Part 6

Another mathematical innovation of the century was that of placing logarithms on a stick by the Scot, John Napier. What he had done, of course, was to make an analog, or scale model of the arithmetical numbers. “Napier’s bones” quickly became what we now call slide rules, forerunners of a whole class of analog computers that solve problems by being actual models of size or quantity. Newton joined Leibnitz in contributing another valuable tool that would be used in the computer, that of the calculus.

The Computer in Literature

Even as Plato had viewed with suspicion the infringement of mechanical devices on man’s domain of higher thought, other men have continued to eye the growth of “mechanisms” with mounting alarm. The scientist and inventor battled not merely technical difficulties, but the scornful satire and righteous condemnation of some of their fellow men. Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist who took a swipe at many things that did not set well with his views, lambasted the computing machine as a substitute for the brain. In Chapter V, Book Three, of Gulliver’s Travels, the good dean runs up against a scheming scientist in Laputa:

The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with Forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room; he said, perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness; and he flattered himself, that a more noble exalted Thought never sprang in any other Man’s Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was a Twenty Foot Square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The Superfices was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine to work. The Pupils at his Command took each the hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded Six and Thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This work was repeated three or four Times, and at every Turn the Engine was so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as the square Bits of Wood moved upside down.

Six hours a-day the young Students were employed in this Labour; and the Professor showed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of Art and Sciences; which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the Publick would raise a Fund for making and employing five Hundred such Frames in Lagado....

Fortunately for Swift, who would have been horrified by it, he never heard Russell Maloney’s classic story, “Inflexible Logic,” about six monkeys pounding away at typewriters and re-creating the world great literature. Gulliver’s Travels is not listed in their accomplishments.

The French Revolution prompted no less an orator than Edmund Burke to deliver in 1790 an address titled “Reflections on the French Revolution,” in which he extols the virtues of the dying feudal order in Europe. It galled Burke that “The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

Seventy years later another eminent Englishman named Darwin published a book called On the Origin of Species that in the eyes of many readers did little to glorify man himself. Samuel Butler, better known for his novel, The Way of All Flesh, wrote too of the mechanical being, and was one of the first to point out just what sort of future Darwin was suggesting. In the satirical Erewhon, he described the machines of this mysterious land in some of the most prophetic writing that has been done on the subject. It was almost a hundred years ago that Butler wrote the first version, called “Darwin Among the Machines,” but the words ring like those of a 1962 worrier over the electronic brain. Butler’s character warns:

There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time.

Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man ... what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.

Butler envisioned the day when the present rude cries with which machines call out to one another will have been developed to a speech as intricate as our own. After all, “... take man’s vaunted power of calculation. Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more quickly and correctly than we can? What prizeman in Hypothetics at any of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with some of these machines in their own line?”

Noting another difference in man and his creation, Butler says,

... Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary, it is clear-headed and collected, when the man is stupid and dull, it needs no slumber.... May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?

It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling spirit and the machine the servant.... This is all very well. But the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master, and we have come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated ... man should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become extinct in six weeks.

Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

Butler considers the argument that machines at least cannot copulate, since they have no reproductive system. “If this be taken to mean that they cannot marry, and that we are never likely to see a fertile union between two vapor-engines with the young ones playing about the door of the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant it. surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system.”

Butler repeats his main theme. “... his [man’s] organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machine is advancing. This is the most alarming feature of the case, and I must be pardoned for insisting on it so frequently.”

Then there is a startlingly clear vision of the machines “regarded as a part of man’s own physical nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal limbs. Man ... as a machinate mammal.” This was feared as leading to eventual weakness of man until we finally found “man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action.” And so the Erewhonians in self-defense destroyed all inventions discovered in the preceding 271 years!

Early Mechanical Devices

During the nineteenth century, weaving was one of the most competitive industries in Europe, and new inventions were often closely guarded secrets. Just such an idea was that of Frenchman Joseph M. Jacquard, an idea that automated the loom and would later become the basis for the first modern computers. A big problem in weaving was how to control a multiplicity of flying needles to create the desired pattern in the material. There were ways of doing this, of course, but all of them were unwieldy and costly. Then Jacquard hit on a clever scheme. If he took a card and punched holes in it where he wanted the needles to be actuated, it was simple to make the needles do his bidding. To change the pattern took only another card, and cards were cheap. Patented in 1801, there were soon thousands of Jacquard looms in operation, doing beautiful and accurate designs at a reasonable price.

To show off the scope of his wonderful punched cards, Jacquard had one of his looms weave a portrait of him in silk. The job took 20,000 cards, but it was a beautiful and effective testimonial. And fatefully a copy of the silk portrait would later find its way into the hands of a man who would do much more with the oddly punched cards.

At about this same time, a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen decided that machines could play games as well as work in factories. So von Kempelen built himself a chess-playing machine called the Maelzel Chess Automaton with which he toured Europe. The inventor and his machine played a great game, but they didn’t play fair. Hidden in the innards of the Maelzel Automaton was a second human player, but this disillusioning truth was not known for some time. Thus von Kempelen doubtless spurred other inventors to the task, and in a short while machines would actually begin to play the royal game. For instance, a Spaniard named L. Torres y Quevedo built a chess-playing machine in 1914. This device played a fair “end game” using several pieces, and its inventor predicted future work in this direction using more advanced machines.

Charles Babbage was an English scientist with a burning desire for accuracy. When some mathematical tables prepared for the Astronomical Society proved to be full of errors, he angrily determined to build a machine that would do the job with no mistakes. Of course calculating machines had been built before; but the machine Babbage had in mind was different. In fact, he called it a “difference engine” because it was based on the difference tables of the squares of numbers. The first of the “giant computers,” it was to have hundreds of gears and shafts, ratchets and counters. Any arithmetic problem could be set into it, and when the proper cranks were turned, out would come an answer—the right answer because the machine could not make a mistake. After doing some preliminary work on his difference engine, Babbage interested the government in his project since even though he was fairly well-to-do he realized it would cost more money than he could afford to sink into the project. Babbage was a respected scientist, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and because of his reputation and the promise of the machine, the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised to underwrite the project.

For four years Babbage and his mechanics toiled. Instead of completing his original idea, the scientist had succeeded only in designing a far more complicated machine, one which would when finished weigh about two tons. Because the parts he needed were advanced beyond the state of the art of metalworking, Babbage was forced to design and build them himself. In the process he decided that industry was being run all wrong, and took time out to write a book. It was an excellent book, a sort of forerunner to the modern science of operations research, and Babbage’s machine shop was doing wonders for the metalworking art.

Undaunted by the lack of progress toward a concrete result, Babbage was thinking bigger and bigger. He was going to scrap the difference engine, or rather put it in a museum, and build a far better computer—an “analytical engine.” If Jacquard’s punched cards could control the needles on a loom, they could also operate the gears and other parts of a calculating machine. This new engine would be one that could not only add, subtract, multiply, and divide; it would be designed to control itself. And as the answers started to come out, they would be fed back to do more complex problems with no further work on the operator’s part. “Having the machine eat its own tail!” Babbage called this sophisticated bit of programming. This mechanical cannibalism was the root of the “feedback” principle widely used in machines today. Echoing Watt’s steam governor, it prophesied the coming control of machines by the machines themselves. Besides this innovation, the machine would have a “store,” or memory, of one thousand fifty-digit numbers that it could draw on, and it would actually exercise judgment in selection of the proper numbers. And as if that weren’t enough, it would print out the correct answers automatically on specially engraved copper plates!

Space Technology Laboratories

“As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise—by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?” Charles Babbage—The Life of a Philosopher, 1861. ]

It was a wonderful dream; a dream that might have become an actuality in Babbage’s own time if machine technology had been as advanced as his ideas. But for Babbage it remained only a dream, a dream that never did work successfully. The government spent £17,000, a huge sum for that day and time, and bowed out. Babbage fumed and then put his own money into the machine. His mechanics left him and became leaders in the machine-tool field, having trained in Babbage’s workshops. In despair, he gave up on the analytical engine and designed another difference engine. An early model of this one would work to five accurate places, but Babbage had his eyes on a much better goal—twenty-place accuracy. A lesser man would have aimed more realistically and perhaps delivered workable computers to the mathematicians and businessmen of the day. There is a legend that his son did finish one of the simpler machines and that it was used in actuarial accounting for many years. But Babbage himself died in 1871 unaware of how much he had done for the computer technology that would begin to flower a few short decades later.