The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

In spite of Babbage’s eccentricities, however, no one doubted that he was determined, visionary and quite brilliant. And, in spite of the odd commercial failure, he was also very wealthy. Or, at least, he was until he sank his personal fortune into his dream of building a giant calculating machine.

  On 12 January 1820, Babbage was one of a handful of diners present at the Freeman’s Tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields when the Astronomical Society was formed, along with his friend John Herschel, son of the famous astronomer William Herschel. Babbage and Herschel soon found themselves working on a series of mathematical tables for the Society, the accuracy of which was particularly important for navigators; one mistake could mean life or death for a seafarer.

  It would be an understatement to say that mathematical tables were something of a Babbage obsession. He was a connoisseur and collector of tables. He owned a private collection of tables running to more than 300 volumes. He even studied the ergonomics of table reading. His idea of a quiet evening in was to draw up tables with various different coloured papers and inks to find out which combination caused the least stress to the reader; just to make sure he had every option covered, he tested green ink on several different shades of green paper. Babbage was incensed by the discovery that the existing tables of computations included far too many errors. Mathematical errors were the scourge of the nineteenth-century scientist. The first edition of the Nautical Ephemeris for finding Latitude and Longitude at Sea, to give one example, was found to contain over a thousand table errors. The textbooks of the day came with errata sheets appended by more errata sheets. The source of error was clear – human fallibility. Suddenly, a thought struck Babbage – what if someone could create an all-purpose, infallible calculating machine, one that could achieve “absolute integrity of results”? The Industrial Revolution was making everything else by steam; why not mathematical calculations and perfect tables?

  In July 1822, Babbage wrote a letter to the president of the Royal Astronomical Society, describing his plan for a calculating machine. He called it the Difference Engine. In 1822, he demonstrated a small working model of his device. It was an ungainly piece of hardware with a bewildering array of brass wheels and cogs and shafts, but the Society were impressed and awarded him their first Gold Medal. A year later, Babbage persuaded the Government to give him a grant to build his invention. The triumphal birth of Babbage’s enterprise, however, would also prove to be the high point of his career. He never got anywhere near completing his giant mechanical calculator, his efforts confounded by a self-destructive streak that would result in a lifetime of personal conflict, political confrontations and silly vendettas.

  To begin with, he had completely underestimated the costs involved. The apparatus he envisaged was a fantastically ambitious undertaking with about 20,000 moving parts, well beyond the limit of nineteenth-century skill and machinery. Most of the precision machine tools needed to shape the wheels, gears and cranks of his engine did not exist and Babbage and his craftsmen would have to make them. In fact, as no minutes were ever made of his initial meeting with the government, no one could agree how much it was supposed to cost in the first place. With no agreed budget and no delivery date, work on the machine wore on and on.

  Meanwhile, there were plenty of other distractions to keep Babbage from finishing his grand calculating machine. There was little he wasn’t prepared to put his mind to. Once, while bored at the ballet, it occurred to him that he might be able to enliven proceedings with some experimental lighting. He devised “the Rainbow Dance”, a ballet in which sixty female dancers, representing fireflies, each dressed in pure white, would take on the colour of any light projected on them. The light came from a huge battery of oxy-hydrogen blowlamps fitted with coloured filters. Although there was a rehearsal with two fire engines standing by, the ballet was never shown to the public because the theatre manager was terrified the building would burn down mid-performance and kill everyone in it.

  More successfully, he published the first ever treatise on actuarial theory, in the process more or less creating the insurance industry. When he applied his new methods to a study of wasteful practices in the printing trade, his publishers were so offended that they refused to print any more of his books. He had better luck when he tried his method out in an analysis of the Victorian postal system. He was able to prove that the cost of assigning a value to every piece of mail according to the distance it had to travel was more expensive than the cost of transporting it. The British Post Office adopted his findings and began to charge a flat rate, independent of the distance each piece had to travel. The “penny post” system still exists around the world to this day.

  The strain of years of hard work on his calculating machine without reward or recognition, plus the sudden deaths inside a year of four members of his immediate family, including his wife, took their toll on the scientist. The once affable young man turned into a prematurely aged, bad-tempered crank. He got involved in a number of pointless public feuds and spent his spare time firing off abusive letters written in green ink on yellow paper at various targets, including publishers of mathematical tables, lambasting them for obscure inaccuracies he had uncovered.

  The scientific Establishment was a favourite subject for his abuse. Babbage thought that the Royal Society was run by incompetents and idiots, a point he made in a series of highly personal broadsides against leading Society members, including one accusing the great Sir Humphrey Davy of fraud. Apart from anything else, this was a shocking breach of scientific etiquette, but in doing so he had also managed to offend the very scientific body who had on three occasions recommended Government support for his Engine.

  They were not the only important people to feel the rough edge of Babbage’s tongue. He was hoping for financial support from a government whose membership, for the most part, was still drawn from the aristocracy. So he decided to publish a pamphlet called A Word to the Wise, a savage attack on the hereditary system of privilege titles, denouncing the British aristocracy as wholly corrupt. As career moves go, it was not the best.

  In 1827, he was appointed Lucusian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a highly prestigious post once held by Isaac Newton. The new position came with a generous income and even more generous terms and conditions. There were absolutely no regular tutoring responsibilities: the sole requirement of the job was to deliver one course of lectures a year. Babbage abused even that simple condition. He held the post for eleven years until 1839, but never gave a single lecture, much to the disgust of the other dons, because he said he was too busy developing his mechanical computer.

  Babbage twice tried his hand at politics, as a Whig candidate to Parliament for the Borough of Finsbury in the general election of 1832 and again in the by-election two years later. He was a terrible politician. During both campaigns he was heckled with questions about the financing of his Engine project – a touchy subject bound to set him off on a purplefaced rant. His public speeches were almost totally incoherent. After predictable defeats in both campaigns, he surrendered all further political ambition.

  Meanwhile, work on Babbage’s calculating machine wore on. Each stage of construction posed a new set of technical problems, each requiring a succession of brilliant innovations in mechanical engineering. His original plan was enlarged into a machine of around 25,000 parts. Ten years after the project was first announced, all he had to show for it, however, was one small working section. The Prime Minister Robert Peel noted sarcastically, “How about setting the machine to calculate what time it will be of use?”

  As the question of the government’s exact financial obligation to Babbage’s Difference Engine remained unresolved, he was having to pay for the project out of his own pocket. He fell out regularly with his engineer, Joseph Clement, who by all accounts could match Babbage for stubbornness. In March 1833, Clement submitted a bill and Babbage refused to pay; he told him to send it to the Treasury instead. When the Treasury rejected it as “unreasonable and inadmissible”, Clemen
t downed tools. Work on the Difference Engine stopped, never to resume again. By this time, costs had spiralled to an astonishing £17,500 – enough to build a couple of battleships. By comparison, Robert Stephenson’s recently built steam locomotive John Bull, commissioned by the United States, had been constructed at a total cost of £785.

  One of Babbage’s biggest mistakes was that he had never bothered to try to explain to the public, or for that matter his financial backers, what the benefits of his invention were in terms anyone could understand, so no one knew what the fuss was about in the first place. He was to receive some unexpected publicity, however, when a lengthy article appeared in the Edinburgh Review by Professor Dionysius Lardner of University College, London, which gave a lengthy, glowing write-up of Babbage and his marvellous Engine. This was exactly the shot in the arm his project needed, or so you might have thought. Lardner was certainly a scientific writer of some repute. The trouble was, it wasn’t the sort of reputation you would necessarily want to be associated with (see Worst Scientific Pundit).

  Babbage couldn’t stop tinkering with his design. Every time it looked as if one means of constructing his device might actually work, he thought of a new and better way of doing it. Almost every room in his house was filled with abandoned models of his engine. By the 1830s, he was already committed to an even more ambitious project, the Analytical Engine, a quicker, more advanced machine that could be programmed with punch cards to do computations and store data. He had come up with the essential features, no less, of the modern computer.

  Babbage wanted to tell the Government all about his exciting Analytical Engine, but they didn’t want to hear about an expensive new project; they had had enough of the old one. It would be cheaper to build a new navy from scratch. It didn’t help matters either that he was in the habit of pestering the Prime Minister Robert Peel and his Treasury with terse letters on the subject of money he thought was owed to him, without giving a moment’s thought to some of the problems that may have been preoccupying Britain’s leader. This was the “hungry forties” when some feared the country was actually teetering on the brink of revolution. Probably the last thing on Peel’s mind was the solvency of some mad scientist with a plan for producing steam-driven maths tables.

  Peel finally agreed to meet Babbage in November 1842. Babbage was warned in advance not to push his luck: the Prime Minister was under a lot of pressure and in no mood to be lectured. Once again, Babbage couldn’t resist pushing the self-destruct button. He harangued Peel about his own financial problems and the government’s responsibility for his project. Peel gave him short shrift; the meeting ended abruptly with Babbage storming out in a huff.

  Finally, in November 1842, the government, weary of delays and of Babbage’s crankiness, gave up on his project officially when the Chancellor of the Exchequer sought the opinion of an expert, Sir George Airy, on the usefulness of the machine and was told it was “worthless”. Peel offered Babbage a knighthood by way of compensation. Babbage turned him down. Anyone could get a knighthood, he believed; he told the authorities that the most important scientific figure of the age would only settle for a life peerage. It was never granted.

  As his calculating machine schemes ran into the sand, Babbage embarked on increasingly desperate money-making schemes to revive them. He was assisted by Ada, Lady Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and now recognized as one of the ablest mathematicians of the era. She encouraged him to come up with a method for mathematically predicting the outcome of handicapped horse races. Although he received hundreds of letters from race-goers who wanted to know more, Babbage turned out to be a disastrous tipster and Ada Lovelace was almost ruined by gambling debts.

  Another abortive moneymaking scheme was his attempt to build the first automatic gaming machine, an automaton that could play noughts and crosses. He reminisced in his 1864 autobiography, “I imagined that the machine might consist of the figures of two children playing against each other, accompanied by a lamb and a cock. That the child who won the game might clap his hands whilst the cock was crowing, after which, that the child who was beaten might cry and wring his hands whilst the lamb began bleating.” He soon discovered that the mid-Victorian public were not interested in noughts and crosses. The market for travelling novelties that year, Babbage noted with disgust, was completely sewn up by P. T. Barnum’s midget, General Tom Thumb.

  Although Babbage’s game-playing machines were commercial failures, his theoretical work created a foundation for the future science of game theory, pre-dating even that twentieth-century genius John von Neumann by about a hundred years.

  There were other discoveries for which Babbage never received his due. For years, he had worked on cracking ciphers – techniques for encoding messages so that only someone with a key could understand them. Ciphers would allow British intelligence to enjoy a major advantage over the Russians in the Crimean War, but Babbage’s important part in this was never acknowledged. In 1847, he invented an ophthalmoscope – a device for examining the inside of the eye. He took it to London’s top eye specialist Thomas Wharton-Jones, who saw no use for it. Four years later, the slightly less short-sighted Hermann von Helmoltz created an almost identical instrument and was credited with its invention. The luckless Babbage had lost out again.

  Babbage’s last hope was that he could at least salvage some pride from his abandoned project and that the unfinished Difference Engine would be carefully preserved in a prime location in the British Museum. To his disgust, it was put behind glass in an obscure corner of King’s College London alongside a collection of eighteenth-century scientific instruments made for George III. Babbage and his engine were completely overlooked for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the largest industrial manufacturing spectacular ever staged. For Babbage, who liked to think of himself as the elder statesman of the industrial movement, this was the ultimate insult.

  The Engine was dusted off and briefly brought out for the London International Exhibition of 1862 but was put, again to Babbage’s horror, in a dark corner where hardly anyone could find it. When he complained, he was told that the extra space was needed for a display of children’s toys. Once again, Babbage reflected bitterly (and very tactlessly) that the ignorant British public had shown themselves to be more interested in entertainment than intelligent engineering.

  Mocked by his critics, Babbage became a reclusive and very bitter old man, but he carried on working. He spent his final years mulling over ways to prevent bank note forgery. In 1864, his autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher was published. This was largely a rant about his pet hates, especially street buskers. Babbage’s wife, Georgina, is not mentioned at all and there is just a single oblique reference to 1827, the year four members of his immediate family died. Alone and suffering from severe headaches and hallucinations, he reflected that he could not remember a single happy day in his life. Babbage’s biographer Bowden recorded: “He spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English Government and organ grinders most of all.”

  He died in 1871, two months before his eightieth birthday, his groundbreaking work on computers hidden under a dustsheet in King’s College.

  The Evolutionist Who Wasn’t Darwin

  In the world of scientific priority, timing is everything. Consider the case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – two men, from very different backgrounds, working on opposite sides of the Earth, independently putting forward the same idea at the same time. But for only one would posterity bedeck the laurels as the inventor of the theory of evolution. As for the other, his name would virtually vanish.

  Alfred Russel Wallace had none of the privileges accorded to university-educated Charles Darwin, whose father was a prosperous doctor. He was born in 1823 in Llanbadoc, Wales, the second-youngest of nine children. He was forced to leave school at fourteen to take up an apprenticeship as a builder because his family had fallen on hard times. He had an early interest in natural history but was
almost entirely self-taught, attending scientific lectures in his free time and reading extensively in public libraries. One of the books he enjoyed was Darwin’s journal from the voyage of the Beagle, a lively travel book that gave almost no hint at all of the evolutionary ideas of its author.

  Wallace worked as a surveyor for several years before setting out for the Amazon to search the rainforests looking for exotic insect specimens to sell to European buyers. At this point, he was officially more of a commercial collector than a scientist but he spent four years exploring remote headwater regions, making observations, gathering specimens, taking notes and drawing sketches. His four-year trek in South America was at times horrific. One day, he disturbed a swarm of wasps and was badly stung. Then he caught yellow fever (and watched his brother die from the disease) followed by several bouts of malaria.

  More calamities lay in store. He was heading up the River Negro when a gun carried by one his colleagues went off accidentally, shooting Wallace in the hand. Having suffered countless injuries, including the loss of a chunk of his hand, he was finally looking forward to going home to England, but Wallace was blighted by bad luck again. His great specimengathering expedition to the Amazon ended in disaster when the ship returning him to Britain caught fire and sank, taking with it thousands of specimens and his hopes of an assured income. Then the ship that rescued him, an old tub called the Jordeson, ran into a terrible storm and almost sank as well. Wallace survived with only a couple of notebooks and an indignant parrot.

  Wallace vowed never to sail again, but he needed to make a living and, within days of limping ashore, he was planning his next trip. This time, he was heading east to the Malay Archipelago.

  Wallace spent the next eight years wandering the islands, sleeping rough, eating whatever the natives ate and paddling himself around in a canoe. His feet became infected several times and he suffered multiple bouts of malaria. He was very particular about what he collected – usually at least six specimens for every species. He noted how many different species adapted specifically to their environment and wondered what might cause one species to transform into a new species with new physical traits. Wallace surmised that the fittest of a species survived and that the traits which enabled them to survive were then passed down to future generations, eventually creating a new species, or multiple species.