March 18th, 2020
Charles Babbage is easily the best instance of a man who was too far ahead of his times. He invented the programmable computer in 1840, and the first actual programmable computer wasn’t built until a century later.
Babbage’s design was absolutely brilliant; it used gears, levers, cams, and other mechanical elements to execute programs carrying out numerical calculations. Here’s his first machine, the difference engine, which was, roughly speaking, a calculator:
The analytical engine was much, much larger; the full size version would have been about as big as a bus. Here’s one of the many pages of plans for the device:
Babbage spent his entire life struggling and failing to get funding to build his machines. He failed because he was so far ahead of his times that there was no need for his computer. What would anybody do with a computer in 1850? Play Lunar Lander? A computer operates in a social context in which large amounts of data must be processed. There wasn’t much data back then; people weren’t recording lots and lots of numbers as they are today. Babbage was so damn far ahead of his times that nobody could appreciate the magnitude of his achievement.
