When did it all start?

“A machine is not a thinking creature, it is just an automaton doing what is embedded in it.”
Luigi Menabrea, 1842



I had a funny dream yesterday. There I interviewed and answered standard questions in the spirit of normal database forms. Suddenly, an employee of the company came to my interviewer for a question. Seeing that there is a process of interrogation, he decided to engage in the process and asked a simple question: “When did it all begin?” Then, in my dream, I was a little confused, only remembered that Lord Byron had a daughter named Ada, who is considered the first programmer on the first computer. The knowledge was a consequence of Byron’s biography, and it became more of an additional fact from his life, so I could not remember anything more concrete, because I did not know.

Returning to a more material reality, this question did not leave me, and I decided to get a thorough start date, at least a year.
For the beginning, I decided to take the creation of the first working computer and launch it, which is important, since there were many projects of difference machines, but we are interested in a specific result, namely the recorded fact of calculations made by the machine.

The investigation returns to Ada Lovelace.

So, we re-read the article about Ada Lovelace and see that the first machine she worked with was the Difference Engine of Charles Babbage.

So the first computer was called Babbage's Large Difference Engine, but was it built, did it work, and if so, when? The search goes to Charles Babbage and his car. The first picture shows her archive diagram.

A brief biography of Charles BabbageCharles Babbage was an English mathematician. Dec. 26. In 1792 at Teigmouth in Devonshire, he was educated at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1814. From his scientific works, extremely accurate and convenient logarithmic tables (A table of the logaritbms of the natural numbers from 1 to 108060, 1827) are noteworthy. In view of the difficulty of producing such large exact tables, B. attacked the idea developed in his work: Letter to sir. H. Davy on the application of machinery to mathematical tables (1822), to compose a special machine for this. Having received funds from the government to build such a machine, B., in order to study the technical details, examined many Mechanics workshops in England and abroad, which resulted in his work: “Economy of manufactures and machinery” (1832), translated into German. Friedberg, under the titles. Ueber Maschinen and Fabrikwesen (Berl, 1833) The conceived machine for calculating and printing mathematical and nautical tables was to consist of two essentially different parts: computational and printing. In 1828, construction of the first part of the machine began, almost completed by 1833, when a break in work came. The second part of the machine, adapted for printing tables, had not yet been brought to half, and the cost of its construction had already reached £17,000, and as the same amount was required for the complete completion of the enterprise, the work was completely abandoned. At this time, Lacroix, along with Herschel and Picock, translated Lacroix’s Traité du calcul différentiel et du calcul intégral into English and wrote his Comparativ View of the Different Institutions for the Assurance of Life (1826) and many other scientifically important articles for the Philosophical Transactions and Breister’s Journal of Science in other periodicals. In 1828 he received a chair in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, but in 1839 he left it. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), he was very pessimistic about the state of science in England, to which he returned a second time in his work, The Exposition of 1851, or Views of the Industry, Science and Government of England (1851). His autobiographical account is published in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864). B. died in London on 20 October 1871.


Moving on to the car article. See.

In 1823, the first subsidy was paid for the construction of what is now considered the first computer on earth and is known as Babbage's Great Difference Engine. Construction lasted ten years, the design of the machine became more complicated, and in 1833 funding was discontinued.
In other sources, an alternative date for the completion of financing is 1834. And no information about the first calculation. Weird. It wasn't as simple as I'd like.

So what does this machine look like?

Charles Babbage’s difference machine is a mechanical apparatus invented by the English mathematician Charles Babbage, designed to automate calculations by approximating functions by polynomials and calculating finite differences. The possibility of an approximate representation in polynomials of logarithms and trigonometric functions makes it possible to consider this machine as a fairly universal computing device.
Yes, judging by the pictures in Wikipedia and articles - a steampunk.

Babbage, in developing the machine, did not present all the difficulties associated with its implementation, and not only did not meet the promised three years, but nine years later he was forced to suspend his work. However, part of the machine still began to function and performed calculations with even greater accuracy than expected. ?
So the car worked, if only partially. It can be considered the first computer.

In 1823, the British government granted Charles Babbage a subsidy to build the machine. The first estimated date of appearance of the machine is 1832, since its development took nine years.

The date is confirmed from the article on the assembly of the model of this machine.

“This model operates on principles very similar to Babbage's original designs, although the constraints of using only standard Meccano parts inevitably mean some aspects of the operation are somewhat different. The model can handle decimal numbers with up to four digits, and up to three orders of differences — similar in scope to the fragment of the original Difference Engine #1 which Babbage actually realized in 1832.
Although some sources appear in 1833.

By the beginning of 1833, however, it was possible to complete and test a part of the machine, which can tabulate with accuracy to the fifth sign polynomials with constant second differences. ?
Ooh!

In 1834, Dr. Dionysius Lardner published an article called Babbage's Computing Machine, which describes in great detail the principle and structure of the machine. ?
That's where the exact dates should be. I have to find the article.

They were inspired by an article by Dr. Dionysius Lardner in the Edinburgh Review in 1834, Babbage's Computer.
So we need to find a scan of this issue, or at least its transcription.

The Edinburgh Review is one of the most influential British magazines of the nineteenth century. The original edition was published from 1802 to 1929, then from 1984 the name was used by the New Edinburgh Review, published in 1969. The magazine is now part of the Eurozine network.
The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal: for July, 1834. . . . . . January, 1835, vol. LX (in the usual numerals it is 60). The release date of 1835 is probably not what we need, but we know the approximate issue number - 59 or 58, unlikely 57 - respectively LIX, LVIII or LVII.

Archival scan of the journal, which presumably has a full version of the article

Looking for a cherished article...

Along the way, it turns out that this release consists of two other subissues with a different numbering. The first is CXXI (121), with a release date of October, 1834. The second is CXXII (122), with a January 1935 release date.

In order to find Lardner’s article, you need to know the Latin spelling of his name. We do. In English, the name Dionysius Lardner is spelled Dionysius Lardner. Funny that there is no article on the Russian-language wiki, only in English. In the future, the original name will be useful for searching his article in the archives.

Along the way, we find the first scan of the article in very poor quality and only one page.

Scan of one of the pages of the article by Dionysius Lardner about the computer Babbage

There are only two dates in the article: 1836 and 1835. According to the data received, they do not suit us, but anything can be. More importantly, we can see the page number, the title of the article, and the month in the top right corner! Obviously, this is the month of issue - July - so October is not suitable for us.

Okay.

• Page number -- 282
• The exact title of the article -- Babbage's Calculating Engine
• A month. July

Indeed, if you look at the full reversal of the issue found earlier, you can see that the year of issue is written on the left, and the month is written on the right.

The Edinburgh Review Magazine

The Edinburgh Review was published in July 1984. The LIX and CXX numbers will also help.

While finding the desired release does not work, we turn to other sources.

In one more authoritative (at least in appearance) work, a fact pops up, once again confirming the date of the first assembly and launch of the machine as 1832.

And one more confirmation, along the way, we learn about the existence of a Toolmaker named Joseph Clement, whom Babbage hired to, in fact, make his first car. Thus, there is another important person in the whole story, who actually assembled the first computer from Babbage’s projects.

“Joseph Clement (1779-1844) was amongst the finest toolmakers of his generation, both gifted and inventive, winning acclaim and awards for innovations in machine tools. Clement was a toolmaker as well as a first-rate draftsman - a rare combination - and was hired by some of the great pioneering engineers of the day, including Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudsley. Babbage hired Clement sometime in the mid-1820s to make Difference Engine No.1. Babbage designed and sketched the mechanisms and Clement made them, often devising specialized tools. The collaboration was close and it is impossible to say how much of the detailed implementation is Clement's and how much Babbage's. Clement made the 'beautiful fragment' - the demonstration piece for Difference Engine No. 1 delivered to Babbage in 1832 One of the finest examples of precision manufacture of the time. In a real sense Clement was the first computer engineer.
In the end, I managed to find the cherished issue of The Edinburgh Review. At the bottom will be a link to the archive with pdfs, there open "The_Edinburgh_Review_Or_Critical_Journal Vol. LIX.pdf. The article begins on page 263 and ends on page 327. Unfortunately, there is no information on the date of the first launch of the machine, only that from 1829 to early 1833, the development process was slow and intermittent until it stopped altogether. Nevertheless, the document is important and interesting and plays a big role not only in Babbage’s life, but in the history of our entire IT industry.

I conclude this investigation, fully convinced that it all began in 1832. In addition to the date, I can now tell a whole story, but this is in another dream. Of course, one would like to know the exact date of the demonstration by clinging to this fact: “A small demonstration assembly was built and delivered to Babbage by Clement in 1832.”, and ideally to know not only the exact date, but also what mood Joseph and Charles were in, and what specific calculations were made.

P.S. Suddenly, the name Johann Helfrich Müller came up with his first development of difference machines, which Babbage may have used. Maybe he's actually the creator of the first machine, not Babbage. Maybe I’ll go into that another time.

Archive with pdfs and pictures - yadi.sk/d/dNQu6p3wb8if4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawlace,_Ada
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_machine_Charles_Babbage
www.meccano.us/difference_engines/rde_1/
history-computer.com/Mechanical Calculators/18thCentury/Muller.html
habrahabr.ru/post/80800
habrahabr.ru/post/80334/
https://wikisource.org/wiki/ESBE/Babbage,_Charles
www.many-books.org/auth/506/book/56631/gibson_uilyam/mashina_razlichiy/read/86
www.computerhistory.org/babbage/dionysiuslardner/
www.computerhistory.org/babbage/josephclement/
www.sophiararebooks.com/pages/books/2605/charles-babbage/babbages-calculating-engines-being-a-collection-of-papers-relating-to-them-their-history-and

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/236389/