Babbage Charles Essay Research Paper CHARLES BABBAGEHassan — страница 2

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Work began on the Difference Engine in 1829. He had hired an engineer and machinist by the name of Joseph Clement to construct the engine and to oversee the fabrication of special tools. By the end of 1830 Babbage wanted to move the engine’s workshop to his house on Dorset Street. A man of great ego, Clement refused to move from his own workshop, and made, according to Babbage, “inordinately extravagant demands”. Babbage would not advance Clement further money, so Clement dismissed his crew, and work on the Difference Engine ceased. Clement also withheld the blueprints and special tools constructed for the project. This would leave bad blood between Clement and Babbage through out the remainder of their lives, although eventually Clement did return the blue prints. Adding

to the difficulties, the British Government suspended funding for his Difference Engine in 1832, and after an agonizing waiting period, finally killed the project in 1842. At any rate, there remain only fragments of Babbage’s prototype Difference Engine. After the collapse of his Difference Engine project, Babbage now focused on his next invention: the Analytical Engine, an improved version of the Difference Engine. This project he devoted most of his time and large fortune towards after 1842, although he never succeeded in completing any of his several designs for it. The Analytical Engine was intended to use loops of Jacquard’s punched cards to control an automatic calculator, which could make decisions based on the results of previous computations. This machine was also

intended to employ several features subsequently used in modern computers, including sequential control, branching, and looping. Unfortunately, though, this too fell through as the British government once again could not approve funding the research the project further, and in 1851 Babbage finally had to close the entire project in frustration. George Scheutz, a Swedish printer, successfully constructed a machine based on the designs for Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1854. This machine printed mathematical, astronomical and actuarial tables with unprecedented accuracy, and was used by the British and American governments. Despite the fact that he died without ever achieving his ultimate goal of the Analytical Engine, Charles Babbage must be considered among the most talented

and intelligent men of the 19th century, and certainly one of the leading visionaries in the field of computing. He has definitely left his mark on our way of life and has every right to be deemed a “genius.” It is because of his visions, maybe not directly related to our advancements in technology today but through his underlying methods and ingenuity that we have such an advanced society. 632 C. Babbage, “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher”, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864. P. And E. Morrison, “Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines”, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, New York, 1961. R.W. Sebesta, “Concepts of Programming Languages”, Fourth Edition, Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998. M.R. Williams, “A History of

Computing Technology”, Second Edition, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, 1998. J.A.N. Lee, http://www.histech.rwthaachen.de/www/quellen/Histcomp/Babbage.html, Charles Babbage, September 1994. JOC/EFR, http://turnbull.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Babbage.html, Charles Babbage, December 1996.