ABSTRACT
It is possible that at some future date a film
will be made of the life of Charles Babbage,
polymath, tabulator and premature inventor
of the computer. If such a film is made, it will
dwell, no doubt, on Babbage’s early,
confident years – years in which our rich and
handsome hero introduced continental
methods of mathematics to Cambridge,
helped to found the Astronomical Society,
received its gold medal, became a fellow of
the Royal Society (at twenty-three), was
elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics,
was received by the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, and was awarded an annual grant
of £1,500 for work on his remarkable
invention, the ‘Difference Engine’. Babbage
involved himself in a hundred and one
practical and taxing problems, from pin
manufacture to crypt-analysis, from light-
houses to statistical linguistics. He actually
lived the kind of colourful, multi-sided life
sometimes depicted for fictional academics on
the silver screen.
