The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer

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Summary: Wonderful combination of history and modern day triumph!
Review: Ahhh, the fascinating story of Charles Babbage. For 100 years he was a footnote to mathematical history, for the next 40 years his story was a required paragraph in the preface of every Computer Science text book. In the last few decades there has finally been serious study of his work. Now with this book we have a highly readable compendium of his life and work, with the added excitement of a modern day adventure.

The first 210 pages provide the best description of Babbage's life yet. All the bits and pieces I've read in numbers of other books on Babbage are here, as told by a modern expert who puts it all in perspective. That perspective is essential, as Babbage's life was filled with controversy and conflict.

The last 100 pages of the book tell the story of building one of Babbage's planned-but-never-built calculating engines in the museum where the author works. It is this personal experience with building a working machine from the 150 year old plans that adds the magic "hands on" touch to the author's analysis of Babbage's tale.

This is a highly readable and fascinating book and undoubtedly the best single volume on the legacy of Charles Babbage.

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Summary: History - What a story
Review: I bought this book hoping to gain a better knowledge of Charles Babbage and of course entertainment. The knowledge part was delivered but I found this book a very hard read. Do not expect to laugh occasionally because the story is very dry. The book also assumes that the reader is very familiar with British history, which I am not. From a factual standpoint it does deliver but its layout and the storyline make it an awful reference resource.

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Summary: History - What a story
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. It was refreshing to step away from the technical library and read more about the people, machines, trials, and triumphs that occured as far back as the early 1800's.

Though it all you learn about a man who had such vision. His execution could be faulted for many reasons. But in the end the machine works! I can not wait to see the Difference Engine myself someday.

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Summary: Wonderful Engines
Review: This book has 2 basic parts. First, is the discussion of Babbage's life and his computing engines. Second, is the author's modern-day story of attempting to complete Babbage's Difference Engine, a feat which Babbage himself was unable to do. I picked up this book for the first part. I wanted to learn about Babbage and how his engines worked. While the author gives a wonderful account of Babbage's life and methodology, he does not clearly describe HOW these engines function. I realize that the engines are extremely complex, but a chapter on the functioning of the Difference Engine trial piece and some diagrams on its operations would have been much appreciated. Unfortunately, as were Babbage's contemporaries, we are left mainly in dark as to how simply turning a crank can produce the necessary additions. The author also never fully explains the "method of finite differences" upon which the function of the difference engine is based.

The most amazing part of the book is the overview of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine- the first programmable computer. It is amazingly similar in concept to today's modern computers, but it uses motion through metal gears and cams, instead of electricity through logic gates and wires. I expected to be bored by the modern-day story, but I actually was interested in the process of reconstructing this 19th century machine. It was enlightening to see how the same problems Babbage faced 150 years before troubled engineers today.

Overall, I recommend this book for those curious about Babbage and his engines. However, the writing seems jerky and unorganized in parts, and there is little technical description of the engines' functionality.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Engines
Review: This book has 2 basic parts. First, is the discussion of Babbage's life and his computing engines. Second, is the author's modern-day story of attempting to complete Babbage's Difference Engine, a feat which Babbage himself was unable to do. I picked up this book for the first part. I wanted to learn about Babbage and how his engines worked. While the author gives a wonderful account of Babbage's life and methodology, he does not clearly describe HOW these engines function. I realize that the engines are extremely complex, but a chapter on the functioning of the Difference Engine trial piece and some diagrams on its operations would have been much appreciated. Unfortunately, as were Babbage's contemporaries, we are left mainly in dark as to how simply turning a crank can produce the necessary additions. The author also never fully explains the "method of finite differences" upon which the function of the difference engine is based.

The most amazing part of the book is the overview of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine- the first programmable computer. It is amazingly similar in concept to today's modern computers, but it uses motion through metal gears and cams, instead of electricity through logic gates and wires. I expected to be bored by the modern-day story, but I actually was interested in the process of reconstructing this 19th century machine. It was enlightening to see how the same problems Babbage faced 150 years before troubled engineers today.

Overall, I recommend this book for those curious about Babbage and his engines. However, the writing seems jerky and unorganized in parts, and there is little technical description of the engines' functionality.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: This book is another in a growing and continuing series of biographies of influential but sometimes obscure historic figures who've made significant contributions to science and the arts. Sobel's "Longitude" and Winchester's "The Map That Changed the World" are similar efforts. I hope the list gets longer.

This is one of the best of the type. Babbage--the subject of the book--is not so obscure since his role in the development of the modern computer is popular science dogma.

In good lucid prose, Swade explains the visionary aspect of Babbage's mind and provides context and texture--social and historical--to make Babbage's story compelling and believable. There is no hero worship or hyperbole. Babbage's critics are given the same fair-minded handling as the book's central subject.

Woven into the biographical narrative, Swade deals with the complexities of building Babbage's First Difference Engine--a part of the book I found fascinating. We live in a world in which every screw, girder, plate and bolt is manufactured to internationl standards of size, shape and strength. Babbage undertook bulding his First Difference Engine using thousands of hand-made small parts during an era when there were absolutely no standards for any machinery.

Swade also deals gracefully with the role Lord Byron's daughter, Ada, played in Babbage's career. Her work consisted of an annotated translation from Italian of a report on Babbage's machine. Alas, she wasn't the avatar of modern analysis.

After the biography proper, Swade describes how--during the 1980s--the London Science Museum undertook building the first complete version of a Babbage Difference Engine. I found the detail about financing the project hard slogging, but the descriptions of building the huge 19th century machine using 19th century standards were engaging and interesting because the modern builders even though equipped with all we've learned since Babbage's death confronted all the unexpected difficulties Babbage himself would have encountered had any of his machines been completed during his lifetime.

The best part of the book is the very end in which Swade summarizes Babbage's contribution to computing. His conclusion will surprise many readers. After finishing the book, I took down my 1968, 200th anniversary edition of the Brittanica and read there that Babbage was indeed the father of modern computing--pace Swade. Interestingly, Alan Turing doesn't have an entry.

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Summary: Doron Swade's Quest to Build a Difference Engine
Review: This is the first book I've read on Charles Babbage, but I imagine that there are others that are better. First, this book seems to assume you've already read a book or two about Babbage before. It almost has an apologetic tone and seems to be an answer to what, I assume, have been slights against Babbage and his work. Second, this book is as much about the author and his quest to build a Difference Engine as it is about Babbage himself. If you want to hear about dealing with office politics in an British museum, you may find this interesting.

All in all, this is a fairly dry read. It was interesting at points, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it for your first book on Babbage.

Rating:
Summary: Doron Swade's Quest to Build a Difference Engine
Review: This is the first book I've read on Charles Babbage, but I imagine that there are others that are better. First, this book seems to assume you've already read a book or two about Babbage before. It almost has an apologetic tone and seems to be an answer to what, I assume, have been slights against Babbage and his work. Second, this book is as much about the author and his quest to build a Difference Engine as it is about Babbage himself. If you want to hear about dealing with office politics in an British museum, you may find this interesting.

All in all, this is a fairly dry read. It was interesting at points, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it for your first book on Babbage.

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Summary: A Cogwheel Computer
Review: What if we had had computers a hundred and fifty years ago? It could have happened. The plans were drawn up for a computer that would have been very much like those of today, except it would have run on cogs, gears, levers, springs, and maybe steam power. We only got around to computers a hundred years later, but things could have worked out much differently, if the work of Charles Babbage had taken off. Doron Swade knows just how well such an engine could have worked. He built one. Or rather, his team within the London Science Museum built a calculating engine that Babbage had designed. It worked, just as Babbage knew it would. Swade tells the story of Babbage and his amazing machines in _The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer_ (Viking). Babbage's accomplishments turned out to be futile in the end, but Swade shows us how there is much to admire in his quest, successful or not.

Babbage wrote papers on chess, taxation, lock-picking, philosophy, submarines, archeology, cryptanalysis, and many other diverse efforts. He was an unstoppable inventor and tinkerer; he invented (but didn't get credit for) the ophthalmoscope every doctor has used, and the cowcatcher installed on the front of locomotives. But what he loved most of all were his computing machines. The Industrial Revolution was making everything else by steam; why not calculations, and perfect tables of them? He designed just such a calculating engine, and although because of various problems it didn't get built, he never stopped tinkering with it, and he designed an even bigger calculation machine that would have done, in its cogwheel way, all the basics that computers now do.

Babbage is sometimes called the grandfather of the computer, but he is more like an uncle. There is no evidence that any of his intricate and visionary machines influenced the design of electronic computers. Swade's engrossing book gives a good capsule biography of a fascinating man, but more importantly, it shows a hands-on appreciation for the machines he had dreamed up. Babbage knew that his dreams were doomed for his own time, but he had an inkling of what was to come; he wrote of the inventor's lot, "The certainty that a future age will repair the injustice of the present, and the knowledge that the more distant the day of reparation, the more he has outstripped the efforts of his contemporaries, may well sustain him against the sneers of the ignorant, or the jealousy of rivals." He was right again.