B. Bright (London: James Walton, 1867), 6.

  ♦ “WE ARE NOT TO CONCEIVE OF THE ELECTRICITY”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 47 (August 1873), 337.

  ♦ “BOTH OF THEM ARE POWERFUL”: “The Electric Telegraph,” The New York Times, 11 November 1852.

  ♦ “CANST THOU SEND LIGHTNINGS”: Job 38:35; Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph.

  ♦ COUNT MIOT DE MELITO CLAIMED: Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, vol. 1, trans. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 44n.

  ♦ MEANWHILE THE CHAPPES MANAGED: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 52 ff.

  ♦ “THE DAY WILL COME”: “Lettre sur une nouveau télégraphe,” quoted in Jacques Attali and Yves Stourdze, “The Birth of the Telephone and the Economic Crisis: The Slow Death of Monologue in French Society,” in Ithiel de Sola Poolin, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 97.

  ♦ “CITIZEN CHAPPE OFFERS AN INGENIOUS METHOD”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 59.

  ♦ ONE DEPUTY NAMED A PANTHEON: Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, 17 August 1794, quoted in ibid., 64.

  ♦ CHAPPE ONCE CLAIMED: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual: A Complete History and Description of the Semaphoric, Electric and Magnetic Telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Ancient and Modern (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859), 42.

  ♦ “THEY HAVE PROBABLY NEVER PERFORMED EXPERIMENTS”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 81.