Babbage developed a digital computer a full century before computers were even a thing. And he did it without transistors, without circuits, without electricity—we’re talking rods and gears here people.

Just as there’s no rule that technically prevents a Golden Retriever from playing basketball, there’s no physical law that says you can’t build a PC out of any old junk that implements basic logic. Want to build a computer from paperclips? Billiard balls? Tinker toys? It’s been done. How about DNA nucleotides? Swarms of crabs? Yawn! Move over infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare. If you put enough trained monkeys in a big enough room, they could calculate the first million digits of Pi.

The only catch is that your computer will be slow, enormous, stupidly expensive, and in the monkey example, teeming with parasites.

The story of Babbage’s computer begins, as all great stories do, with a series of tedious mathematical tables. In those days, tables of figures (cosines, logarithms, etc.) took hundreds of hours to produce and were more error prone than a greased gorilla playing shortstop.¹ What’s more, unlike said gorilla, Britain’s navy relied on such tables for navigation.¹ Nothing spoils tea like inadvertently sinking your fleet on a sunken reef.

This 5-ton "fragment" is the only part of the Difference Engine Babbage ever built.

Fortunately, there’s a trick to doing all these calculations. The method of finite differences lets us break down complicated trig and log tables into simple addition. Instead of paying some asshole mathematician a mint and a half to calculate thousands upon thousands of equations on his lonesome, you could use the method of finite differences to break your table of equations into basic addition operations, and hire an army of 5-year-olds who’ll add it all up for crackers and juice.

It sounds like the perfect crime, but still, addition is not foolproof. What if Billy shoves a counting bean up his nose and the entire Royal Navy winds up in Madagascar? Babbage convinced the government to let him build a giant adding machine—a Difference Engine—to sum up lengthy mathematical tables automatically.¹ This way there’d be no room for error.

The stars were aligned for the dawn of the computing age. And then everything fell apart. Babbage’s chief engineer turned out to be a total dick, and the government turned skittish over rising production costs.¹ By 1834, all Babbage had to show for himself was a set of detailed designs and a mysterious five-ton “fragment.”¹ After ole’ Mama England snapped her purse strings shut, you might have thought our friend would have took a hint.

But noooooo. Freed from the talons of government investment, Babbage only went crazier. Science shows that while many of our mental faculties diminish with age, the “mad” faculty, overrepresented in the brains of mad scientists, only grows stronger, owing to the peculiar chymikal properties of the bodilie humours involved.

This Difference Engine was constructed in the 1990s for former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold, based on Babbage's designs. It works just as Babbage intended.

This is where things really start to get hairy. The Difference Engine could calculate a single series of equations. But Babbage began to wonder, what if you built an even more ridiculously large machine—an Analytical Engine—that could calculate anything at all?² And what if you added a punch card system to let users program the machine without getting their hands dirty.² While were at it, how about basic memory so it could store and retrieve data?² What would you have then?!

If you built a machine that did all that, you’d essentially have modern computer, theoretically capable of running solitaire, asking Jeeves, storing porn, or performing any of the other millions of critically important tasks we rely on our computers for—only very slowly.

What’s that? You want to see the Analytical Engine? Nnnnnnnnnnno. He never finished building it.

Blueprints detailing just one small part of the Analytical Engine.

Soured by the Difference Engine debacle, Babbage became convinced that no one rich enough cared enough to fund his next calculating engine.¹ Instead, he focused on drafting detailed blueprints and prototypes to prove that it could be built.¹ He had the technology. Contemporary scholars agree that Babbage could have finished both the Analytical Engine and the Difference Engine using the tools available to him at the time—provided of course there was someone willing to foot the bill, which would surely have been enormous.² This theory is being put to the test as we speak as contemporary crazyman John Graham Cumming has recently begun constructing a full-scale working version of the Analytical Engine based on Babbage’s designs.

A model of the Analytical Engine's "mill" built by his son Henry. In modern computing terms, this would be the processor.

But why didn’t anybody care enough to fund Babbage’s project? It boils down to the fact that math was even more boring back then than it is today. Even though trig tables still seem dull, we have this implicit understanding that they are critical to many aspects of our lives. But this knee-jerk association between science and productivity is a recent thing.¹

Back in Victorian England, hard science and hard labor rarely met. Even though much of Britain’s wealth was built on its industry, engineering was seen as a lowbrow profession.¹ The idea that a mechanical computer could somehow make Britain’s industry more efficient, just by churning out math equations, was enough to make a man’s carefully curled mustache sproing flat in disbelief.

In addition to inventing the world’s first digital computer, Babbage also deserves to be recognized as the original computer nerd. His eclectic interests, irritating humor, and nitpicky personality helped lay the foundation for modern computer nerdom, as the following miscellany attests:

• At Cambridge Charles founded the Extraction Society, whose sole purpose was to extract any of its members should they wind up committed in an asylum.
• He enjoyed scouring the personal ads for encrypted love missives along with buddies Charles Wheatstone and Lord Playfair. Together the gang made a game of cracking secret lovers’ codes, and were not above placing their own encrypted messages in the paper advising couples to “avoid rash decisions” and whatnot.³
• In London, Babbage waged a legendary crusade against such “public nuisances” as street music, hoop trundling, and the popular game of tip-cat.⁴
• And then there’s his infamous correction to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous couplet: “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born”…

I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

Every minute dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born

I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.⁵

Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter and a close friend of Babbage, was one of the few who actually understood the power of the calculating engines (possibly even better than Babbage did). She's been dubbed the world's first computer programmer on account of an algorithm she wrote for use in the Analytical Engine.

Babbage’s contributions to nerd culture are indisputable. But how should we judge his contributions the development of modern computers nearly a century later?

Oddly, historians hardly bothered analyzing the inner workings of the calculating engines until the 1970s. Only then did they realize the scope of Babbage’s accomplishment was greater than imagined. A number of modern computing concepts like microprogramming, conditional branching, and memory, were developed completely independently by Babbage.^1,3 In some respects, the Analytical Engine offered even greater functionality than the first electronic computers.³ And this was before even a basic theory of computation had been hashed out.

Charles Babbage isn’t a household name, and it’s not hard to see why. He never even came close to completing his magnum opus, and has a mixed track record with his other inventions. The signaling system he invented for lighthouses is still in use today, while his steeple-to-steeple mail delivery funicular and shoes for walking on water never gained much traction.¹ In fact he nearly drowned testing the latter.¹

Still, frustrated ambition and impossibly ahead-of-your-time thinking are precisely the qualities that make for a top-notch mad scientist. Here failure is rewarded, obsession is praised, and public acceptance—punished. We offer no material award, but something even more precious, a chance to be diagnosed with a horrifying disease from which there is no cure. I am speaking of course, of science madness.

Sources:
1. Hyman, A. (1985). Charles Babbage: pioneer of the computer. Princeton University
Press.
2. Bromley, A. G. (1982). Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1838. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 4(3), 196–217. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1982.10028
3. Snyder, L. J. (2011). The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world. Random House Digital, Inc.
4. Shelly, J. (1864) “Street Music (Metropolis) Bill” United Kingdom. Parliament. Edited Hansard. 176. Retrieved from: here
5. Morrison, P. (Ed.). (1961). Charles Babbage and his calculating engines: Selected writings by Charles Babbage and others. Dover.

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It would take another 500 years for Europeans to finally ease their attitude toward lifelike automata. In 1739, Jacques de Vaucanson captured the public imagination with his “Defecating Duck,” a bizarre clockwork apparatus that ate food pellets and shat them out the other side. In 1770, Wolfang von Kempelen debuted his mystifying chess-bot (known simply as “The Turk”). The machine would go on to best the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin.²

Simulating human speech, however, proved a more elusive goal. While Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s robots could be programmed to write and draw pretty much anything, the most advanced mechanical speech synthesizers of the 18th century could utter nothing more than a few select words and phrases. It wasn’t until the early 1840s that an obscure German inventor by the name of Joseph Faber conjured up the very first bona-fide talking head.

In Paris 1783, Abbé Mical produced two rudimentary talking heads that exchanged a set of stock phrases in praise of the king.¹

No joke people. His machine could pronounce any combination of vowels and consonants, in any European language.³ In the hands of a skilled operator, it could laugh, whisper, talk, and even sing!³

Faber accomplished this feat by carefully aping the structure of the human vocal tract. A bellows, pumped by a foot pedal, served as the gadget’s lung. The glottis and mouth were modeled though a complex system of levers, tubes, and shutters, hooked up to a keyboard, and cloaked under the stoney-eyed mask of a human face.

“Euphonia,” as it would later be dubbed, was leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors. Faber could have promoted his work within the scientific community, or used it as a springboard for practical applications. Instead, he chose to spend the rest of his life as a cheap showman, touring the head across Europe and The United States.⁴

It’s hard to fathom why, since by most accounts he wasn’t much of an entertainer. As theater manager John Hollingshead recalls:

“The Professor was not too clean, and his hair and beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have no doubt that he slept in the same room as his figure – his scientific Frankenstein monster – and I felt the secret influence of an idea that the two were destined to live and die together.”⁵

Hollingshead notes, with particular horror, the machine’s “sepulchral version of ‘God Save the Queen,'” which he quips, “suggested inevitably, God save the inventor.”⁵

The London press turned Faber into a punchline:

“By the way, why should not Lord George Bentick have one of these machines constructed, with a Benjamin Disraeli figure-head, and play upon it himself at once, and spare the honourable Member for Shrewsbury the bother of being his Lordship’s Euphonia?”⁶

Needless to say, Faber’s act failed miserably. In a frenzy of madness and frustration, the sad German hacked and set fire to his life’s work.⁴

"Never probably, before or since, has the National Anthem been so sung. Sadder and wiser, I, and the few visitors, crept slowly from the place, leaving the professor with his one and only treasure - his child of infinite labour and unmeasurable sorrow." -John Hollingshead⁵

Faber belongs to that particular breed of mad scientists who miserably marry themselves to their inventions—the Pygmalions and Promethei of the world, for whom creation is a mere end in itself. Only, marriage is an inappropriate term for the union, as the contract certainly does not terminate at death. In hell the two wretched souls remain forever entwined, plunged into an infinity of torture and despair.

While Faber would rebuild Euphonia once again and resume the touring life, success continued to elude him.

Sometime in the 1860s, guy dropped of the face of the Earth. A few decades later, his head followed suit.⁴

VODER, the world’s first electronic speech synthesizer, premiered at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.⁷ From that point on, speech synthesis has been cast as branch of computational signal processing. Faber’s hand-pumped, human-controlled talking head was doomed to obscurity, perhaps forever.

Elocution specialist Melville Bell was quite taken by Faber's Euphonia, and challenged his young son Alexander Graham to try his own hand at artificial speech synthesis.⁸ A decade later, Aleck invented the telephone. Coinkidink?

It’s a bummer because it would be soooo cool to hear what this thing sounded like. Our ability to build weird shit has increased so dramatically since the 19th century that many steampunk wet dreams are becoming reality. Aviation engineers recently developed a human-powered ornithopter that flies by flapping its wings. Programmer John Graham-Cumming has set out to build a steam-powered, gear-driven, PC (post to come on this most probably). Surely with today’s technology we could even improve upon Faber’s design. Imagine, instead of a clunky keyboard, a sexy sax with a human face stretched over its opening. I can just hear it now: It—must—have been moo—oooonglo—HONK! Eh people?

Recently, there have been a few horrifying attempts (see below) to wire physical models of the human vocal tract to computer controllers.⁹ But thus far, judging by publicity videos, even these fanciful creations seem incapable of producing anything beyond chilling infantilisms.

Ah Joseph, you were ahead of one time and behind another, but perhaps in obscurity you will find salvation. The internet loves its losers, all the more so if they’re frighteningly insane.

1. Hankins, T.L., Silverman, R.J. (1995). Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Riskin, J. (2003). The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life. Critical Inquiry, 29, 599-633.
3. Lindsay, D. (1997). Madness in the Making: The Triumphant Rise & Untimely Fall of America’s Show Inventors. New York: Kondasha America.
4. Lindsay, D. (1997). Talking Head. Invention and Technology Magazine, 13(1). (url: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1997/1/1997_1_56.shtml).
5. Hollingshead, J. (1895). My Lifetime: Vol 2. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co.
6. Lemon, M., Mayhew, H., Taylor, T., Brooks, S., Burnand, F.C., Seaman, O. (1846). The Speaking Machine. Punch, 11, 83.
7. Dudley, H. (1950). The Speaking Machine of Wolfgang von Kempelen. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 22(1), 151-166.
8. Bruce, R.V. (1973). Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.
9. Ngo, D. (2010). Video: moaning rubber robot mouth simulates human voices, fuels our nightmares. Retrieved from: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-04/freaky-robot-mouth-simulates-human-voices. (2010, April 19).

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