Stone cold fox, Charles Babbage, was a brainiac. In 1824, Babbage won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society “for his invention of an engine for calculating mathematical and astronomical tables”. He was a founding member of the society and one of its oldest living members on his death in 1871.
Babbage was a noted scholar, mathematician and published a plethora of academic articles (see here for a full list and more from Babbage himself). He also invented the first “computer”.
In 1812 he was sitting in his rooms in the Analytical Society looking at a table of logarithms, which he knew to be full of mistakes, when the idea occurred to him of computing all tabular functions by machinery. The French government had produced several tables by a new method. Three or four of their mathematicians decided how to compute the tables, half a dozen more broke down the operations into simple stages, and the work itself, which was restricted to addition and subtraction, was done by eighty [human] computers who knew only these two arithmetical processes. Here, for the first time, mass production was applied to arithmetic, and Babbage was seized by the idea that the labours of the unskilled computers could be taken over completely by machinery which would be quicker and more reliable. —B. V. Bowden, Faster than thought, PitmanBorn 26 December 1791, (d. 18 October 1871) Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer. Considered a “father of the computer”, Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. (Halacy, Daniel Stephen (1970). Charles Babbage, Father of the Computer. Crowell-Collier Press.)
Although he was largely ignored until the advent of modern computers around the 1940s, Babbage in elevated circles is to consider one of the original thought leaders of the new culture of innovation. His computer prototype was called “The Analytical Engine” and “was a much more ambitious project because it was to have employed then-recent developments in abstract symbolic algebra, thereby extending its range into the logical realm rather than being limited to the strictly mathematical.” (Green, WAS BABBAGE’S ANALYTICAL ENGINE INTENDED TO BE A MECHANICAL MODEL OF THE MIND?)
Like other inventions during the British Regency, the Analytical Engine represented a new age of logical enlightenment where maths and the scientific method was employed to solve problems…in many cases, problems of efficiency and industry (See my posts on Luddites, the Weatherman, the Tin Can, and the Steam Locomotive). The impact on culture and society would be seen in everything from medicine to criminal justice; from advertising to food production. It is, then, perhaps no surprise that the excesses of the Regent’s reign would give way to a more ordered, dispassionate (or by many interpretations, repressed) Victorian era.
Beyond the ballrooms and country estates of the glittering, golden Regency we all love from Reg Rom was a reality of explosive change in the way people lived their lives (sanitation, lighting, farming, transportation, shopping…mass produced consumer goods). Although many of the creature comforts we now take for granted (like the toliet) would come later, the impetus in many cases had its birth in the Regency (see Pollution).
Its this boiler of tension that makes the Regency era so exciting…and what I think lends itself so well to romance.
For more info: http://www.charlesbabbage.net/
