Charles Babbage and Related Topics

This portrait of Jacquard was woven in silk on a Jacquard loom and required 24,000 punched cards to create (1839). It was only produced to order. Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits; it inspired him in using perforated cards in his Analytical Engine. It is in the collection of the Science Museum in London, England.

Jacquard machine

Device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé.

A Jacquard loom showing information punchcards, National Museum of Scotland

Jacquard diagram. The numbered components are as described in the text.

19th century Engineering drawing of a Jacquard loom.

Close-up view of the 8 × 26 hole punched cards—one card per pick (weft) in the fabric

Austrian Jacquard handloom, end of 19th century, National Museum of textile Industry, Sliven, Bulgaria

Close-up view of comber board, harness, mails, weights (Lingoes) and warp with 1040 ends

Punched cards in use in a Jacquard loom. German Museum of Technology, Berlin

Punched card loom mechanism in silk-weaving workshop; Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Weaver in a silk-weaving workshop; Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Jacquard looms in the Textile Department of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Poland.

Weaving on a jacquard loom with a flying shuttle at the Textile Department of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Poland.

Following the pattern, holes are punched in the appropriate places on a jacquard card at the Department of Textile Art at Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Poland.

Detail of Dove and Rose jacquard-woven silk and wool double cloth furnishing textile, designed by William Morris

Punched paper tape used to instruct the 1944 Harvard Mark I computer

Detail of Jaquard loom at TextielMuseum Tilburg

Four Hattersley looms with the distinctive Jacquard head

Carpet loom with Jacquard apparatus by Carl Engel, around 1860.

This use of replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware, having inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Science Museum, London

Major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London.

Making the Modern World gallery from above

The Apollo 10 Command Module Charlie Brown, which orbited the Moon 31 times in 1969, is displayed in the Modern World Gallery

Information Age Gallery at the Science Museum London

Replica of the DNA model built by Crick and Watson in 1953.

Old Bess, A surviving example of a steam engine made by James Watt, in 1777.

4073 Caerphilly Castle in the Land Transport gallery

In the landing area to access the gallery (stair C) is a working example of Charles Babbage's Difference engine No.2.

Peterhouse, Cambridge

Oldest constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England, founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely.

St Peter's College, view from Trumpington Street, 1815

The Chapel cloisters, through which Old Court can be seen

I and H staircases, Gisborne Court, Peterhouse

Whittle Building in Gisborne Court, Peterhouse.

Exterior of the Hall, leading to the Deer Park.

William Stone Building, Scholars' Garden

alt=Sam Mendes|Sam Mendes Film and stage director, producer and screenwriter

Part of St Peter's College, view from the private gardens, 1815

Peterhouse alumni are notably eminent within the natural sciences, including scientists Lord Kelvin, Henry Cavendish, Charles Babbage, James Clerk Maxwell, James Dewar, Frank Whittle, and five Nobel prize winners in science: Sir John Kendrew, Sir Aaron Klug, Archer Martin, Max Perutz, and Michael Levitt.

Trinity College Great Court

Trinity College scarf

Trinity College, Cambridge

Constituent college of the University of Cambridge.

1575 map showing the King's Hall (top left) and Michaelhouse (top right) buildings before Thomas Nevile's reconstruction.

David Loggan's print of 1690 showing Nevile's Great Court (foreground) and Nevile's Court with the then-new Wren Library (background) – New Court had yet to be built

Trinity established Cambridge Science Park, UK's first science park, in 1970

Remembrance Service at the Great Court in 2018

A historical plan of the development of Trinity College by 1897.

Wren Library interior, showing the limewood carvings by Grinling Gibbons

The statue of Sir Isaac Newton in the chapel, where scholars are typically installed

Great Court, with (from left to right) the dining hall, Master's Lodge, fountain, clock tower, chapel and Great Gate

The statue of the college's founder Henry VIII presiding over the Great Gate, with a chair leg in his right hand

The High Table is at the far end of the dining hall under the portrait of Henry VIII

Newton's own copy of the Principia Mathematica, with handwritten corrections, on display in the Wren Library

Lord Melbourne whose name gave rise to the Australian city, Melbourne served as Prime Minister in 1834–1841

Martin Rees was Master of Trinity from 2004 to 2012

Dame Sally Davies, current Master of Trinity

Fellows' Bowling Green, with the oldest building in the college (originally part of King's Hall) in the background

The River Cam as it flows past the back of Trinity, Trinity Bridge is visible and the punt house is to the right of the moored punts

The Avenue of lime and cherry trees, and wrought iron gate to Queen's Road viewed from the Backs

Sundial and shelter at the Fellows' Garden

Blue Boar Court, with the Wolfson Building in the background.

Trinity alumni include the father of the scientific method (or empiricism) Francis Bacon, six British prime ministers (the highest number of any Cambridge college), physicists Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr, mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and Charles Babbage, poets Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson, English jurist Edward Coke, writers Vladimir Nabokov and A. A. Milne, historians Lord Macaulay and G. M. Trevelyan and philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell (whom it expelled before reaccepting).

John Herschel

English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, experimental photographer who invented the blueprint, and did botanical work.

A Calotype of a model of the lunar crater Copernicus, 1842

Disa cornuta (L.) Sw. by Margaret & John Herschel

Herschel's first glass-plate photograph, dated 9 September 1839, showing the mount of his father's 40-foot telescope

1867 photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron

Margaret Brodie Stewart by Alfred Edward Chalon 1829

John Frederick William Herschel by Alfred Edward Chalon 1829

The adjoining tombs of John Herschel and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey.

Description of a machine for resolving by inspection certain important forms of transcendental equations, 1832

It was during his time as an undergraduate that he became friends with the mathematicians Charles Babbage and George Peacock.

Daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet (c. undefined 1843). One of only two known photographs.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Byron, aged seven, by Alfred d'Orsay, 1822, Somerville College, Oxford.

Watercolour portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, circa 1840, possibly by Alfred Edward Chalon

Painting of Lovelace seated at a piano, by Henry Phillips (1852). Although in great pain at the time, she agreed to sit for the painting as her father, Lord Byron, had been painted by Phillips' father, Thomas Phillips.

Portrait of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836)

Lovelace's diagram from "note G", the first published computer algorithm

An illustration inspired by the A. E. Chalon portrait created for the Ada Initiative, which supported open technology and women

Blue plaque to Ada Lovelace in St. James's Square, London

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

Analytical Engine

Two types of punched cards used to program the machine. Foreground: 'operational cards', for inputting instructions; background: 'variable cards', for inputting data

Henry Babbage's Analytical Engine Mill, built in 1910, in the Science Museum (London)

Plan diagram of the Analytical Engine from 1840

The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage.

Difference engine

Automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.

Closeup of the London Science Museum's difference engine showing some of the number wheels and the sector gears between columns. The sector gears on the left show the double-high teeth very clearly. The sector gears on the middle-right are facing the back side of the engine, but the single-high teeth are clearly visible. Notice how the wheels are mirrored, with counting up from left-to-right, or counting down from left-to-right. Also notice the metal tab between "6" and "7". That tab trips the carry lever in the back when "9" passes to "0" in the front during the add steps (Step 1 and Step 3).

Fully operational difference engine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California

It was designed in the 1820s, and was first created by Charles Babbage.

A215 road

A road in south London, starting at Elephant and Castle and finishing around Shirley.

The station entrance to Norwood Junction of Portland Road.

Jolly-sailor station in 1845, showing the bridge carrying Portland Road in the background and the atmospheric propulsion system pumping station, with its Gothic chimney/exhaust vent, in the foreground.

Charles Babbage, the Victorian mathematician and computer pioneer, was probably born at 44 Crosby Row, now Larcom Street, Walworth Road on 26 December 1791.

Mechanical computer

Computer built from mechanical components such as levers and gears rather than electronic components.

Difference Engine, 1822 – Charles Babbage's mechanical device to calculate polynomials.