ABSTRACT
George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal and de facto scientific advisor to government, declared Charles Babbage’s calculating engine to be ‘useless’. This damning dismissal, made in 1842 to Prime Minister, Robert Peel, effectively sealed the fate of Babbage’s engines and arguably doomed the nineteenth-century movement to automate calculation. To Babbage Airy’s brusque dismissal was an artefact of professional rivalry and personal malice. This chapter explores the circumstances and grounds for Airy’s opposition to devices and machines for automatic computation. Close reading of manuscript correspondence reveals Airy’s summary rejection to have been less an isolated aberration than part of a consistent, sustained, and reasoned position, though arguably a narrow one. History tends to portray Airy as a brilliant but unimaginative bureaucrat playing Salieri to Babbage’s Mozart. Yet it was Airy who prevailed.
