The Information by James Gleick
♦ “IT MAY BE HERE ALSO NOTED THAT THE USE OF A 100 POUND”: Ibid., 11.
♦ “A SCOTTISH BARON HAS APPEARED ON THE SCENE”: Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” APL Quote Quad 15, no. 1 (1984): 14.
♦ THE MAJORITY OF HUMAN COMPUTATION: Michael Williams, A History of Computing Technology (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1997), 105.
♦ “IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROFESSOR”: Michael Mästlin, quoted in Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” 14.
♦ “THIS LADY ATTITUDINIZED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 17.
♦ INSTALLED IT ON A PEDESTAL: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 58.
♦ FROM A SPECIALTY BOOKSELLER: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 26–27.
♦ “A SIN AGAINST THE MEMORY OF NEWTON”: W. W. Rouse Ball, A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 117.
♦ “THE DOTS OF NEWTON, THE D’S OF LEIBNITZ”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 23.
♦ “TO THINK AND REASON IN A NEW LANGUAGE”: Ibid., 31.
♦ “A NEW KIND OF AN INSTRUMENT INCREASING THE POWERS OF REASON”: C. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 7 (Berlin: Olms, 1890), 12, quoted by Kurt Gödel in “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140.
♦ “BY THE APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF ARRANGING SIGNS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 25.
♦ “THE DOT-AGE OF THE UNIVERSITY”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 25.
♦ “WE HAVE NOW TO RE-IMPORT THE EXOTIC”: Charles Babbage, Memoirs of the Analytical Society, preface (1813), in Anthony Hyman, ed., Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–16.
♦ “THE BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144.
♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34.
♦ “I AM THINKING THAT ALL THESE TABLES”: Ibid., 42.
♦ “WHETHER, WHEN THE NUMBERS”: Ibid., 41.
♦ “WE MAY GIVE FINAL PRAISE”: “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multipicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur,” trans. M. Kormes, 1685, in D. E. Smith, A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 173.
♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock & Joy, 1822), 1.
♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43.
♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834), 282; and Edward Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447.
♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69.
♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282.
♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52.
♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62.
♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to John Herschel, 10 August 1814, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31.
♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94.
♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53.
♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264.
♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219.
♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300.
♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65.
♦ “I NEED HARDLY POINT OUT TO YOU THAT THIS CALCULATION”: Quoted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, xxiii. The Morrisons point out that Tennyson apparently did change “minute” to “moment” in editions after 1850.
♦ “THE PROS AND CONS IN PARALLEL COLUMNS”: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 129.
♦ “IF YOU SPEAK TO HIM OF A MACHINE FOR PEELING A POTATO”: Quoted in Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 132.
♦ “I THINK IT LIKELY HE LIVES IN A SORT OF DREAM”: Quoted in ibid., 38.
♦ FOR A GUINEA, SHE COULD SIT: Advertisement in The Builder, 31 December 1842, http://www.victorianlondon.org/photography/adverts.htm (accessed 7 March 2006).
♦ “THE CHILD OF LOVE,…—THOUGH BORN IN BITTERNESS”: Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” canto 3, 118.
♦ “IS THE GIRL IMAGINATIVE?”: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47.
♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25.
♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27.
♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55.
♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33.
♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89.
♦ “I DO NOT CONSIDER THAT I KNOW”: Ada to Dr. William King, 24 March 1834, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 45.
♦ “GEM OF ALL MECHANISM”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 8 July 1834, ibid., 46.
♦ “PUNCHES HOLES IN A SET OF PASTEBOARD CARDS”: “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 55.
♦ “HOW THE MACHINE COULD PERFORM THE ACT OF JUDGMENT”: Ibid., 65.
♦ “I AM AT PRESENT A CONDEMNED SLAVE”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 22 June 1837, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 70.
♦ “THE ONLY OTHER PERSON WAS A MIDDLE-AGED GENTLEMAN”: Ada to Lady Byron, 26 June 1838, ibid., 78.
♦ “I HAVE A PECULIAR WAY OF LEARNING”: Ada to Babbage, November 1839, ibid., 82.
♦ “YOU KNOW I AM BY NATURE A BIT OF A PHILOSOPHER”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, ibid., 83.
♦ “AN ORIGINAL MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATOR”: Augustus De Morgan to Lady Byron, quoted in Betty Alexandra Toole, “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, an Analyst and Metaphysician,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996), 7.
♦ “I HAVE DONE IT BY TRYING”: Ada to Babbage, 16
February 1840, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 83.
♦ “OF CERTAIN SPRITES & FAIRIES”: Ada to Augustus De Morgan, 3 February 1841, ibid., 99.
♦ “WE TALK MUCH OF IMAGINATION”: Untitled essay, 5 January 1841, ibid., 94.
♦ “I HAVE ON MY MIND MOST STRONGLY”: Ada to Woronzow Greig, 15 January 1841, ibid., 98.
♦ “WHAT A MOUNTAIN I HAVE TO CLIMB”: Ada to Lady Byron, 6 February 1841, ibid., 101.
♦ “IT WILL ENABLE OUR CLERKS TO PLUNDER US”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 113. He added: “possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit …”
♦ “THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE”: Quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 185.
♦ “NOTIONS SUR LA MACHINE ANALYTIQUE”: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, no. 82 (October 1842).
♦ NOT TO “PROCLAIM WHO HAS WRITTEN IT”: Ada to Babbage, 4 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 145.
♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247.
♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES NOT OCCUPY COMMON GROUND”: Ibid., 252.
♦ “THE ENGINE EATING ITS OWN TAIL”: H. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” paper read at Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331.
♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147.
♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 149.
♦ “I FIND THAT MY PLANS & IDEAS”: Ada to Babbage, 22 July 1843, ibid., 150.
♦ “I DO NOT THINK YOU POSSESS HALF MY FORETHOUGHT”: Ada to Babbage, 30 July 1843, ibid., 157.
♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333.
♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230.
♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143.
♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11.
♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235.
♦ “EVERY SHOWER THAT FALLS”: “On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London: John Murray, 1837), in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 368.
♦ “ADMITTING IT TO BE POSSIBLE BETWEEN LONDON AND LIVERPOOL”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 10.
♦ “ENCLOSED IN SMALL CYLINDERS ALONG WIRES”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 447.
♦ “A COACH AND APPARATUS”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 273.
♦ “ZENITH-LIGHT SIGNALS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 460.
♦ “THIS LED TO A NEW THEORY OF STORMS”: Ibid., 301.
♦ “A DIFFERENT SENSE OF ANACHRONISM”: Jenny Uglow, “Possibility,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage, 20.
♦ “IF, UNWARNED BY MY EXAMPLE”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 450.
♦ “THEY SAY THAT ‘COMING EVENTS’ ”: Ada to Lady Byron, 10 August 1851, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 287.
♦ “MY BEING IN TIME AN AUTOCRAT”: Ada to Lady Byron, 29 October 1851, ibid., 291.
5. A NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE EARTH
♦ “IS IT A FACT—OR HAVE I DREAMT IT”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), 283.
♦ THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM: They managed the traffic “easily, and not very continuously.” “Central Telegraph Stations,” Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers 4 (1875): 106.
♦ “WHO WOULD THINK THAT BEHIND THIS NARROW FOREHEAD”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” Quarterly Review 95 (1854): 118–64.
♦ HE WAS NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal of the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75.
♦ ALFRED SMEE: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’ ” 471.
♦ “THE DOCTOR CAME AND LOOKED”: “Edison’s Baby,” The New York Times, 27 October 1878, 5.
♦ “THE TIME IS CLOSE AT HAND”: “The Future of the Telephone,” Scientific American, 10 January 1880.
♦ “ELECTRICITY IS THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph: Including Its Rise and Progress in the United States (New York: Putnam, 1852), v.
♦ “AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, IMPONDERABLE AGENT”: William Robert Grove, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.
♦ “THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IS NOT AGREED”: Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph, revised and rewritten by Edward B. Bright (London: James Walton, 1867), 6.
♦ “WE ARE NOT TO CONCEIVE OF THE ELECTRICITY”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 47 (August 1873), 337.
♦ “BOTH OF THEM ARE POWERFUL”: “The Electric Telegraph,” The New York Times, 11 November 1852.
♦ “CANST THOU SEND LIGHTNINGS”: Job 38:35; Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph.
♦ COUNT MIOT DE MELITO CLAIMED: Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, vol. 1, trans. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 44n.
♦ MEANWHILE THE CHAPPES MANAGED: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 52 ff.
♦ “THE DAY WILL COME”: “Lettre sur une nouveau télégraphe,” quoted in Jacques Attali and Yves Stourdze, “The Birth of the Telephone and the Economic Crisis: The Slow Death of Monologue in French Society,” in Ithiel de Sola Poolin, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 97.
♦ “CITIZEN CHAPPE OFFERS AN INGENIOUS METHOD”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 59.
♦ ONE DEPUTY NAMED A PANTHEON: Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, 17 August 1794, quoted in ibid., 64.
♦ CHAPPE ONCE CLAIMED: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual: A Complete History and Description of the Semaphoric, Electric and Magnetic Telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Ancient and Modern (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859), 42.
♦ “THEY HAVE PROBABLY NEVER PERFORMED EXPERIMENTS”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 81.
♦ “IF YOU’LL ONLY JUST PROMISE”: Charles Dibdin, “The Telegraph,” in The Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged, vol. 2 (London: G. H. Davidson, 1863), 69.
♦ “THESE STATIONS ARE NOW SILENT”: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual, 31.
♦ “ANYTHING THAT COULD BE THE SUBJECT”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 56.
♦ “ANYONE PERFORMING UNAUTHORIZED TRANSMISSIONS”: Ibid., 91.
♦ “WHAT CAN ONE EXPECT”: Ibid., 93.
♦ “OTHER BODIES THAT CAN BE AS EASILY ATTRACTED”: J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837 (Lon
don: E. & F. N. Spon, 1884), 90.
♦ “THIS SECONDARY OBJECT, THE ALARUM”: E. A. Marland, Early Electrical Communication (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 37.
♦ HARRISON GRAY DYER TRIED SENDING SIGNALS: “An attempt made by Dyer to introduce his telegraph to general use encountered intense prejudice, and, becoming frightened at some of the manifestations of this feeling, he left the country.” Chauncey M. Depew, One Hundred Years of American Commerce (New York: D. O. Haynes, 1895), 126.
♦ “IT MUST BE EVIDENT TO THE MOST COMMON OBSERVER”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833), 11.
♦ “TELEGRAPHY IS AN ELEMENT OF POWER AND ORDER”: Quoted in Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200.
♦ “IF THERE ARE NOW ESSENTIAL ADVANTAGES”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language, 26.
♦ “A SINGLE LETTER MAY BE INDICATED”: Davy manuscript, quoted in J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837, 351.
♦ “I WORKED OUT EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION”: William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph: Was it Invented By Professor Wheatstone? (London: W. H.Smith & Son, 1857), 27.
♦ “SUPPOSE THE MESSAGE TO BE SENT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph: With the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity Or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1847), 178.
♦ “THE WORDY BATTLES WAGED”: Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 21.
♦ “THE MAILS IN OUR COUNTRY ARE TOO SLOW”: Recalled by R. W. Habersham, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals.
♦ “IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 70.
♦ “SEND A MESSENGER TO MR HARRIS”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 128.
♦ AT THE STROKE OF THE NEW YEAR: Laurence Turnbull, The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, With an Historical Account of Its Rise, Progress, and Present Condition (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), 87.
♦ “IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER”: “The Trial of John Tawell for the Murder of Sarah Hart by Poison, at the Aylesbury Spring Assizes, before Mr. Baron Parks, on March 12th 1845,” in William Otter Woodall, A Collection of Reports of Celebrated Trials (London: Shaw & Sons, 1873).
♦ “A SCOTTISH BARON HAS APPEARED ON THE SCENE”: Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” APL Quote Quad 15, no. 1 (1984): 14.
♦ THE MAJORITY OF HUMAN COMPUTATION: Michael Williams, A History of Computing Technology (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1997), 105.
♦ “IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROFESSOR”: Michael Mästlin, quoted in Ole I. Franksen, “Introducing ‘Mr. Babbage’s Secret,’ ” 14.
♦ “THIS LADY ATTITUDINIZED”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 17.
♦ INSTALLED IT ON A PEDESTAL: Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 58.
♦ FROM A SPECIALTY BOOKSELLER: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 26–27.
♦ “A SIN AGAINST THE MEMORY OF NEWTON”: W. W. Rouse Ball, A History of the Study of Mathematics at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 117.
♦ “THE DOTS OF NEWTON, THE D’S OF LEIBNITZ”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 23.
♦ “TO THINK AND REASON IN A NEW LANGUAGE”: Ibid., 31.
♦ “A NEW KIND OF AN INSTRUMENT INCREASING THE POWERS OF REASON”: C. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 7 (Berlin: Olms, 1890), 12, quoted by Kurt Gödel in “Russell’s Mathematical Logic” (1944), in Kurt Gödel: Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Solomon Feferman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140.
♦ “BY THE APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF ARRANGING SIGNS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 25.
♦ “THE DOT-AGE OF THE UNIVERSITY”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 25.
♦ “WE HAVE NOW TO RE-IMPORT THE EXOTIC”: Charles Babbage, Memoirs of the Analytical Society, preface (1813), in Anthony Hyman, ed., Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–16.
♦ “THE BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144.
♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34.
♦ “I AM THINKING THAT ALL THESE TABLES”: Ibid., 42.
♦ “WHETHER, WHEN THE NUMBERS”: Ibid., 41.
♦ “WE MAY GIVE FINAL PRAISE”: “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multipicatio nullo, divisio vero paene nullo animi labore peragantur,” trans. M. Kormes, 1685, in D. E. Smith, A Source Book in Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 173.
♦ “INTOLERABLE LABOUR AND FATIGUING MONOTONY”: Charles Babbage, A Letter to Sir Humphry Davy on the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical Tables (London: J. Booth & Baldwain, Cradock & Joy, 1822), 1.
♦ “I WILL YET VENTURE TO PREDICT”: Babbage to David Brewster, 6 November 1822, in Martin Campbell-Kelly, ed., The Works of Charles Babbage (New York: New York University Press, 1989) 2:43.
♦ “CONFUSION IS WORSE CONFOUNDED”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” Edinburgh Review 59, no. 120 (1834), 282; and Edward Everett, “The Uses of Astronomy,” in Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 447.
♦ 250 SETS OF LOGARITHMIC TABLES: Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Charles Babbage’s Table of Logarithms (1827),” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 159–69.
♦ “WOULD AFFORD A CURIOUS SUBJECT OF METAPHYSICAL SPECULATION”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 282.
♦ “IF PAPA FAIL TO INFORM HIM”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 52.
♦ “IF THIS COULD BE ACCOMPLISHED”: Ibid., 60–62.
♦ “IT IS SCARCELY TOO MUCH TO ASSERT”: Babbage to John Herschel, 10 August 1814, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 31.
♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94.
♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53.
♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264.
♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219.
♦ LARDNER’S OWN EXPLANATION OF “CARRYING”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 288–300.
♦ IN 1826 HE PROUDLY REPORTED TO THE ROYAL SOCIETY: Charles Babbage, “On a Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 3 (1826): 250–65.
♦ “I NEED HARDLY POINT OUT TO YOU THAT THIS CALCULATION”: Quoted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, xxiii. The Morrisons point out that Tennyson apparently did change “minute” to “moment” in editions after 1850.
♦ “THE PROS AND CONS IN PARALLEL COLUMNS”: Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877), quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 129.
♦ “IF YOU SPEAK TO HIM OF A MACHINE FOR PEELING A POTATO”: Quoted in Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), 132.
♦ “I THINK IT LIKELY HE LIVES IN A SORT OF DREAM”: Quoted in ibid., 38.
♦ FOR A GUINEA, SHE COULD SIT: Advertisement in The Builder, 31 December 1842, http://www.victorianlondon.org/photography/adverts.htm (accessed 7 March 2006).
♦ “THE CHILD OF LOVE,…—THOUGH BORN IN BITTERNESS”: Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” canto 3, 118.
♦ “IS THE GIRL IMAGINATIVE?”: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47.
♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25.
♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27.
♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55.
♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33.
♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89.
♦ “I DO NOT CONSIDER THAT I KNOW”: Ada to Dr. William King, 24 March 1834, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 45.
♦ “GEM OF ALL MECHANISM”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 8 July 1834, ibid., 46.
♦ “PUNCHES HOLES IN A SET OF PASTEBOARD CARDS”: “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 55.
♦ “HOW THE MACHINE COULD PERFORM THE ACT OF JUDGMENT”: Ibid., 65.
♦ “I AM AT PRESENT A CONDEMNED SLAVE”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 22 June 1837, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 70.
♦ “THE ONLY OTHER PERSON WAS A MIDDLE-AGED GENTLEMAN”: Ada to Lady Byron, 26 June 1838, ibid., 78.
♦ “I HAVE A PECULIAR WAY OF LEARNING”: Ada to Babbage, November 1839, ibid., 82.
♦ “YOU KNOW I AM BY NATURE A BIT OF A PHILOSOPHER”: Ada to Babbage, 16 February 1840, ibid., 83.
♦ “AN ORIGINAL MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATOR”: Augustus De Morgan to Lady Byron, quoted in Betty Alexandra Toole, “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, an Analyst and Metaphysician,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996), 7.
♦ “I HAVE DONE IT BY TRYING”: Ada to Babbage, 16
♦ “OF CERTAIN SPRITES & FAIRIES”: Ada to Augustus De Morgan, 3 February 1841, ibid., 99.
♦ “WE TALK MUCH OF IMAGINATION”: Untitled essay, 5 January 1841, ibid., 94.
♦ “I HAVE ON MY MIND MOST STRONGLY”: Ada to Woronzow Greig, 15 January 1841, ibid., 98.
♦ “WHAT A MOUNTAIN I HAVE TO CLIMB”: Ada to Lady Byron, 6 February 1841, ibid., 101.
♦ “IT WILL ENABLE OUR CLERKS TO PLUNDER US”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 113. He added: “possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit …”
♦ “THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE”: Quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 185.
♦ “NOTIONS SUR LA MACHINE ANALYTIQUE”: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, no. 82 (October 1842).
♦ NOT TO “PROCLAIM WHO HAS WRITTEN IT”: Ada to Babbage, 4 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 145.
♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247.
♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES NOT OCCUPY COMMON GROUND”: Ibid., 252.
♦ “THE ENGINE EATING ITS OWN TAIL”: H. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” paper read at Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331.
♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147.
♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 149.
♦ “I FIND THAT MY PLANS & IDEAS”: Ada to Babbage, 22 July 1843, ibid., 150.
♦ “I DO NOT THINK YOU POSSESS HALF MY FORETHOUGHT”: Ada to Babbage, 30 July 1843, ibid., 157.
♦ “IT WOULD BE LIKE USING THE STEAM HAMMER”: H. P. Babbage, “The Analytical Engine,” 333.
♦ “WHAT SHALL WE THINK OF THE CALCULATING MACHINE”: “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” in The Prose Tales of Edgar Allan Poe: Third Series (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1889), 230.
♦ “STEAM IS AN APT SCHOLAR”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 143.
♦ “WHAT A SATIRE IS THAT MACHINE”: Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 11.
♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235.
♦ “EVERY SHOWER THAT FALLS”: “On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London: John Murray, 1837), in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 368.
♦ “ADMITTING IT TO BE POSSIBLE BETWEEN LONDON AND LIVERPOOL”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 10.
♦ “ENCLOSED IN SMALL CYLINDERS ALONG WIRES”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 447.
♦ “A COACH AND APPARATUS”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 273.
♦ “ZENITH-LIGHT SIGNALS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 460.
♦ “THIS LED TO A NEW THEORY OF STORMS”: Ibid., 301.
♦ “A DIFFERENT SENSE OF ANACHRONISM”: Jenny Uglow, “Possibility,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage, 20.
♦ “IF, UNWARNED BY MY EXAMPLE”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 450.
♦ “THEY SAY THAT ‘COMING EVENTS’ ”: Ada to Lady Byron, 10 August 1851, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 287.
♦ “MY BEING IN TIME AN AUTOCRAT”: Ada to Lady Byron, 29 October 1851, ibid., 291.
5. A NERVOUS SYSTEM FOR THE EARTH
♦ “IS IT A FACT—OR HAVE I DREAMT IT”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), 283.
♦ THREE CLERKS IN A SMALL ROOM: They managed the traffic “easily, and not very continuously.” “Central Telegraph Stations,” Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers 4 (1875): 106.
♦ “WHO WOULD THINK THAT BEHIND THIS NARROW FOREHEAD”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” Quarterly Review 95 (1854): 118–64.
♦ HE WAS NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal of the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75.
♦ ALFRED SMEE: Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’ ” 471.
♦ “THE DOCTOR CAME AND LOOKED”: “Edison’s Baby,” The New York Times, 27 October 1878, 5.
♦ “THE TIME IS CLOSE AT HAND”: “The Future of the Telephone,” Scientific American, 10 January 1880.
♦ “ELECTRICITY IS THE POETRY OF SCIENCE”: Alexander Jones, Historical Sketch of the Electric Telegraph: Including Its Rise and Progress in the United States (New York: Putnam, 1852), v.
♦ “AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, IMPONDERABLE AGENT”: William Robert Grove, quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, “ ‘The Nervous System of Britain,’” 463.
♦ “THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IS NOT AGREED”: Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph, revised and rewritten by Edward B. Bright (London: James Walton, 1867), 6.
♦ “WE ARE NOT TO CONCEIVE OF THE ELECTRICITY”: “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 47 (August 1873), 337.
♦ “BOTH OF THEM ARE POWERFUL”: “The Electric Telegraph,” The New York Times, 11 November 1852.
♦ “CANST THOU SEND LIGHTNINGS”: Job 38:35; Dionysus Lardner, The Electric Telegraph.
♦ COUNT MIOT DE MELITO CLAIMED: Memoirs of Count Miot de Melito, vol. 1, trans. Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 44n.
♦ MEANWHILE THE CHAPPES MANAGED: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 52 ff.
♦ “THE DAY WILL COME”: “Lettre sur une nouveau télégraphe,” quoted in Jacques Attali and Yves Stourdze, “The Birth of the Telephone and the Economic Crisis: The Slow Death of Monologue in French Society,” in Ithiel de Sola Poolin, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 97.
♦ “CITIZEN CHAPPE OFFERS AN INGENIOUS METHOD”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 59.
♦ ONE DEPUTY NAMED A PANTHEON: Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, 17 August 1794, quoted in ibid., 64.
♦ CHAPPE ONCE CLAIMED: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual: A Complete History and Description of the Semaphoric, Electric and Magnetic Telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, Ancient and Modern (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1859), 42.
♦ “THEY HAVE PROBABLY NEVER PERFORMED EXPERIMENTS”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 81.
♦ “IF YOU’LL ONLY JUST PROMISE”: Charles Dibdin, “The Telegraph,” in The Songs of Charles Dibdin, Chronologically Arranged, vol. 2 (London: G. H. Davidson, 1863), 69.
♦ “THESE STATIONS ARE NOW SILENT”: Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The Telegraph Manual, 31.
♦ “ANYTHING THAT COULD BE THE SUBJECT”: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks, 56.
♦ “ANYONE PERFORMING UNAUTHORIZED TRANSMISSIONS”: Ibid., 91.
♦ “WHAT CAN ONE EXPECT”: Ibid., 93.
♦ “OTHER BODIES THAT CAN BE AS EASILY ATTRACTED”: J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837 (Lon
♦ “THIS SECONDARY OBJECT, THE ALARUM”: E. A. Marland, Early Electrical Communication (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964), 37.
♦ HARRISON GRAY DYER TRIED SENDING SIGNALS: “An attempt made by Dyer to introduce his telegraph to general use encountered intense prejudice, and, becoming frightened at some of the manifestations of this feeling, he left the country.” Chauncey M. Depew, One Hundred Years of American Commerce (New York: D. O. Haynes, 1895), 126.
♦ “IT MUST BE EVIDENT TO THE MOST COMMON OBSERVER”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833), 11.
♦ “TELEGRAPHY IS AN ELEMENT OF POWER AND ORDER”: Quoted in Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200.
♦ “IF THERE ARE NOW ESSENTIAL ADVANTAGES”: John Pickering, Lecture on Telegraphic Language, 26.
♦ “A SINGLE LETTER MAY BE INDICATED”: Davy manuscript, quoted in J. J. Fahie, A History of Electric Telegraphy to the Year 1837, 351.
♦ “I WORKED OUT EVERY POSSIBLE PERMUTATION”: William Fothergill Cooke, The Electric Telegraph: Was it Invented By Professor Wheatstone? (London: W. H.Smith & Son, 1857), 27.
♦ “SUPPOSE THE MESSAGE TO BE SENT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph: With the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity Or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1847), 178.
♦ “THE WORDY BATTLES WAGED”: Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 21.
♦ “THE MAILS IN OUR COUNTRY ARE TOO SLOW”: Recalled by R. W. Habersham, Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals.
♦ “IT WOULD NOT BE DIFFICULT”: Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 70.
♦ “SEND A MESSENGER TO MR HARRIS”: Andrew Wynter, “The Electric Telegraph,” 128.
♦ AT THE STROKE OF THE NEW YEAR: Laurence Turnbull, The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, With an Historical Account of Its Rise, Progress, and Present Condition (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853), 87.
♦ “IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER”: “The Trial of John Tawell for the Murder of Sarah Hart by Poison, at the Aylesbury Spring Assizes, before Mr. Baron Parks, on March 12th 1845,” in William Otter Woodall, A Collection of Reports of Celebrated Trials (London: Shaw & Sons, 1873).