Free Jacquards' Web by James Essinger Page A

Georgiana came from a family of quality, had a fortune of her own, and was by all accounts a thoroughly charming and good person. But Benjamin believed that young men should make money a higher priority than matrimony.
    The truth, however, was that Charles had chosen a profession, but that unfortunately it would not be seen as one until about 1950 .
    Yet no matter how testy and troublesome Benjamin may have been, scientific history owes him a debt of gratitude, for his preoccupation with money was to fund his son’s life’s work. On Benjamin’s death in 1827 , Charles inherited almost his entire fortune. The legacy, including Benjamin’s cash in the bank and his silver and gold plate, was worth about £ 100 000 .
    To set this amount in perspective, when Charles Dickens died in 1870 after a lifetime of working harder than almost any writer has ever worked, he left about £ 98 000 in his will.
    Between 1827 and 1870 there was almost no change in the value of money in Britain, so Charles Babbage inherited more than the fruit of Dickens’s life’s work. Furthermore, Babbage was still young and healthy enough to enjoy it.
    How much would Babbage’s £ 100 000 be worth today? A reasonable rule of thumb is that during the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, amounts of money should be multiplied by about fifty times to give an approximate idea of what they would be worth today. Taking everything into account, the legacy which Benjamin left to Charles was worth about £ 5 million (about $ 8 million) in today’s money. It freed Charles Babbage from financial care for the rest of his life and made possible the liberation of his scientific imagination.
    There is a particular significance in how Charles’s scientific career was funded. So many of Benjamin’s customers had made a 53
    Jacquard’s Web
    fortune from the cloth industry that it is really no exaggeration to say that Charles Babbage’s life’s work was itself financed by the cloth business. This being so, there was a sense in which when he made such creative use of Jacquard’s ideas in his plans for the Analytical Engine, he was coming home.
    As a boy growing up in a wealthy London family, Charles Babbage showed signs at a very early age of a fascination with engineering and mechanics. In his autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (the word ‘scientist’ was not current until later in the nineteenth century) he writes:
    From my earliest years I had a great desire to enquire into the causes of all those little things and events which astonish the childish mind. At a later period I commenced the still more important enquiry into those laws of thought and those aids which assist the human mind in passing from our received knowledge to that other knowledge then unknown to our race. Truth only has been the object of my search, and I am not conscious of ever having turned aside in my enquiries from any fear of the conclusions to which they might lead.
    One particular childhood memory describes how he loved to take things apart to find out how they worked:
    My invariable question on receiving any new toy, was ‘Mamma, what is inside of it?’ Until this information was obtained those around me had no repose, and the toy itself, I have been told, was generally broken open if the answer did not satisfy my own little ideas of the ‘fitness of things’.
    The first reference to machinery in Passages is a reminiscence that opens Babbage’s chapter about his boyhood. When he was living in London with his parents, his mother took him to several exhibitions of machinery, including one in Hanover Square, organized by a man who called himself ‘Merlin’.
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    From weaving to computing
    I was so greatly interested in it, that the exhibitor remarked the circumstance, and after explaining some of the objects to which the public had access, proposed to my mother to take me up to his workshop, where I should see still more wonderful automata. We