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In the 1940s, during World War II, British and American scientists invented
revolutionary new machines that could calculate
artillery ranges and decrypt coded messages.
These were the world’s first computers,
and they paved the way for our modern computers and the internet age.
But if history had gone differently, the first general-purpose computer could have
been built a century earlier, all the way back in the 1800s.
Back then, scientific information was often stored in large reference tables,
which had lots of important purposes.
For instance, they held data about the positions of the stars and planets,
which sailors used to navigate at sea.
Unfortunately, making these tables was tedious and prone to errors
because it relied on people literally just working out equations by hand.
So in 1821, the young British scientist Charles Babbage thought,
there had to be a better way.
He started thinking about how a machine might take over the tedious job
of calculations, and in 1823 he received a government grant to give it a try.
He set out to design a machine that could calculate these tables automatically,
churning out data on things like the position of the Sun every day of the year.
Almost a decade later, he had a finished prototype.
It was stupendously/ complex.
The machine had over 20 thousand parts and
was based on gears and cogs that had to be cranked by hand.
He called his invention the Difference Engine, because it used a
mathematical method called finite differences to calculate the numbers.
And it worked remarkably well, although not quite at the scale
Babbage had originally imagined.
In fact, it still works.
It now lives in the Science Museum in London.
But Babbage never finished the full Difference Engine
because he got sidetracked by a much more ambitious idea.
During the years that he worked on the Engine, he realized that
by modifying the design, he could create a machine hugely more powerful.
He called this new idea the Analytical Engine,
and it was essentially a steam-powered, Victorian computer.
It involved one critical upgrade from the Difference Engine,
which could only do basic arithmetic.
It would do those same calculations, then take the outputs
and feed them into new calculations.
Babbage called this “eating its own tail.”
This feature would have let the Analytical Engine do any computation,
making it a general-purpose computer, just like our modern computers.
And Babbage is thought to be the first person to ever come up with this concept.
The Engine would have worked off of mechanical wheels and steam power.
It had four parts: There was a reader to accept inputs in the form of punch cards,
a printer to write the results, and two parts that were essentially
like a CPU and a hard drive.
The problem was, by this point, Babbage had
strayed from his interest in making tables.
Now he was more interested in machines kind of for their own sake.
So when he asked the British government for more money
to build the Analytical Engine in 1834, they said no.
He self-funded work on the Engines for the rest of his life,
but never finished designing or making the Analytical Engine.
In fact, the entire concept might have just vanished into the void of history
if it hadn’t been for another brilliant mind from the same era.
In 1842, Babbage needed a French article about the Analytical Engine
translated into English, so he asked for help from an old acquaintance:
the Countess Ada Lovelace.
Ada was a talented mathematician, and by 1842 she had been
following Babbage’s work for a decade.
More than anyone, she understood the incredible potential of the Engine.
So when she wrote the translation, she appended a bunch of extra notes.
Notes that ended up being three times the length of the original article.
Those notes are now famous because they
contained a list of instructions you could put on punch cards to
make the Engine compute a tricky mathematical formula.
In a sense, this was the first ever “computer program.”
Today, we know that the Analytical Engine was an incredible concept for its time,
with impressive similarities to the computers that would arise in the future.
It would have been able to do any computation that a modern computer can do.
Just… a lot slower.
It also would have accepted its programming as punch cards,
which is actually how the first electronic computers worked, too.
Sadly, Babbage and Lovelace’s work went unappreciated in their lifetimes.
But in the 1930s, the Harvard engineer Howard Aiken stumbled
across one of Babbage’s prototypes… in the attic of his own department!
And that inspired him to finish what Babbage had started.
Aiken’s machine, the Harvard Mark I, was the first fully automatic computer,
but it wasn’t fully electronic and only barely programmable.
Like, it could only store 72 numbers at a time in its memory,
and it could only solve three addition or subtraction problems each second.
It wasn’t until the 1940s, when British and American scientists
started developing technology for the war, that the first programmable,
electronic, general-purpose computers were invented.
In the years since, Babbage and Lovelace’s ideas have been rediscovered.
In 1991, the Science Museum in London built Babbage’s full,
final design for the Difference Engine, and it worked!
So now, many recognize Babbage as the “father of the computer,”
and Lovelace as the “first programmer.”
It’s a little hard to envision a world where they succeeded.
A world with a hundred extra years of computer research.
And a version of the 1800s with steampunk computers!
It’s one of the big “what-ifs” of science history.
But the story of Babbage and Lovelace shows
how the history of science is messy and bumpy.
Sometimes great ideas get lost or happen before their time.
But also: People everywhere are always coming up with brilliant,
creative solutions to the problems at hand,
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