Charles Babbage :: essays research papers

Charles Babb termCharles Babbage may have spent his life in vain, trying to make a workconsidered by most of his friends to be ridiculous. 150 years ago, Babbage drewhundreds of drawings projecting the fundamentals on which todays computers arefounded. But the technology was not there to meet his dreams. He was innate(p) onDecember 26, 1791, in Totnes, Devonshire, England. As a child he was alwaysinterested about the mechanics of everything and in the supernatural. Hereportedly erstwhile tried to prove the existence of the devil by making a circle inhis own blood on the floor and reciting the Lords Prayer backward. In college,he formed a ghost club dedicated to verifying the existence of the supernatural.When in Trinity College in Cambridge, Charles carried out childish pranks andrebelled because of the boredom he felt from knowing more than his instructors.Despite this, however, he was on his way to understanding the advanced theoriesof mathematics and even formed an Analytical S ociety to stand for and discussoriginal papers on mathematics and to interest people in translating the worksof several foreign mathematicians into English. His studies also led him to a captious study of logarithmic tables and was constantly reporting errors in them.During this analysis, it occurred to him that all these tables could becalculated by machinery. He was convinced that it was possible to construct amachine that would be able to compute by successive differences and to evenprint out the results. (He conceived of this 50 years before type-settingmachines or typewriters were invented.)In 1814, the age of 23, Charles unite 22-year-old Georgina Whitmore. Georginawould have eight children in thirteen years, of which only three sons wouldsurvive to maturity. Babbage really took no interest in raising his children.After Georgina died at the age of 35, his mother took over the upbringing. In1816, Babbage had his first taste of failure when his application for theprofessorship of mathematics at East India College in Haileybury was rejecteddue to governmental reasons, as was his application, three years later, for thechair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Fortunately, his elderbrother supported his family while Babbage continued his work on calculatingmachines.At the age of 30, Babbage was ready to announce to the Royal AstronomicalSociety that he had embarked on the construction of a table-calculating machine.His paper, "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation ofMathematical Tables" was astray acclaimed and consequently, Babbage waspresented with the first gold medal awarded by the Astronomical Society.