The Philosophical Breakfast Club (63 page)

He was still experimenting. Pages and pages in his experimental notebooks were filled in during April and May of 1870, written in an exceedingly small hand. Herschel was mixing chemicals with abandon, indulging his lifelong love of chemistry. One mixture was described with precision as a “highly colored red salt—or, rather, ruddy orange.”
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Herschel rarely left Collingwood after Whewell’s funeral. Although his letters testified more and more to his physical infirmities, he continued his scientific correspondence, paying closest attention to developments in photography and optics. In one of his final letters to Babbage, at the end of 1870, Herschel praised his godson, Babbage’s eldest son Benjamin Herschel, for a scientific pamphlet he had written. Herschel commiserated with his friend over the ravages of age: “Memory fails … and things rearrange themselves ‘no-how-like’ in the mind of a man just entering on his eightieth year & feeling himself getting stupider and stupider every day!”
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One of his most frequent correspondents at the end was Augustus De Morgan. When the younger man died in the spring of 1871, Herschel wrote to his widow, “Many and very distinct indications tell me that I shall not be long after him.”
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And indeed, within two months, on May 11, Herschel died, gently and peacefully, surrounded by much of his large and loving family.
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Babbage, the only remaining member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, wrote immediately to Herschel’s wife, Margaret. “You have sustained the loss of one of the earliest and most valued of the friends of my youth,” Babbage sympathized. “I greatly regret that the state of my own health which confines me almost entirely to my house puts it out of my power to pay the last tribute of respect to my departed friend by attending his remains at the grave.” Babbage could not resist one last bitter comment, recalling the opportunities his friend had enjoyed that were never
open to him. “The effect of the possession of an illustrious name,” Babbage predicted, “will open for your children paths inaccessible to others less fortunately born and will doubtless lead them to arrive at eminence in whatever line their tastes may induce them to pursue.”
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Sad, envious, and slightly curmudgeonly, it would be the last letter that Babbage ever wrote.

Herschel was buried with all pomp and ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in the Nave. As if mocking Babbage, the stone reads, “John Herschel, of William Herschel the only son by birth, in work and in fame; having explored the Heavens, he rests here near Newton.” A decade later, Charles Darwin would be laid to rest beside him.
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(In the mid-twentieth century, a plaque would be placed nearby commemorating William Herschel, who had been buried at Upton Church, near Slough: “He broke through the confines of the heavens.”) One of his obituary writers called Herschel “the Homer of science,” noting that “he was its highest poet … rousing the emotions, animating the affections, and inspiring the imagination.”
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B
ABBAGE HAD RETURNED
, with a flurry of activity, to his Analytical Engine in the 1850s. This time he fully intended to build it, even without government support, and he began to draw up specific plans for the individual parts of the machine. He had begun the work, perhaps, inspired by the idea of building a code-breaking machine, but by the time he commenced the work leading to its construction, his motivation came from a different source. His interest—and, he hoped, the interest of the public—had been sparked anew by the work of a father and son from Sweden.

In 1834, Georg Scheutz, a printer and the editor of a technical journal in Stockholm, read Lardner’s article in the
Edinburgh Review
describing Babbage’s Difference Engine. He began to try to design a Difference Engine of his own, using models made of wood, pasteboard, and wire. Three years later his son, Edvard, a student at the Royal Technological Institute, joined him and they began to build the machine. In 1837 they applied to the Swedish government for financial assistance, and were turned down. But they continued working, and by 1840 the machine was able to calculate series with terms of five figures, with one order of difference. By
April 1842 the machine could calculate series with two and three orders of difference. The next year they completed a printing mechanism, and the machine was inspected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Although it reported favorably on the machine, it was left to languish at the academy for seven years.

In 1851 the Scheutzes finally received funding from the government: 10,000 rix dollars, estimated to be about £560—with the severe condition that they must return the money if the machine was not successfully completed by the end of 1853. It was completed on time, and the Scheutzes were fêted by the king. The following year the two traveled with the machine to England and France; they were granted a British patent for the machine, and it was exhibited at the 1854 Great Exhibition in Paris, where it received a gold medal. Benjamin Gould, head of the Dudley Observatory in New York, persuaded a wealthy merchant to purchase the machine for his observatory for £1,000. Before the machine left England, a copy was made, under the supervision of the Scheutzes, by Donkin and Co. (the firm that had adjudicated the dispute between Babbage and Clement in 1829), and was purchased by the British government, for use at the registrar general’s office at Somerset House.
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Given Babbage’s personality, one would expect that he would have been bitter that others had succeeded where he had failed, and worried about the inevitable comparison: Babbage, with the £17,000 granted by the British government and the aid of the most talented engineers of the age, had been unable to accomplish what two Swedish technicians had managed to do, by themselves, with a mere £560. Babbage, however, rose to the occasion gallantly. In a speech to the Royal Society in 1855, he praised the Scheutzes, at the same time chastising the British government for the fact that “the country of Berzelius should thus have anticipated them in giving effect to an invention which requires for its perfection the tools of nations more highly advanced in mechanical science.”
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Babbage even set his son Henry to work preparing a presentation on the machine for the British Association meeting in Glasgow in September.
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The Scheutzes were so relieved about Babbage’s generosity that when a table of logarithms calculated by their Difference Engine was published, the dedication hailed Babbage as “one of the benefactors of mankind.”
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(All did not go well for the Scheutzes: the machine turned out to be inaccurate, lacking the security devices Babbage had designed, and they both
died bankrupt. The British copy of their machine is on display at the Science Museum in London.)

Babbage’s support of the Scheutzes may not have been completely devoid of self-interest; Isambard Kingdom Brunel had convinced him that the public’s curiosity about the Scheutz Difference Engine would reawaken a desire for Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
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Babbage began to work, patiently designing parts that could be built and eventually put together to construct a finished, working machine. When his work stopped abruptly for a time, he was chastised by one of his friends, the Countess Teleki, for having committed a kind of “moral murder, and an injury to the whole human race!”
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Babbage replied testily that her conclusion “rests entirely on the hypothesis that I care for the ‘whole human race.’ ”
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Nevertheless, he did go back to work on the machine, work he continued, on and off, until his death.

In August 1869, aged seventy-eight, Babbage attended the British Association meeting for the last time. He brought drawings and parts of the Analytical Engine with him to Exeter, hoping for something like the reception in Turin so long ago, when eager engineers and men of science crowded into his room to hear him lecture on his new invention. Babbage reported forlornly afterwards that he had sat with the drawings hung up all around his sitting room, and “The
only
Members of the Association who called to see those drawings were
two American gentlemen
.”
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By this point, Babbage had given up attempting to construct the machine; now he was just tinkering with the designs, trying to simplify the mechanism. Countess Teleki had earlier accused him of “making the better the enemy of the good,” which had been a problem in Babbage’s earlier periods.
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Now, however, that was not the issue. Babbage’s incredible powers were fading. One friend sadly recounted that “he had lost the faculty of arranging his ideas, and of recalling them at will.”
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Babbage’s brother-in-law Edward Ryan reported to Herschel that Babbage’s memory was so bad he could not remember the founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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A visitor during this period described his “large and rambling” house, with its rooms all “crammed with books, papers, and apparatus in apparent confusion.”
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Babbage’s difficulties in concentrating led him to believe that his work was being sabotaged by street musicians, especially “organ grinders,” men who went from house to house making music and hoping for some coins
in return. These men—many of them immigrants from Italy—would travel through neighborhoods holding large barrel organs. From time to time they would stop and support the organ by a hinged wooden leg. A strap around the neck would balance the instrument, leaving one hand free to turn the crank and the other to steady the organ. The organs were often out of tune, and the cranks were turned with little attention paid to the proper beat of the music. A tin cup on top of the organ or in the hand of a companion (usually a young boy, or a small trained monkey) was used to solicit payments for the performance. Many Londoners believed these street performers to be engaged in a kind of extortion, exacting payment for the promise to stop the noise and move on—a situation recognizable to inhabitants of certain urban centers today.

Babbage lashed out, yelling at the offenders from his window, prosecuting the organ grinders in the courts, and finally publishing a pamphlet on “Street Nuisances,” which he reprinted in his
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
. Retaliatory mobs began to follow him about, sometimes one hundred people at a time, shouting and banging on tin drums and blowing horns; dead cats were left on his doorstep, windows were broken, threats on his life were made.
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Children from the local schools would shout out his name “coupled with offensive adjuncts” whenever they passed the windows of his house.
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Although he has been mocked or pitied by biographers for this obsession, Babbage was not alone in considering the organ grinders a public nuisance; Charles Dickens wrote to a friend that he could not write for more than half an hour without being driven to distraction by organ grinders. The brewer Michael Thomas Bass (grandson of the founder of Bass Ale), a member of Parliament, was moved to introduce a parliamentary act, the “Act for the Better Regulation of Street Music in the Metropolis,” which would give policemen the right to arrest any street performer who did not leave a neighborhood when requested by a homeowner. Bass published a book arguing for the act, including supportive letters from academics, literary, artistic, and scientific men, lawyers, and others who worked from home and were disturbed by the street musicians. Dickens contributed a letter bemoaning the “brazen performers on brazen instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, clashers of cymbals, worriers of fiddles, and bellowers of ballads.” The letter was cosigned by Alfred Tennyson, John Everett Millais, Wilkie
Collins, Thomas Carlyle (who had spent £170 constructing a soundproof study in his London home), and twenty-four other prominent writers, artists, and architects.
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Babbage’s difficulties with the organ grinders are given pride of place in Bass’s pamphlet: Bass reprinted numerous clippings from newspapers dealing with cases in which Babbage had brought a summons against a street performer, and Babbage’s name is mentioned in many of the included editorials on the topic. One editorial chastised the public to remember that “the services of Mr. Babbage are employed by the Government in calculations of the highest importance; these calculations require the strictest accuracy; and calm and quiet are absolutely necessary for their development.”
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Babbage was so publicly associated with the proposed act that after it passed, in July 1864, De Morgan wrote to Herschel, “Babbage’s Act has passed, and he
is
a public benefactor. A grinder went away from my house at the first word.”
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Once Herschel died, Babbage followed quickly, within five months, on October 18, 1871. His son Henry was at his bedside. Babbage’s final hours were plagued by the organ grinders, as well as a “man inciting boys to make a row with an old tin pail,” as Henry later recalled. “It’s a long time coming,” Babbage muttered to his son. At last, the end came, just two months shy of his eightieth birthday.
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As befitted his liberal politics and unconventional religious views, Babbage was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, the first public burial ground—open to both Anglicans and Dissenters—in England. Others waited for him there: his friends the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Arctic explorer Sir John Ross, the chemist Robert Brown, and the Duke of Somerset; as well as some old adversaries, including the Duke of Sussex and Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, Ada’s mother, who had argued with Babbage at the end of her daughter’s life. His son Henry, recently back from India, his friend and brother-in-law Edward Ryan, and only a handful of others attended the funeral. The Duchess of Somerset’s carriage was the only one that followed the solemn procession to the cemetery. At Babbage’s request, his brain had been removed and given to the Royal College of Surgeons. Half resides today at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the other half at the Science Museum in Kensington.