250 | 24 TURING, lOVElACE, AND BABBAGE
warrants. Ideas articulated a century apart show a startling congruence, and this agitates an
inevitable question: to what extent, if any, were the pioneers of the modern age of computing
aware of what had gone before?^2
In the context of Turing’s work this suite of ideas is unmistakably modern, yet each was expli-
citly articulated in the writings of Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and Ada Lovelace (1815–52).
The suite includes:
• algorithm and stepwise procedure
• ‘mechanical process’ and the idea of computation as systematic method
• computing as symbol manipulation according to rules
• halting as a criterion of solvability
• machine intelligence
• abstract formalism—attempts to express complex relations in a compact language of
signs and symbols.The start of automatic computation
Automatic computation received its first major impetus from Charles Babbage. The designs
for his vast mechanical calculating engines mark the genesis of the movement to realize viable
computing machines. Babbage bursts out of contemporary practice to startle us with concepts
and machines that represent a quantum leap in logical conception and physical scale in relation
to what had gone before. Babbage was a towering and controversial figure in scientific and
intellectual life in Regency and Victorian England. Supported by his father, a wealthy London
banker, he went up to Cambridge in 1810, aged 18, to study mathematics, an early and enduring
passion. Already a moderately accomplished mathematician he found his college tutors staid
and indifferent to new Continental theories, and he pursued a curriculum largely of his own
devising. He formed a lifelong friendship with John Herschel, later a celebrated astronomer
and lauded ambassador for science, and enjoyed the company of a wide circle of friends. He
played chess, took part in all-night sixpenny whist sessions, and bunked lectures and chapel to
go sailing on the river with his chums.
He was instrumental in the founding of the Analytical Society, a group whose mission
was to reform Cambridge mathematics. His political views were radical, supporting as he
did Napoleonic France, with which England was still at war. In a preliminary part of his final
examinations he attempted to defend a proposition regarded by the college moderators as blas-
phemous, and he suffered their censure. Despite this apparent boldness and independence of
thought, he recalls that he was ‘tormented by great shyness’.
Babbage married in 1814 and settled in London with his wife, Georgiana. He embraced
London scientific life, published several mathematical papers, and went on to author six books
and some ninety papers, the scope of which collectively attests to a formidable range of inter-
ests. In maturity he was a respected and imposing scientific figure enjoying both fame and
notoriety. He was proud, combative, and principled beyond ordinary reason—launching scath-
ing ill-judged public attacks on the Royal Society for its supposedly negligent governance of
scientific life. He appeared to prefer protest to persuasion and behaved as though being right
entitled him to be rude. His first biographer described him as ‘the irascible genius’ and this
depiction has endured.^3