On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

Charles Babbage, born December 26, 1791 and died October 18, 1871 in London, is a mathematician, inventor, British visionary of the nineteenth century who was one of the leading precursors of computer science. He was the first to state the principle of a computer. It was in 1834, during the development of a calculating machine for the calculation and printing of mathematical tables (the difference machine) that he had the idea of incorporating cards of the Jacquard trade, The sequential reading would give instructions and data to his machine, and thus imagined the mechanical ancestor of computers today. He never finished his analytical machine, but spent the rest of his life conceiving it in the smallest details and constructing a prototype. One of his sons built the central unit (the mill) and the printer in 1888 and made a successful demonstration of table calculation at the Royal Astronomical Academy in 19081. It was between 1847 and 1849 that Charles Babbage undertook to use the technological advances of his analytical machine to design the plans of a second no. 2 machine with equal specifications requiring three times fewer parts than the previous one. In 1991, from these plans, it was possible to reconstruct a part of this machine which works perfectly using the techniques that were available in the nineteenth century, which shows that it could have been built during the lifetime of Charles Babbage. Preface The present volume may be considered as one of the consequences that have resulted from the calculating engine, the construction of which I have been so long superintending. Having been induced, during the last ten years, to visit a considerable number of workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of endeavouring to make myself acquainted with the various resources of mechanical art, I was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalization to which my other pursuits had naturally given rise. The increased number of curious processes and interesting facts which thus came under my attention, as well as of the reflections which they suggested, induced me to believe that the publication of some of them might be of use to persons who propose to bestow their attention on those enquiries which I have only incidentally considered. With this view it was my intention to have delivered the present work in the form of a course of lectures at Cambridge; an intention which I was subsequently induced to alter. The substance of a considerable portion of it has, however, appeared among the preliminary chapters of the mechanical part of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. I have not attempted to offer a complete enumeration of all the mechanical principles which regulate the application of machinery to arts and manufactures