Simon Schaffer

Babbage's Calculating Engines and the Factory System In: Réseaux, 1996, volume 4 n°2. pp. 271-298.

Abstract Summary: The English mathematician Charles Babbage, who during the first half of the nineteenth century invented the precursors of today's computers, was keenly interested in the economic issues of the Victorian era. His calculating engines were an application of contemporary theories on the division of labour and provided models for the rationalisation of production. Bahhage's ideas contributed to the dehumanisation of labour hut were also the source of major discoveries. The mathematician's history was closely linked to that of the industrial revolution, cradled in England, the 'workshop of the world'. This article recalls the effervescence of that period.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Schaffer Simon. Babbage's Calculating Engines and the Factory System. In: Réseaux, 1996, volume 4 n°2. pp. 271-298.

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/reso_0969-9864_1996_num_4_2_3315 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING

ENGINES AND THE FACTORY

SYSTEM

Simon SCHAFFER

Summary: The English mathematician Charles Babbage, who during the first half of the nineteenth century invented the precursors of today's computers, was keenly interested in the economic issues of the Victorian era. His calculating engines were an application of contemporary theories on the division of labour and provided models for the

271 Simon SCHAFFER

rationalisation of production. Bahhage's ideas contributed to the dehumanisation of labour hut were also the source of major discoveries. The mathematician's history was closely linked to that of the industrial revolution, cradled in England, the 'workshop of the world'. This article recalls the effervescence of that period. 272 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

commodities. Scientists rarely recognise 4 BABBAGE'S in these commodities the labour on which they depend. They place their trust in machines, texts and techniques CALCULATING whose fragile and contingent construct ionthey do not, need not and (some ENGINES AND times) must not investigate. The production of Knowledge in the scientific workplace depends on a fetishism THE FACTORY through which the products of others' labours are treated as nature's living representatives. Fleck's Denkkollektive, SYSTEM Kuhn's paradigmatic exemplars, Lakatos's protective belt and Callon's réseaux des porte-parole all remind us that the experimental life depends on the self-evident reliability of others' prod ucts.2 A good way of mapping the work place is to chart the places where production processes of various com modities are recognised or where they matter. In a nineteenth-century astro Simon SCHAFFER nomical observatory, for example, the human computers knew little of the processes through which transit instr uments were made, while spectroscopists or meteorologists worked in oblivion of 'I wish that my friends in Paris the labour involved in making and veri should be acquainted with the Cal fying the hundreds of volumes of stellar culating Engine and my mode of rep transit times and positions, logarithms resenting the consecutive actions of and trigonometric functions which all machines which, having been stocked their libraries. At the Royal practically employed in the work Observatory in Greenwich, 'for one per shop, is useful to the arts but which son actively engaged at a telescope, the is more interesting to the philoso visitor would see a dozen writing or com pheras being one among those sys puting at a desk'. These observatories tems of signs by which man aids his were publicly compared by their spokes reasoning power' (Charles Babbage, mento income tax offices, their ledgers 1833)1 stuffed with figures and the principle of division of clerical labour rigidly Introduction: the invisible enforced.3 industry of astronomical Any discussion of the invisible presence tables of industry in the scientific workplace The world of the scientific workplace must raise these problems of commodity presents itself as a vast array of production. I chose Victorian science. 273 Simon SCHAFFER

especially astronomy, because it institu omists of the process of commerce and tionalised these ways of dealing with comm manufacture. The historian William Ash- odities. Marx was not the only worth points out that the founders of the journalist in Victorian London who recog London Astronomical Society (1820), nised the double process through which including Charles Babbage, Francis labour power was reified and the prod Baily and Henry Colebrooke, were active ucts of labour fetishised. Thus in 1843 in banking, insurance and fiscal reform. George Dodd, author of a series of They computed actuarial tables, best-selling surveys of the London facto launched new investment schemes and ries, explained to his metropolitan read developed a comprehansive theory of the ersthat 'the simple fact that he who has factory system. Their values were those money can command every variety of of finance capital.6 Traditionally, exchangeable produce seems to act as a astronomers had been represented as veil which hides the producer from the isolated observers in direct contact with consumer ... as in the case of other agenc an unmediated sky. In the nineteenth ies, the principals have but a vague century, their private practice and their knowledge of the source whence the sup public repute was increasingly related to ply is obtained'. The efficiency of the net an industrial system of astronomical work of consumption and production work. The watchtower became the fac simultaneously obscured its real worki tory. Observatory managers spent as ng.4 Successive nineteenth-century exhi much time watching their subordinates bitions of 'the works and industry of all as watching the stars. The doyen of Vic nations' were what Walter Benjamin torian astronomers, John Herschel, called 'sites of pilgrimages to the com explained that 'in astronomy, the super modity fetish'. The Crystal Palace was a ior departments of theory are comp literally transparent display of these com letely disjoined from the routine of modities - only the production processes practical observation'. The aim of the were invisible and the prices of the goods astronomer, and by implication any sci unmarked. Its 300,000 panes of glass entist, was 'to make himself as far as were made by the Birmingham glaziers possible, independent of the imperfec Chance Brothers. When the energetic tionsincident to every work the [instr economic journalist Harriet Martineau umentmaker] can place in his hands'. visited their glassworks the year after the Independence from artisans and domi show she was warned against revealing nance over observers became the aims of too much of their exploitative labour rela the observatory and laboratory mana tions to her keen readers.5 gers of Victorian Britain. Observatory managers could become entirely inde This interesting process of concealment, pendent by watching others closely and display and commodification was obvi mechanising what they did.7 ous in the work of Victorian astronomy. In the first half of the nineteenth cen George Airy, the stern head of the Royal tury, division of astronomical labour, Observatory, announced that astronomi reification of its capacities and fetishisa- calobservation should be treated like a tion of its products were all actively engi branch of the mining industry: 'an neered. Astronomers of the period were observation is a lump of ore, requiring remarkably self-conscious political for its production, when the proper 274 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM machinery is provided, nothing more 'observation' now became the result of than the commonest labour, and without teamwork linking observatory workers value until it has been smelted'. Data and large numbers of collaborators.9 were fetishised, and the labour of Astronomers' references to 'imperfect observers and calculators correspondi and variable machines' drew attention to nglyreified, in the mechanised system those elements of their new networks of the observatory. In 1832 Airy upon which they could not yet rely. explained that 'the work of a mere Unreliable elements could not function observer is the most completely as commodities, because their public horse-in-a-mill work that can be con status could not be guaranteed and the ceived. The beau idéal of an observer of details of their production became all too the highest class is a compound of a obvious. In the case of observers, mecha watchmaker and a banker's clerk'.8 nisation and subordination turned Technical developments such as the imperfect variation into calculable pre construction of the 'personal equation', dictability. But an even more serious variable but measurable reaction-times problem existed in the persons of the for different observers, demanded the astronomical 'computers' and in their regimentation of each observatory tables. There is perhaps no better examp worker. Artificial stars moving at a leof the invisibility of industry in the known rate across the telescope's filar scientific workplace than the presence of micrometer were used to calibrate each mathematical tables. Here trust must be observer's performance at the eyepiece. absolute and the labour required to veri Galvanic and mechanical stopwatches fyor challenge a tabulated number cor were used to effect the calibrations. Cont respondingly immense. Early nineteenth rol over the act of observation was dis century astronomers faced a crisis with placed from each individual observer to respect to their own computers, because the collective regime of managers, they could not be trusted and their clock-makers and electricians. labour could obviously not be reified. Publicly-funded European observatory The rest of this paper is devoted to one managers such as Airy, Quetelet (Bruss enterprise which dealt with this crisis: els), Struve (Pulkovo) and Arago (Paris) Charles Babbage's attempts from 1821 routinely performed calibration trials on until the mid- 1850s to build calculating their employees. Arago wrote of his machines which would produce reliable reliance on clock-makers' skill and on mathematical tables.10 the division of the labour of observation to which it led. Machines carried the The course of this enterprise illuminates burden of trust: *when one wishes in several aspects of the relationship future to become independent of per between industrial supply and scientific sonal errors, it will be necessary, so to work: speak, to leave to the stopwatch the bur (a) Products such as astronomical tables den of evaluating the second and frac could not become commodities in sc tion of a second corresponding to the ience unless they were reliable and free of passages of stars', declared Arago. An error. Producing reliable tables by American contemporary classed an human or mechanical computation was observer as 'but an imperfect and vari very much like disciplining the indust able machine'. Any meridian transit rialworkforce. 275 Simon SCHAFFER

(b) This similarity became explicit when economy of manufactories', George Dodd Babbage designed calculating machines pointed out that 'it must be obvious that to produce mathematical tables, where some hundreds of men are because his machines were organised employed, some working by the day, and like factories of numbers. He drew others by piece-work, and where scores analogies between the factory system, of different materials are used; the com the working of the calculating engines, mercial accounts of a factory must and the organisation of science. require extreme care and a well-orga (c) The calculating machines were never nizedsystem; to prevent the most inex used to make astronomical tables tricable confusion'. The aim of the new because they never became commoditi observatory managers was to adopt just es.Conflicts with the existing workf such a system in the administration of orce, with the observatory managers their underlings and the production of their clerical accounts." These new and with exhibition organisers all vit iated the image of the machines as rel observatories formed an integral part of iable substitutes for human computers. an expanding fiscal- military state and When labour processes remain visible, it an increasingly regulated industrial sys is hard to secure the status of industrial tem. Airy boasted that in his observatory products. 'a mass of observations was accumulati ngwhich, though confined in its object, (d) The calculating machines did acquire surpassed in regularity and accuracy, exemplary status in Victorian science as and perhaps in general value, any other tokens of nature's true properties. The observations made at that time'. Thus theatrical display of the calculating 'the Royal Observatory is quietly con machines helped convince Darwin that it tributing to the punctuality of business was possible to explain the origin of through a large portion of this busy species by natural mechanisms, and the country'.12 presence of such engines in his college's museum helped Maxwell to develop a The Utopia of tabulation embodied sev model which represented electr eral salient features of Victorian culture. omagnetic ether as countless rows of gear It was claimed that reliable computation wheels. Manufacture plays ideological was a matter of moral rectitude. Airy and practical roles in the formation of fired operatives who were 'unpunctual in science's stories about nature. business and so unmanageable', prefer The immediate premiss of this pr ringthe stalwart graduates of the Camb ogramme is the role of benchtop mathe ridge Mathematics Tripos on whose matical handbooks. Numerical probity he could rely. Babbage was just tabulation available at the scientist's fi such a graduate. In the summer of 1814 ngertips was a precondition of the success he tried briefly to join the Greenwich of nineteenth-century physical science. staff as a computer until Herschel di Tables of logarithmic and trigonometric ssuaded him from the thankless task.13 functions, of meridian times and of This moral rectitude was most obviously lunar positions, played a role in the worked out in campaigns for universal observatory equivalent to that of the standards in which Babbage, Airy and Barrême in the counting house. Thus in Herschel all took part. Metrological his exposé of what he called the 'private tabulation fetishised the labour of 276 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM computational staff. Victorian experts tific traveller roaming over the universe' reckoned that the 'general value' of equipped with nothing but experimental imperial standards hinged on the labour cunning and a completely reliable book expended in their production, and yet of tables. 'For myself, Thomson told his that this labour had to be invisible when colleagues in the Society of Civil Engi these standards were established and neers, 'what seems the shortest and deployed. They all worked hard to make surest way to reach the philosophy of the work involved in making standards measurement is to cut off all connection vanish. Thus, while Herschel described with the Earth and think what we must the 'extraordinary pains taken in the then do to make measurements which construction' of the imperial yard by a shall be definitely comparable with those series of controversial commissions and which we now actually do make in our state-funded industrial projects between terrestrial workshops and laboratories. 1824 and 1855, he insisted that 'our Suppose then the traveller to have lost yard is a purely individual material his watch and his measuring rod, but to object from which all reference to a nat have kept his scientific books'. Thomson ural origin is studiously excluded as imagined a scientific traveller so much as if it had dropped from the equipped recapturing the units of clouds'. The length standard became a length, time and electrical resistance by national fetish, its copies bricked up in calibrating improvised trials against the the walls of the Board of Trade, the authoritative numbers his 'scientific Houses of Parliament and the Royal books' contained. Through the extension Observatory.14 In the 1830s, Babbage of these techniques any lone Victorian tried to make a paper collection of such could apparently rebuild his culture if standards, an all-embracing Table of the only he could rely on the values of his Constants of Nature and Art. The phrase tables.16 'constant of nature' was a neologism Babbage helped coin. He urged the labo This was a Victorian Utopia - it hap rious preparation of an encylopaedia pened nowhere. At the start of the nine which would contain 'all those facts teenth century, many scientists' libraries which can be expressed by numbers in would hold at least 125 volumes of various sciences and arts'. The Table tables. They might contain thousands of would 'call into action a permanent errors, due to computation, copying, ver cause of advancement towards truth, ifying and printing. Dionysius Lardner, continually leading to the more accurate the journalist who acted as Babbage's determination of established facts and publicity agent, estimated in 1834 that a measurement of new ones'.15 The apothe random selection of 40 tabulations con osisof this vision was reached later in tained 3,700 acknowledged errors and the century, when the pre-eminent Glas innumerable others. The crucially signif gow physicist and entrepreneur Sir icant Nautical Almanac contained at William Thomson hammered home the least one thousand errors, while the message that perfect numerical tabula multiplication tables its computers used tionwould guarantee the independence sometimes erred at least 40 times per of exact science from any locale. In a page. Such handbooks were rarely com remarkable exercise in science fiction, puted from scratch and typically relied Thomson sketched the career of a on collation of previous data; thus, in 277 Simon SCHAFFER

1825 it was reported that in twenty contained further errors. In the 1860s apparently independent tables at least Babbage could still report that such six common errors could be found. Such pre-eminent tables as the data on lunar errors were infections in the body of sci motion used by Airy and the French ence. John Herschel compared them to analysts Pontécoulant and Delaunay 'sunken rocks', where errant navigators were getting even worse, their errata would quite literally come to grief. Bab- tables doubling in length over a period of bage once estimated that at least £3 mil five years. These were moral, economic lion had been lost to the state through and practical issues which threatened errors in annuity tables.17 the very basis of the Victorian regime of certain calculation and fetishistic preci Babbage, a banker's son and heir, a sion. The great importance of having Cambridge mathematician and obses accurate tables is admitted by all who sive analyst, owned more than 300 understand their uses; but the multi books of tables. Among his treasures tude of errors really occurring is comp were some pages of G. F. Prony's cel aratively little known', Babbage ebrated decimal tables of the 1790s, com announced. 'It is, however, fair that the missioned by the French state for eminent men who presided over the geodesy and the establishment of the preparation of these works for the press, metric system. These tables were never observe that the real fault lay not in published but remained emblematic for them but in the nature of things'. By dis British proponents of mechanised calcu playing the error of tabulation and trying lation, who often retold the story of to change the nature of things, Babbage Prony's application of Smith's division of simultaneously called into question and labour to the work of computation and made visible the industry on which tab the success of his subordinate compute ular authority rested. This was why his rswho lacked all knowledge of arith campaign for the production of tables metic apart from the rules of addition through industrial engineering remained and subtraction. When Babbage visited at the very centre of Victorian accounts Paris in 1819 he met the printer of the of science and the factory system.19 tables, Didot, and was given a copy of the section of the sine tables which had The visible industry of the been set. Babbage left this invaluable compilation to his son in his will.18 calculating engines Other, harsher, legacies dominated Bab- In what follows, I explore the co-product bage's perception of the tables crisis. In ionof ideologically laden accounts of 1826-7 he made his own tables by colla intelligence and of politically charged tion of sets of independent tabulations, systems of machinery. To make finding 32 errors in his manuscript and machines look intelligent it was neces 8 more after typesetting. This was an sarythat the sources of their power, the astonishing accomplishment. He left the labour force which surrounded and ran state a copy of his own work to check the them, be rendered invisible. This is why tables used at Greenwich, which turned Siegfried Giedion's brilliant study of out to have 19 errors. When these cor automation is subtitled 'A contribution rections were then printed in the Nauti to anonymous history'. Like him, I am calAlmanac, the errata table itself concerned with the mundane places of 278 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

intelligence, in order to confront the Vic But in order to make the products of this torian mathematical Utopia with the industry into secure commodities he had Victorian geography of industrial, com to make the labour which produced mercial and philosophical London. Lon them invisible to the consumers. The don in the 1820s and 1830s was a users of tables were told that they had fractured world. The map of London at been produced by machines alone and that time is significant because of the were thus autonomous from errant interesting relationship between visibil human labour. Contemporaries were ityand mechanisation. South of the keenly aware of this double process of river, in Lambeth, were the workshops of the surveillance of industry and the reifi- the machinists whose labours drove the cation of its labour. In his address to the production of automatic tools and accu Astronomical Society in early 1824, its rate design. In the fashionable milieu of president, the financier and mathematic the West End, genteel Londoners could ianHenry Colebrooke, eulogised Bab see the triumphs of these new machine bage's planned machine. 'In other cases, systems in public lectures and carefully mechanical devices have substituted orchestrated museums. Here, too, were machines for simpler tools or for bodily the wardens of scientific reason, the labour. ... But the invention to which I Astronomical Society, the Royal Society, am adverting ... substitutes mechanical the Royal Institution. Northwards again, performance for an intellectual process'. in the fashionable houses of Marylebone, In other words, 'Mr Babbage's invention lived men such as Charles Babbage and puts an engine in place of the computer', Charles Darwin, ambitious reformers the human on whose virtues tables had who sought to rethink human nature in previously relied.21 Babbage, far from the name of a reconstructed scientific inventing computers, tried to abolish and social order. And in the north-east them. He reckoned he could police the were the huge working-class districts, London machine-tool workshops well areas where Babbage sought to run for enough to make tables independent of parliamentary office and where his these workshops' vagaries. socialist critics debated with him on the hustings about the effects of industriali Babbage's designs for calculating sation.This is the geography of Bab- engines dominated his career from the bage's genius, the world where his moment he reached London as a wealthy systematic vision was forged.20 and ambitious analyst in the 1810s. His Difference Engine was based on the In Babbage's world, the automisation of mathematical principle that the success the factory system went hand in hand ivedifferences of values of polynomials with the idea that its mechanical compo were ultimately constants, so tables of nentspossessed intelligence. In the pro these values could be computed by addi ject to mechanise the production of tion and subtraction of such predeter tables, Babbage subjected the industrial mined constants. For astronomical basis of his own enterprise to unprece work, the important functions were tran- dentedscrutiny. He tried to make indust scendentals which could be approxi ry,especially the machine-tool trades, mated in a given interval by some uniquely visible to its managers so as to polynomial function. The values of this guarantee a reliable quality of output. polynomial would be computed at 279 Simon SCHAFFER

selected points within this interval and aspects of the Engine, its capacity for checked at those points where the origi memory and for anticipation, were to be nalfunction's values were independently profound resources for Babbage's meta known. Accuracy would be increased by physics and his political economy. 'Noth developing values for a higher order of ingbut teaching the Engine to foresee differences and by lessening the interpo and then to act upon that foresight lationinterval. So the original Difference could ever lead me to the object I Engine of the 1820s was to be made of a desired'.22 The science of operations, that series of axes each carrying sets of inde is to say, an algebra of machine analysis, pendent toothed wheels, parallel was thus proposed as an intellectual dis columns of which would represent cipline and as material for producing columns of numbers. Geared operations precise values. could transform the numbers stored in each column and a relay connected to This new science was supposed to help the array to print its output on metal make the industry of machine product blocks. The device was launched in Lon iontransparent. Initially designed to don in the summer of 1822 and after 'see at a glance what every moving piece many vicissitudes, including its nation in the machinery was doing at each alisation in early 1830, it collapsed instant of time', this panoptic notation amidst recriminations between Babbage was proffered as a technology of univers and his master-engineer Joseph almanagement. Babbage stressed the Clement in the summer of 1834. Then in advantages of machine semiotics the mid- 1830s Babbage began negotiat because 'of all our sense, that of sight inga new contract with Clement's fo conveys intelligence most rapidly to the rmer craftsman, C. G. Jarvis, to plan an mind'. Lardner reported that the work Analytical Engine. This new machine ingof the human body and of the factory was an unprecedented technical system. system could both be represented and It was designed to carry in its memory managed this way. The analogy of one thousand numbers each of fifty digi machine, body and workshop was devel ts. The store consisted of sets of parallel oped at once: 'not only the mechanical figure wheels, structured like those in connection of the solid members of the the store of the Difference Engine; the bodies of men' but also 'in the form of a input-output device was based on sets of connected map or plan, the organization number cards and variable cards, the of an extensive factory, or any great publ latter of which would control which icinstitution, in which a vast number of gear-axis would be used; and the control individuals are employed, and their was transmitted through what Babbage duties regulated (as they generally are or called 'operation cards'. Sequences of ought to be) by a consistent and cards carried instructions to the engine, well-digested system'. Under Babbage's which were decoded in the store, using gaze, factories looked like perfect the machine's library of logarithmic and engines and calculating machines like other functions, and then distributed to perfect computers. The workforce might the operating sections of the mill. Such be a source of trouble - it could make distribution could itself be modified by tables err or factories fail - but it could variables set by the existing state of not be seen as a source of value. The operations in the machine. These crucial panoptic gaze which revealed the reliable 280 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM working of the calculating engines, the quantity of both which is necessary order of the factory system and the for each process; whereas if the mechanism of the body, also rendered whole work were executed by one the customary skills of the workforce workman, that person must possess and its resistance rather hard to see.23 sufficient skill to perform the most difficult and sufficient strength to As historians such as Maxine Berg have execute the most laborious of the demonstrated, these machines for manu operations into which the art is facturing numbers were developed divided'.24 alongside the discourse of Ricardian political economy. The 'philosophy of manufactures' provided Babbage with As Babbage and his allies amang the political economists showed, the disag- an account of what he called the 'domest iceconomy of the factory' and also with gregation of the production process into an analysis of the skilled labour embodi its simplest components allowed a series edin machinery. Babbage's publica of economies and practices of surveil lance. Mechanised production required tionson the economy of the factory culminated in his great survey of 1832, strict discipline. The same was true of the calculating machines. Parcelling the On the Economy of Machinery and Manuf processes of Lagrangean analysis into actures, a work based on intelligence specific components allowed the gathered throughout the factories of Britain and soon translated into every increase in speed of the machine, the transformation of infinities of space into major European language. As the Anal ytical Engine was a 'manufactory of fig manageable durations of time, the most ures', so Babbage had to outline his economical recompense to each compo nentin terms of consumed power (if definition of a 'manufactory'. 'A consider abledifference exists between the terms mechanical) or consumed wages (if making and manufacturing', he human). The whole history of the inven tionhas been a struggle against time', explained in his economics text. The dif ference lay in the economical regulation Babbage wrote in 1837. The replacement of the domestic system of the factory. of individual human intelligence by This led to Babbage's reinterpretation of machine intelligence was as apparent in Adam Smith's notion of the division of the workshop as in the engines. This labour, and, as he emphasised, the fun task was both politically and economic damental principle of that division which allynecessary. 'One great advantage allowed the sensitive analytical regula which we derive from machinery is the tionof the process of manufacture. The check which it affords against the inat 'Babbage principle', as it came to be tention, idleness or the dishonesty of human agents'. Such failings could pro known, applied equally to the regulation of the factory and of the calculating duce the erroneous results which vit iated calculation and stopped tables machines: being treated as reliable commodities. That the master manufacturer, by This was why Babbage was always fasc dividing the work to be executed into inated by the fact that Prony's least intel different processes, each requiring ligent computers, when subject to the different degrees of skill or of force, right management, were the most reli can purchase exactly that precise able. Unreliable agents could also form 281 Simon SCHAFFER

trade union combinations, which, Bab- legislative discipline, just as the calcu bage held, were always 'injurious' to the lating engines provided both legislative workforce itself. His aim here was to and executive co-ordination. This politi contest the influence of 'designing per caland managerial language was not sons' and show the working classes that merely an elegant reformist metaphor 'the prosperity and success of the master hatched in wealthy London drawing manufacturer is essential to the welfare rooms. The calculating machines were of the workman', even though 'this con themselves products of the system of nexion is in many cases too remote to be automatic manufacture which Babbage understood by the latter'.25 sought to promote. They were some of that system's most famous and most vis Babbage's political strategies during the ible accomplishments. strife-ridden 1830s outlined a crucial role for the analytic manager. The The visible industry of the machinery of the factory and the calcu factory system lating engines largely replaced the indi vidual intelligence of the worker. Only The calculating machines completed for the superior combination and correlation the polite attention of fashionable soci of each component guaranteed efficient, etywith the vast array of automata and economical, planned and therefore intel mechanisms on display in London show ligent performance. This abstract behavi rooms. In early 1834 two models of the our,almost as if in obedience to a law, Difference Engine were made by the was visible only to the overseers, men instrument designer Francis Watkins, such as Babbage. No doubt his own sta who plied his trade as electrician and tus as a gentlemanly specialist helped. showman at the Adelaide Gallery, the He inherited £100,000 from his banker leading London showcase for new engi father in 1827, while the state spent neering. The Adelaide Gallery also con more than £17,000 on his machines in tained a Jacquard loom, a the next decade. The efforts for the programmable machine often mentioned improvement of its manufactures which when explaining the principle of 'weav any country can make with the greatest ingnumbers' with Babbage's Analytical probability of success', he argued in his Engine. 'In each of these valuable reposi text on machinery, 'must arise from the tories of scientific illustration', London combined exertions of all those most readers were told in a commentary on skilled in the theory, as well as in the the Analytical Engine, 'a weaver is con practice of the arts; each labouring in stantly working at a Jacquard loom and that department for which his natural is ready to give any information that may capacity and acquired habits rendered be desired'. This was deeply ironic: the him most fit'. Such declarations made Jacquard system had almost completely the new class of managerial analysts the destroyed the traditional weaving trades supreme economic managers and legis which had previously employed so much lators of social welfare. In good Bona- of London's workforce. Display mediated partist style, Babbage thought they the effects of mechanisation on everyday should be rewarded with new-fangled life life. This was why, when the Difference peerages and political power.26 The sc Engine had been abandoned, Babbage ience of calculation became the supreme insisted 'it should be placed where the 282 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM public can see if. It was put on display ration with his brother Jeremy had in the museum of King's College, Lon already introduced an identical system don. Next door, at the Admiralty of surveillance in Russian woodworking Museum in Somerset House, visitors schemes in the early 1780s, a scheme could view Henry Maudslay's celebrated soon to be known as the panopticon. The block-making machinery designed for engineering works were laid out by Marc the Portsmouth naval dockyards. These Brunei and implemented by his close technical systems were on show as the ally Maudslay. These were the men who highest achievements of the early Victo introduced Clement to Babbage, and the rianmachine-tool industry.27 men who made this system of inspect ion,regulation and line-production a Two salient features of these displays visible exemplar of rational managem mattered for Babbage's own project. ent.28 First, the systématisation of machine- Samuel Bentham and his colleagues tool production was highly charged polit made Portsmouth dockyard a site of ically. Secondly, this process demanded 'incessant work' and then turned it into the reorganisation of the productive a tourist attraction. The Portsmouth body and the space in which it per team argued that public visibility could formed. The pre-eminent example was be an invaluable aspect of their indust provided at Portsmouth dockyard, the rialreformation. Bentham 'considered it very earliest site at which the automatic highly conducive to the hastening of the machine-tool system was implemented. introduction of a general System of Between 1795 and 1807 the entire sys machinery that public opinion should be tem of production of pulley-blocks for obtained in its favour, and that this was the Royal Navy was overhauled. Tradi likely to be more surely effected by a dis tionally this production had relied on play of well arranged machines'. So from specialised crafts in woodworking and the 1810s the block machinery became a milling highly resistant to line manage common resort for interested visitors. mentand control. In the face of mass The new system of technological repres protests, military force was used. As his sioncan be taken as exemplary of the torians Carolyn Cooper and Peter emergence of the wage form and of the Linebaugh have explained, the new pro productive labourer. A guidebook to the duction-line system destroyed and reor dockyard commented that 'on entering ganised every feature of this pattern. the block mill, the spectator is struck Pulley-blocks were standardised and with the multiplicity of its movements marked to prevent what was now called and the rapidity of its operations'.29 The 'theft'. Standardised machinists impersonal pronouns in this account are replaced specialist craftsmen. Wood was eloquent. To see the automatic world as replaced by steam-driven all-metal a reliable system of commodity product machinery and separate artisan tasks ion,it was important not to see the cul embodied in purpose-built lathes and ture of the workforce. clamps. The protagonists of this reor ganisation were also the protagonists of The London machine shows exhibiting much wider social change. The system the Difference Engine and the was developed by Samuel Bentham, the Portsmouth lathes were designed to win inspector of naval works, who in income and teach important lessons to a 283 Simon SCHAFFER

wide range of publics. Babbage's lessons Michel Foucault, with Benthamite hinged on the proper ownership of strategies for the surveillance of the machinery and thus, in the jargon of his body in the illuminated spaces of the favourite science, the source of product panopticon. Babbage's campaigns for ivevalue. The rights of the workers to machine intelligence take their place the whole value of their labour informed alongside these more familiar strategies much of the radical protest of these key for the reconfiguration of the productive years. Who should 'own' these body within the factory system.31 machines? Whose labour did they embody? Reformist journalists were per The factory system was first represented under this name in a powerful series of sistently struck by 'the systematic way journalistic reports produced in the in which the people proceeded', while the 'people' themselves protested against the 1830s and 1840s, of which Friedrich campaigns 'to make us tools' or Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) is only the most noto 'machines'. These issues made urgent the problem of the source and ownership rious, though certainly one of the more perceptive. Babbage's work on political of the skills embodied in machines con economy and on machine intelligence fessedly designed to perform mental work.30 took its place in this genre of works which were both products of well-publi cisedtours of the workshops and also Working class interests appealed to tra producers of intelligence about the fac ditional custom, in which skill was tory system. Maxine Berg emphasises recognised as a property inherent in the that 'the factory system itself was a term persons of the workers themselves. Skill which frequently concealed more than it was reckoned to be scarcely communicab revealed'.32 Babbage's tours were no leoutside carefully controlled milieux exception. His was one of the handbooks which were designed to remain opaque with which factory tourists were supp to the surveillance of managers and lied. Other representative texts inspectors. Thus attempts by observers included The Philosophy of Manufactures such as Babbage to gather intelligence in 1835 from the same publisher as Bab about machines and the workforce were bage's work and written by the Scottish politically controversial. In contrast to consulting chemist Andrew Ure, and the traditional model, philosophers of reports on the Lancashire factories pro machinery promoted an account of ratio duced in the 1840s by the Irish journali nalvaluation, attempting to render the stWilliam Cooke Taylor. In their labour process transparent and skills well-marketed texts, the factory guides fairly easily measurable in the market emphasised that inside the automatic placeof wage labour. These are the early system tourists would see those nineteenth century English conflicts 'admirable adaptations of human skill which, following E. P. Thompson, we and intelligence' by which 'we are giving now typically associate with political to the present age its peculiar and wond economic campaigns against the Corn erful characteristic, namely the tr Laws and the customary moral economy iumph of mind over matter'.33 of the grain rioters, where economic rationality came into conflict with tradi Literary companions were produced as a tional forms of exchange, or, following skilful mixture of travel diary and tourist 284 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM guide. Readers were repeatedly the status of human labour, and human instructed on the right mode of deport labour transformed into a form of deli mentwhen on tour in the manufacturing cate leisure.34 districts. Cooke Taylor was a notable propagandist for free trade and the manu These careful transformations were facturing interests of Manchester and hammered home in the tour guides pro an amateur ethnographer, the author of duced in the 1830s and 1840s. A hand a treatise on The Natural History of Soci book for visitors to Manchester, the ety (1840) in which class struggle was 'metropolis of manufactures', produced explained in terms of mutual ignorance. in 1839, counselled all tourists to read In his Factories and the Factory System Ure thoroughly and then obtain letters of of 1844, a work dedicated to the Tory introduction to the mills run by Fair- premier and reluctant free trader Robert bairn and Nasmyth, the bastions of Peel, Cooke Taylor noted the contrast mass-production engineering and of the between hasty visions of the industrial deployment of machine tools on a large sublime and philosophical meditation on scale. With almost one hundred various the systematic benefits of the factory. 'It machine firms in the city to be seen, is not surprising that many false notions walking through Fairbairn's ironworks, should prevail respecting the influence or travelling on a specially-built train of machinery; the tourist, visiting a fac through Nasmyth's Bridgewater tory district for the first time, cannot Foundry, a 'gratifying treat' would give contemplate without wonder and even the appropriate sense of wonder together some emotions of involuntary fear the ... with the understanding of regular sys mighty steam-engine performing its tem. The visitor should take a walk functions with a monotonous regularity among the mills, and whatever his not less impressive than the enormous notions may be respecting their smoke force which it sets in motion. His earliest and steam and dust, he will be comp impression is that fire and water - elled to indulge in feelings of wonder at proverbially the best servants and the their stupendous appearance'. But in worst masters - have here established troubled times such feelings, as Cooke despotic dominion over man, and that Taylor also stressed, should be immedia here matter has acquired undisputed telytempered by the sense of regular empire over mind'. Such errors, which order. The Bridgewater Foundry, for Cooke Taylor reckoned had bred unfor example, was established in 1836, where tunate evangelical efforts to limit and major strikes of Lancashire engineers control factory conditions, could only be soon erupted in protest against harsh corrected by 'time and patience, wage rates and the destruction of the repeated observation, and calm reflec apprentice system. From summer 1838 tion'. The philosophic gaze would see Chartist demonstrations in Manchester that 'the giant, steam, is not the tyrant demanding the enfranchisement of the but the slave of the operatives, not their working class commanded more than rival but their fellow-labourer, employed fifty thousand marchers. In contrast, the as a drudge to do all the heavy work, ideal tourist would expect to see Nas leaving to them the lighter and more del myth's 'straight-line system' of through icate operations'. Under Cooke Taylor's putand the widespread application of wizardry, steam power was elevated to self- acting machine tools. At Fairbairn's 285 Simon SCHAFFER

works 'in every direction the utmost sys the material world'.36 In their accounts of tem prevails, and each mechanic this resistance, a characteristic series of appears to have his peculiar description themes was developed in the literature of of work assigned with the utmost eco factory tourism. The apparently ove nomical subdivision of labour'.35 rwhelming power of the works should rightly be understood as labour disci This triumph was at once a claim for the pline within a system of division and machine tool system, and thus the cont co-ordination, producing geometrical rol of matter by human intelligence, and precision out of mere manual skill in for labour discipline, and thus the cont despite of proletarian resistance. rol of the workforce by its masters. Ure stressed the relation between 'the auto In this context, the faculties of reliability matic plan' and 'the equalization of and mechanical production of tabulated labour'. The grand object therefore of data with which Babbage sought to the modern manufacturer is, through endow his engines and their output also the union of capital and science, to characterised his self-presentation as reduce the task of his work-people to the the unique author of the calculating exercise of vigilance and dexterity'. It machines and of the factory survey. was precisely for this reason that in his They embodied his control over the tours Ure judged the factory as a form of engine and disembodied the skills, and laboratory, a potentially Utopian site camouflaged the workforce, on which it devoid of strife and replete with scientific depended. They made the engine into a truth. Here the industrialist simply fetish. Babbage explained his view of the became a scientist. The science of the property of skill involved in the calculat factory' was at once a means of disciplin ingengines in an appeal to the premier, inglabour and an object-lesson in ther the Duke of Wellington, about their mal physics, 'better studied in a week's future in late 1834. 'My right to dispose, residence in Lancashire than in a ses as I will, of such inventions cannot be sion of any university in Europe'. The contested; it is more sacred in its nature Manchester guidebook explained that than any hereditary or acquired prope the self-acting principle applied to slide rty, for they are the absolute creations control in machine lathes 'is that which of my own mind'.37 This remarkable dec enables a child or the machine itself to laration followed a decade of strife with operate on masses of metal and to cut Clement, the brilliant (but here charact shavings off iron as if it was deprived of eristically unnamed) engineer on whose all hardness and so mathematically cor work so much of the engine's develop rect that even Euclid himself might be mentdepended. When the project was the workman!' The tour guides agreed inaugurated Babbage had to work out that accuracy was both demanded by, whether the design was in 'such a form and a corrective to, labour resistance. that its execution [might be] within the The frequent and insufferable annoy reach of a skilful workman'. In turn, this ances which engineers have experienced prompted his immediate examination 'in from trades unions' produced 'those detail of machinery of every kind'. Fights admirable contrivances which are were endemic about Babbage's claims enabling mechanicians to perform such that the workforce should submit to, wonders in overcoming the resistance of and only needed slavishly to follow, his 286 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM detailed design for the calculating chuck. Their network of machine-tool engines and that any results of this firms dominated the training and regula labour would belong to himself.38 tionof precision engineering. Maudslay set up his own London works in Lam Babbage's specifications placed beth in 1797, and employees there fo unprecedented demands on the capacit llowed suit: Richard Roberts in 1814 in iesof the machine tool workshops and Manchester, James Nasmyth, hired by soon turned those workshops into revo Maudslay in 1829 before setting up in lutionary sites of innovation and train Manchester in 1836, and Joseph Whit- ing.For the first engine mill he required worth, who began working for Maudslay at least six coaxial gear wheels turned to in early 1825 and established his own an extraordinary exactitude, while the firm in Manchester in 1833. The careers printing system needed a further set of of all these men were charted and interlocking gears engraved with letters moralised in the mid-century by Samuel and figures. A report drafted in 1829 for Smiles, the indefatigable chronicler of the Royal Society by Babbage's closest self-improvement and engineering allies, including Herschel, conceded that achievement.40 'in all those parts of the machine where the nicest precision is required the Clement was one of Smiles's heroes and wheelwork only brings them by a first a veteran of this system too. The son of a approximation (though a very nice one) handloom weaver, the trade which suf to their destined places, and they are fered most from rapid mechanisation, then settled into accurate adjustment by Clement worked as a turner in Glasgow peculiar contrivances which admit of no before training with Bramah and Mauds shake or latitude of any kind'.39 The layin the 1810s. In 1817 he set up troublesome terms in these bland shop in Southwark, near Maudslay and remarks by the gentlemen of science the centre of the London engineering were the references to nice precision, trade, where he soon introduced a new accurate adjustment and shake or lat form of slide rest to render lathe-work itude. What might seem to a scientist to regular and manageable. This remained be a matter of irrational judgement, were essentially domestic labour. When Bab- key aspects of the customary culture of bage commissioned him in 1823 on the the industrialising workshop. The Manc recommendation of the eminent engi hester engineer William Fairbairn remi neer Marc Brunei, Clement had just one nisced that 'the millwright of former lathe set up in his own kitchen. As cash days was to a great extent the sole repre began to flow for the calculating engine sentative of mechanical art'. But in very project, Clement's firm soon expanded to rapid succession, in fields such as clock a scale of workforce, and of individual making, ornamental turning and, above machine tools, quite new in the trade. all, the development of steam pistons Up to one-third of his business and screw gears, masters such as depended on the Difference Engine pro Joseph Bramah and his chief workman ject. Whitworth was hired to work for Maudslay began to design self-moving Clement on the design. The Manchester cutting lathes to allow the production of City News observed that 'Mr Clement precise planes, reliable screws and contrived and manufactured numerous slide-rests to control the work in the tools for executing the several parts of 287 Simon SCHAFFER

this [calculating] machine, educating, at machinists and draughtsmen was vital the same time, special workers to to the project. When Babbage set out on manipulate and guide them. ... Mr Whit- a European tour in 1828 he left Clement worth was possessed of a special apti what he reckoned were 'sufficient draw tude for that minute accuracy of detail in ings to enable his agents to proceed with mechanical work which necessarily the construction of the Difference must bave been a marked characteristic Engine during his absence'. Such writ of the skilled workmen engaged on Bab- ten instructions soon proved hopelessly bage's machine'.41 inadequate. Two years later, on his return, Babbage demanded that the These workshops were designed to train engine construction site be moved from apprentices in the production of regular Clement's works across the river to Bab and consistently accurate work through bage's own house in Dorset Street. the use of highly standardised and auto Brunei helpfully suggested a compro matic tools. A Lancashire engineer work misesite at the British Museum. When ingin the 1840s recalled that 'men in the government funded a new workshop large shops are not troubled with a vari next door to Dorset Street, Clement ety of work, but had one class of work demanded a large financial recompense and special tools. The men soon became for the costs of splitting his workforce expert and turned out a large quantity of between two places. The financiers work with the requisite exactness with refused and Clement sacked most of his out a little of the thought required of men. Jarvis, Clement's ex-draughtsman those who work in small shops where and future co-designer of the Analytical fresh work continually turns up but Engine, explained to Babbage why it was always the same old tools'. However, as important that work proceed 'under your the comments of Whitworth reveal, the immediate inspection': 'you might be at shops were also highly private sites of once appealed to whenever it was found specialist aptitude routinely judged to be very difficult to produce nearly [the the personal quality of some privileged desired] effect - which is a very common individual. Nasmyth remembered how case in machinery'. The lesson is a famil his drawings of high pressure steam iarone. The production and reproduct engines were decisive in obtaining ionof skills and material technology employment at Maudslay's shop: requires intense and immediate interac 'Mechanical drawing is the alphabet of tionin spaces specifically designed for the engineer. Without this the workman the purpose. Such designs violated the is merely a hand; with it, he indicates conventions by which the machinists the possession of a head'. Such local plied their trade. In Maudslay's works, a entanglements of standardised product large locked door protected 'his beautiful ionand individualised skill were not private workshop' where 'many trea easily unravelled by Babbage's campaign sured relics of the first embodiments of for the mechanisation and quantification his constructive genius' were hung. of the value of mental and manual They were kept as relics of his progress labour.42 Two critical problems haunted towards mechanical perfection'. Such the work on the calculating engines. shrines were, significantly, protected First, the place of skill and the social and from the intrusions of customers and cognitive distance between designers, patrons alike. Clement, for example, 288 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM always refused to make out bills for his might look like costly disorder. He told work and tools 'because it not the cus Wellington in the summer of 1834 that tom of engineers to do so'.43 the shift from the Difference to the Anal A second decisive problem for the engine ytical design was part of this order. The project was therefore the issue of owner fact of a new superseding an old shipand public knowledge. The costs of machine in a very few years is one of the work were traditionally in the hands constant occurrence in our manufactor of the engineer, while his tools, in this ies... half finished machines have been case the lathes, planes and vices, were thrown aside as useless before their always his own property. Thus the ques completion'. This scarcely consoled the tion of whether the Difference Engine administration nor did it easily engage was itself a tool became relevant. From with the culture of the machine shops, where personal skill and thus individual 1829 Babbage and Clement were in dis 'improved' pute about property and prices. Clement property was at stake in every nominated Maudslay and Babbage nomi design and workshop layout. Once the nated Bryan Donkin, designer of engine had been nationalised and machinery for national weights and shifted to Babbage's own workshop, it measures, to arbitrate in the dispute. was proposed that Jarvis work there but Clement at once appealed to the cus remain under Clement's management. toms of his craft: all the tools, especially Clement refused the deal because 'my the new self-acting lathes, belonged plan may be followed without my being exclusively to him and he insisted on his in any way a gainer', and Jarvis refused right to make more calculating engines because he would be blamed for any fai without Babbage's permission. Once lure 'as being necessarily most familiar again, Jarvis explained the point to the with the details, whereas all the praise infuriated mathematician: which perfection would secure would attach to Mr Clement who would come 'It should be borne in mind that the over now and then and sanction my inventor of a machine and the maker plans only when he could not substitute of it have two distinct ends to obtain. any of his own'. The machinist refused to The object of the first is to make the become 'party to my own degradation'. machine as complete as possible. Babbage and his Royal Society allies The object of the second - and we might judge this as rational manage have no right to expect he will be ment,while the engineers often saw it as influenced by any other feeling - is a challenge to their rights and skills".45 to gain as much as possible by maki ng the machine, and it is in his But while Babbage's early projects col interest to make it as complicated as possible'.44 lapsed under the force of these chal lenges, his campaign for automatic Babbage's characteristic solution was to calculation successfully captured the propose the nationalisation of the interests of the engineering managers engine, the tools and the designs. He and their new system. The intelligence was pursuing what he reckoned was the gathered for his work on manufacture practical logic of much of the machine- offered two important lessons about tool industry. Babbage was forced to wage rates and skill patterns. The engi explain how rationally managed design neers were prepared to value the calcu- 289 Simon SCHAFFER

lating engine project by raising the chance of the best work and I am proud wages of workmen who had been to say that I am getting more wages than involved in the scheme. They were also any other workman in the Factory'. committed to the design of increasingly Wright offered himself to Babbage as a automated systems which would break possible master engineer. 'I should be down craft divisions and allow the glad to convince you that I am able to employment of increasingly cheap hands complete it by making either a model ... and increasingly subordinate labour or by making any difficult part of the processes. In a telling annotation to his Machine either calculating or printing'. correspondence with Wellington, Bab- During the later 1830s Wright was trav bage remarked that 'I have been elling extensively throughout the factory informed by men who are now scattered system. In 1835, for example, he walked about in our manufacturing districts, from London to Yorkshire, where he sur that they all get higher wages than their veyed the factories and the mines, then fellow workmen in consequence of hav on to Scotland, Ulster and Lancashire. ing worked at that machine'. Babbage's Though he complained that 'the habits source was Richard Wright, whom he and conversation of the Factory are first employed as a valet on his Euro indeed disgusting to a thinking mind', by pean tour in 1828. Five years later, the end of the decade he had set up his Wright set up as an engineer in Lambeth own works in Manchester, where 'I Road, very near Maudslay. Armed with intend to employ nothing but the best Babbage's instructions, the young man workmen and material', and from the set out on a tour of the northern work early 1840s was in active consultation shops as part of the campaign to gather on the Analytical project. By making intelligence for Babbage's book. In the himself a 'thinking mind', Wright became summer of 1834 Wright went to Manc Babbage's ideal, a Smilesian paragon hester to work for Whitworth, who had who reckoned that rational management opened his mill there a year earlier after and the careful surveillance of the divi leaving the Difference Engine project. sion of labour provided the key to suc They are building as large a Factory as cess in making the calculating engines. any in Manchester', Wright told Bab- In a lengthy epistle Wright explained to bage. The struggle between craft custom Babbage how the new system should and innovative production-line tech work and how management should rule niques was striking. According to an the skills of the workforce: American visitor to the Whitworth fac tory, because of subordination of the The man you select for the work workforce and the increasing use of shop ought to be a good general self-operating machines 'no-one in his workman both at Vice and Lathe for works dared to think'. So Wright set out such a man can see by the way a to make himself fit for the Babbage man begins a job whether he will fin engine scheme. He went to classes at the ish it in a workmanlike manner or local Mechanics' Institute and drawing not. Perhaps you are not quite aware academy. He reported to Babbage that that at Mr Clement's and most other 'there is much talk about the [calculat Factories the work is divided into the ing]Machine here, so much so that a branches Vice and Lathe, and in man who has worked at it has a greater most cases the man who works at 290 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

the one is nearly ignorant of the were so often fetishised. Maudslay's other ... He ought above all to have benchtop scale was 'humourously called studied the dispositions of workmen ... The Lord Chancellor', while Nasmyth so as to keep the workshop free from and his colleagues boasted of 'the prog contention and disorder and the eny of legitimate descendants' which causes of the repeated failures of so they had produced.47 much new Machinery for I am sure there are more failures through In London, Lancashire, Clydeside and waste of labour and bad manage elsewhere, the systems these men mentthan there are through bad helped forge were the sites of a new schemes or any other cause".46 managerial and technical network, dependent as much on strenuous regu Wright's was the anonymous voice lation of the labour process as on the recorded in the pages of Babbage's Econ development of new automatic machine omy of Machinery and which, through ry.The development of ready-made this text, helped articulated the con metal textile machinery, for example, cerns of those employed in the auto was a result of this system. In the matic system in the machine-tool trades. process, craft customs were subverted In the philosophy of manufacture much and standardised, and accurate product was made of the highly personal skills ionsecured.48 The managers of the most embodied in the master-engineers. In advanced workshops eventually became his travel notes for the engine survey, Babbage's closest allies and sources of Babbage recorded that 'causes of failure' intelligence and support. In his Economy should be found by consulting a 'man of of Machinery Babbage made much of the science on the principle' and 'a practical means through which the lathe would engineer on mechanical difficulties'. It guarantee 'identity' and 'accuracy', and was acknowledged, and celebrated, that then accounted accuracy as an economy manual dexterity remained a central of time, since 'it would be possible for a attribute of 'the skilled workman*. Bab very skilful workman, with files and pol bage reckoned that 'the first necessity' ishing substances', to produce a perfect for his Difference Engine was 'to pre surface. So artisan skill could be trans serve the life of Mr Clement... it would be muted into its wage equivalent. In 1847, extremely difficult if not impossible to he contributed a discussion of this the find any other person of equal talent ory of lathe-work and metal-turning to both as a craftsman and as a mechanic the definitive textbook produced by ian'.Engine masters became heroes. Charles Hotzapffel, doyen of specialist According to Nasmyth 'by a few masterly lathe designers. Holtzapffel himself then strokes Maudslay could produce plane contributed a long description of Bab surfaces so true that when their accu bage's own tools on the engine project. racy was tested by a standard plane sur In the next decade, both Whitworth and face of absolute truth, they were never Nasmyth offered Babbage support in found defective'. At the same time, completing the Analytical Engine and 'absolute truth' was increasingly vested testified in public to the benefits of the in the standardised tool-kit of the calculating engines for their own trade. machine shops. No doubt this was why Babbage's friend the dissenting mathe the authoritative scales and tools in use matician Augustus de Morgan brilliantly 291 Simon SCHAFFER

summarised the relation between the display of these devices as commodities lathe, emblem of automatic skill, and was decisive. Babbage's erstwhile collab Babbage, master of mechanical analysis, orator Bryan Donkin brought the in a cartoon showing him at the lathe Scheutz machine to London in 1854, armed only with a series of logarithmic showed it to the Royal Society, and even functions. In this image, the support tually persuaded the General Register staff and the workshops on whose Office to use such an engine to compute virtues Babbage depended are invisible. its life tables. One version was shown at Mathematical analysis is now identified the Paris international exhibition in with the automatic machine and its 1855, a show which Babbage described master.49 as 'remarkable beyond all former ones for the number and ingenuity of the Conclusion: the fabrication machines which performed arithmetical operations'. Scheutz's machine was and exhibition of reliable thence shipped to the Dudley Observat numbers oryin New York State for astronomical Despite these images of mastery and tabulation. This engine ended up in a mechanism, Babbage's engines were Chicago Museum, and a huge version of never used to make the tables for which it, designed by Barnard Grant, was put they were designed. In this sense, they on display at the Philadelphia Centenn provide an object lesson in the difficul ialExhibition in 1876. Babbage himself tiesof marketing science commercially. was obsessed by the place (and the Michel Callon warns us that economistic absence) of his own engines at success analogies for the processes of science, iveLondon exhibitions. He reckoned however appealing, 'are really more dan they had been deliberately excluded gerous than useful, because they end up from the Crystal Palace in 1851. Even blocking the only question that matters: when shifted from King's College how does research manage to create in Museum to be put on display at the one and the same movement both new International Exhibition of 1862, the products and the demand which is asso Difference Engine was 'placed in a small ciated with them 9'50 Babbage's project hole in a dark corner where it could, with helped produce a demand it did not some difficulty, be seen by six people at meet. Its principal impact on the conf the same time'.51 These exhibitions licting fields of Victorian scientific man simultaneously turned machines into agement and precision measurement commodities and provided the sites at was the production of that demand. In which the disciplinary and industrial Victorian scientific culture, these division of labour could be mapped and demands were often produced through reinforced. In his manifesto for the Cryst public exhibition and then analysed in alPalace, Prince Albert made the point moral and disciplinary terms. The histo pithily: 'the great principle of the division rian Michael Lindgren recently showed of labour, which may be called the movi that Lardner's 1830s publicity for Bab ng power of civilisation, is being bage's schemes soon prompted the extended to all branches of science and Swedish engineers Georg and Edvard industry'. In the exhibitions, the com Scheutz to build a series of difference plex interaction between science as the engines, completed in the 1850s. Public producer of industrial know-how and 292 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM science as the consumer of industrial were apparent in the career of the calcu products was displayed, debated and lating machines. The boss of the General defined.52 Register Office, William Fair, confirmed that the Difference Engine 'required Both apologists of the factory system incessant attention. ... The work had to and eulogists of the exhibitions often be watched with anxiety and its arith lauded machines, including the calculat metical music had to be elicited by fr ingengines, because they disciplined the equent tuning and skilful handling'. It workforce, prevented errors and guarant was by no means obvious to all Victorian eedreliable production. Proletarian vis scientists that it was desirable to dis itors to the machine shows equally place such skills. At Greenwich, Airy frequently complained that their own was never convinced that it was possible role in manufacture was invisible there. to mechanise the highly moral and Thus Andrew Ure characteristically mathematically complex functions of his lapsed into the imagery of Olympus and computers. In 1842 he told the Chancell of Frankenstein to describe Richard orof the Exchequer Henry Goulburn Roberts's new spinning mule installed in that 'scarcely a figure of the Nautical the Manchester mills as 'the Iron Man Almanac could be computed by it.... the sprung out of the hands of our modern difficult part must be done by human Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva - a computers'. Fifteen years later, when creation destined to restore order among Donkin and Scheutz were propagandisi the industrious classes'. In his story, ngfor the difference, engines at the scientific wisdom taught industry how to (General Register Office, Airy conceded run its affairs and mechanise its labour that the simple functions required for a process. But the displacement of handic life table might be mechanised, but raftby the machine was neither uni wanted Greenwich Observatory kept as a form nor universal. As Raphael Samuel human preserve. In the Observatory 'no has demonstrated, mid-Victorian indust advantage would be gained by the use of rialmechanisation was accompanied by the Machine and (Airy) would prefer the the preservation, intensification and pen computation of human computers expansion of skilled manual labour in the way in which it has hitherto been throughout the economy. The mid-Vic employed'.54 These were controversial torianengineer was still characteristi views. Some critics reckoned that the callya craftsman, an artisan or mathematical discipline which Airy mechanic rather than an operative or admired so much was little better than hand'. The invisibility of human labour working a prison treadmill. Far from pre in the automatic system was a political serving human skill, they complained, and moral image never justified by fac Airy's Cambridge-trained mathematic tory life nor by mathematical tabulation. ianswere actually reducing it to As William Lazonick has argued, for mechanical rote. Thus the Edinburgh example, in the cotton factories over moralist William Hamilton reckoned that lookers preferred less mechanical meth both Cambridge mathematics and the ods for winding yarn onto spindles treadmill 'equally educate to a mechanic because such methods yielded much alcontinuity of attention, as in each the greater discipline of the conduct and scholar is disagreeably thrown out on quality of labour.53 The same conflicts the slightest wandering of thought'. To 293 Simon SCHAFFER

such a hostile observer there seemed lit tors 'went to see the thinking machine tle to choose between calculating (for such it seems)' and were treated to engines and Greenwich computers. So if Babbage's miraculous show of appare Airy claimed that a machine which could ntlysudden breaks in its output. There only compute using fourth differences was a sublimity in the views thus opened was inadequate for the analysis his of the ultimate results of intellectual astronomical tabulations needed, Bab- power', one onlooker reported. A few bage countered that it was 'really extra streets away, the young naturalist ordinary that when it was demonstrated Charles Darwin learnt his lesson and set that all tables are capable of being com out to use Babbage's system as an ana puted by machinery, and even when a logue for the origin of species by natural machine existed which computed certain law without divine intervention. Darwin tables, the Astronomer Royal did not larded his Origin of Species (1859) with become the most enthusiastic supporter arguments he found in Babbage's of an instrument which could render description of this phenomenon. He such invaluable service to his own sci found in the calculating engine the mes ence'. The calculating engines did not sage that the world could be represented become commodities in the Royal Observ as a mechanical array visible as a sys atory.55 tem from the point of view of the philoso pherand in no need of immediate For some pre-eminent Victorian scient miracles to maintain its regular order.56 ists, however, these machines func tioned as practical symbols of nature's Another example of the universalisation capacities. The calculating engines could of such engines is found in the origin of become powerful emblems of the way the the electromagnetic theory of light. universe really worked. Here are two Between 1843 and 1862, as we have examples. Throughout the 1830s Bab- seen, Babbage's Difference Engine stood bage regaled his house-guests with a in the Museum of King's College, Lon portentous party trick. He could set the don. During the 1850s the College's pro Difference Engine to print the series of fessor of manufacturing art and integers for an apparently endless machinery, the Cambridge mathematic period. Any observer of the machine's ianThomas Goodeve, lectured on the output would assume that this series machines in his Museum, demonstrated would continue indefinitely. But the ini their properties and produced an influ tial setting of the machine could be ential textbook, Elements of mechanism adjusted so that at a certain point the (1860). Gear wheels and pulley blocks, machine would then advance in steps of trains and lathes all provided matter for ten thousand. An indefinite number of his clasies.57 Soon after Goodeve left the different rules might be programmed in College another Cambridge mathematic this way. To the observer, each disconti ian,James Clerk Maxwell, was nuitywould seem to be a 'miracle', an appointed as natural philosophy profes event unpredictable from the apparently sorat King's. Maxwell was still in post immutable course of the machine. Yet in when Babbage's calculating engine was fact the manager of the system would at last put on public show at the 1862 have planned it beforehand. His onlook industrial exhibition in London. At the erswere almost always impressed. same time, Maxwell published a radical 294 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM new model of the behaviour of luminifer- Papers and Airy Papers), the Royal Society Library (Herschel Papers) and the British Library ous ether, the principal topic of mid-Vic (Babbage Papers). torianmathematical physics. Maxwell cited Goodeve's textbook for the Notes mechanical analogy he constructed for British1 Babbage Library toMSS Dupin, ADD 3718X20 December f.l 17. 1833, the ether. In this model, Maxwell envis 2 For science as a system of organised trust aged an infinite array of gear wheels sep (rather than scepticism) see Steven Shapln, A arated by the idle wheels he found Social History of Truth (Chicago: Chicago Univers ityPress, 1994), chapter 2. The sources ment described in Goodeve's text. The velocity ioned here are Ludwick Fleck, Genesis and of each gear wheel was analogised to the Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979); T. S. Kuhn, 'Second local magnetic field strength and the Thoughts on Paradigms', in The Essential Tension motion of the idle wheels to the flow of (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), chapt er12; I. Lakatos, 'Falsification and the Methodo electric current. This model warranted logyof Scientific Research Programmes', in I. Maxwell's calculation that by setting the Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds.. Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge torsion coefficient of the gears and University Press, 1971), 91-195; M. Callon, 'El wheels appropriately, the speed of prop ements pour une sociologie de la traduction', L'An agation of an impulse through the gear néesociologique (Paris: PUF, 1986), 169-208. 3 Astronomer Royal's Report, 1853, cited by J. array would be identical to that of light A. Bennett, 'George Biddell Airy and Horology', in the ether.58 Annuls of Science 37 (1980), 269-85, p. 282; Walt er Maunder, The Royal Observatory Greenwich (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), p. 137. Here, perhaps, was another legacy of See Robert W. Smith, 'A National Observatory Babbage's project. It had become plausi Transformed: Greenwich in the Nineteenth Cent ury', Journal for the History of Astronomy 22 blethat natural objects really behaved in (1991), 5-20. the way that geared engines did. At the 4 George Dodd, Days at the Factories (Charles end of his Economy of Machinery and Knight: London, 1843), p.l. 5 Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitale du XIXe Manufactures, first published three Siècle, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd éd. (Paris: Le decades earlier, Babbage had described Cerf, 1993), p. 39. Thomas Richards, The Com modity Culture of Victorian England (Verso: Lon 'a higher science' which 'is now prepar don, 1991); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: ingits fetters for the minutest atoms the Expositions Universelles. Great Exhibitions and World Fairs 1851-1939 (Manchester Univers that nature has created: already it has ityPress: Manchester, 1991); Armand Martelait. chained the etherial fluid, and bound in L'invention de la communication (La Découverte: Paris, 1994), pp. 132-9. For Chance Brothers and one harmonious system all the intricate Martineau see Clive Behagg, 'Secrecy, Ritual and and splendid phenomena of light. It is Folk Violence: the Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century', in R. D. the science of calculation which becomes Storch, éd., Popular Culture and Custom in Nine continually more necessary at each step teenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, of our progress, and which must ult 1982), 154-79, pp. 156-9. 6 William Ashworth, The Calculating Eye'. imately govern the whole of the applica British Journal for the History of Science 28 tionsof science to the arts of life'.59 It is (1994). 7 Herschel's comments on the 'superiority' of significant for this story of the product theory are In his Preliminary Discourse on the ionof knowledge and machines that a Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831), p. 132. His prophecy of the role of tabulated calcula remarks on instruments are in his Outlines of tionin classical physics appears at the Astronomy, 4th ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p.76. end of a text on the factory system. 8 G. B. Airy, 'Report on the Progress of Astron Thanks to Billy Ashworth, Bob Brain, William omyduring the Present Century', in Report of the Ginn, Ben Marsden, Iwan Moras, Otto Sibum, Second Meeting of the British Association for the Richard Staley and Andy Warwick for their gener Advancement of Science (John Murray: London oushelp. In this paper I cite manuscripts held in 1833) 125-89 p. 184; Airy to Harcourt. 5 Septem the Cambridge University Library (Babbage ber1832. in Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, 295 Simon SCHAFFER

Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence of the Une histoire intellectuelle de l'économie politique British Associationfor the Advancement of Science (Paris: EHESS, 1992), p 411 and Mattelart, L'in (Royal Historical Society: London. 1984), p. 151. vention de communication, p. 78. 9 D. J. F. Arago, 'Mémoire sur un moyen très 19 Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a simple de s'affranchir des erreurs personelles', in Philosopher (London: Longmans. 1864), pp. M. J. A. Barrai, éd.. Oeuvres complètes de 138-40 (Babbage's emphasis). François Arapo (Gide: Paris, 1859), 5: 233-44. On 20 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization takes com mechanizing the personal equation see Simon mand: a contribution to anonymous history (Nor Schaffer, 'Astronomers Mark Time', Science in ton: New York, 1969). p. 3: 'history writing is ever Context 2 (1988), 115-145. tied to the fragment'. For London's geography see Crisis'10 See in for Charles example Babbage Doron Swade,and his TheCalculating Tables Iwan Morus, Jim Secord and Simon Schaffer. 'Scientific London'. in Celina Fox éd., Engines (London: Science Museum, 1991), pp. London-World City 1800-1840 (Yale: New Haven, 1-5. 1992/Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Essen), pp. 129-42. 1 1 The best discussion of the problem of tables' 21 Henry Colebrooke, "Address on presenting reliability is Andrew Warwick, The Laboratory of the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Theory', in M. Norton Wise, éd.. Values of Preci Charles Babbage', Memoirs of the Astronomical sion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Society 1 (1825), 509-12, pp. 509-10. 1994); the citation is from Dodd, Days at the Fact 22 Charles Babbage, Passages, p. 1 14. See H. W. ories, p. 517. Buxton, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the late 12 Airy, "Report on the Progress of Astronomy Charles Babbage, ed. R. A. Hyman (1880; Camb during the Present Century', p. 124; for the fi ridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 80-102; scal-military state see John Brewer, The Sinews of Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Power: War Money and the English State (London: Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Unwin Hyman, 1989). 1982), pp. 123-35; Michael Lindgren, Glory and 13 Allan Chapman, 'Sir George Airy and the Con Failure: the Difference Engines of Johann Muller, cept of International Standards in Science. Time Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz keeping(1985)' 321-8and Navigation',and William VistasGinn, Philosophersin Astronomy and 28 (Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T.Press, 1990), pp. 52-59. 23 Babbage, 'On a Method of Expressing by Artisans: Men of Science and Instrument Makers in Signs the Action of Machinery', Philosophical London 1820-1860 (PhD thesis, Kent University, Transactions 116 (1826). 250-65 and draft in 1991), p. 237; Herschel to Babbage, 25 October Cambridge University Library MSS ADD 8705.2 1 ; 1814, Royal Society HS 2.31. [Lardner], 'Babbage's Calculating Engine', pp. 14 John Herschel, The Yard, the Pendulum and 318-319. For Lardner's collaboration on mechani the Metre' (1863), in Familiar Lectures on Scient calnotation with Babbage, and its publicity in ificSubjects (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867), Paris and Berlin, see Babbage to Dupin, 20 419-51, pp. 429-32; see Julian Hoppit. 'Reform December 1833 and Babbage to Humboldt, ingBritain's Weights and Measures', English His December 1833, British Library MSS ADD 37188 torical Review (1993), 82-104. ff. 117, 123. 15 Charles Babbage, 'On tables of the constants 24 Ada Lovelace. 'Sketch of the Analytical of nature and art', Smithsonian Institution Annual Engine by L.F.Menabrea', Taylor's Scientific Memo Report (1856), 289-302, pp. 289, 293-^. For 'con irs3 (1843), 666-731. p. 690; Maxine Berg. The stants' see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance Machinery Question and the Making of Political (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge University p.57. Press: Cambridge. 1980), pp. 182-89; Babbage, 16 William Thomson, Popular Lectures and On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1894), 2: 120. 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 120, For background to Thomson's remarks, see 175. See Richard M. Romano, The Economic Simon Schaffer, 'Victorian Metrology and its Ideas of Charles Babbage'. History of Political Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms', in Economy 14 ( 1982), 385-405, p. 391. For Marx's Susan Cozzens and Robert Bud, eds. Invisible response to the Babbage principle see Karl Marx, Connexions (Bellingham: SPIE Press, 1992), Capital: Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 23-56. p. 42. 1976), p.469: 'the collective worker now pos 17 Swade, The Tables Crisis'; Michael Williams, sesses all the qualities necessary for production The Difference Engines', Computer Journal 19 in an equal degree of excellence, and expends (1976). 82-9. them in the most economical way'. 18 Babbage, A Letter to Humphry Davy (London: 25 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, pp. 54, Booth, 1822), p.8. The gift from Didot in 1819 is 250-1: Buxton Memoir of Babbage. p. 194. Very recorded at the front of Babbage's copy of the sine useful discussions of the theory of calculation tables, Cambridge University Library MSS ADD involved in the engines are Jean Mosconi, 8705.37. For other responses to Prony, see 'Charles Babbage: vers une théorie du calcul [Dionysius Lardner], 'Babbage's Calculating mécanique'. Revue de l'Histoire des Sciences 36 Engines', Edinburgh Review 59 (1834), 263-327, (1983). 69-107 and especially Marie-José p. 275. For the Revolutionary context of Prony's Durand-Richard, "Charles Babbage: de l'Ecole work see Lorraine Daston's forthcoming paper in Algébrique anglaise à la 'Machine Analytique' Critical Inquiry (1994). For Prony, geodesy and Mathématiques. Informatique. et Sciences the division of labour see Jean-Claude Perrot, Humaines. 118 (1992), 5-31. 296 BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM

26 Babbage. Economy of Machinery, pp. 379, of Mass-production Engineering', Business His 388; Hyman, Babbage p.86; Buxton, Memoir of tory 17 (1975), 109-49, p. 113. For Chartist Babbage. pp. 215, 111. For Babbage on honours demonstrations see Dorothy Thompson, The see The Exposition of 1851. 2nd ed. (London: Chartists (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1984), ch. John Murray, 1951), pp.220-49 and for the 3. Bonapartist connection see Reflections on the 36 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures Decline of Science in England (London: Fellowes, (London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 20-21. 25; 1930), pp. 25-7. Manchester as it is. pp. 217, 32-33. Further ev 27 Hyman, Babbage. p. 192; Carolyn Cooper, idence is available in Maxine Berg, éd.. Technology The Portsmouth System of Manufacture', Tech and Toil in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: nology and Culture 25 (1984), 182-225, p. 213. CSE Books, 1973), esp. p. 159. For Watkins' models see Watkins to Babbage, 15 37 Babbage to Wellington, 23 December 1834, January 1834, British Library MSS ADD 37188 British Library MSS ADD 4061 1 f. 181. f. 160. For machine exhibitions in the early nine teenth century see Richard Altick, The Shows of 38mechanism'Babbage, (1822)The science in Buxton, of number Memoir reduced of Bab to London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978), pp. 375-89. For the Analytical Engine and the bage, p. 65. Jacquard Loom, see Lovelace, 'Sketch of the Anal 39 Buxton, Memoir of Babbage. p.86. ytical Engine", p. 706; for the Jacquard Loom's 40 William Fairbairn, Treatise on Mills and effects on the weavers, see Dorothy George, Lon Machines (London, 1861), p. v; Samuel Smiles, don Life in the Eighteenth Century (London: Pere Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool grine. 1966), p. 191. Makers (London, 1863). The 'Life of Clement' is 28 Cooper, 'Portsmouth System'; Peter chapter 3. Linebaugh, 'Technological Repression and the 41 K. R. Gilbert, 'Machine-Tools', in С Singer et Origin of the Wage', London Hanged (Har- al, eds.. History of Technology Volume 4 (Oxford: mondsworth: Penguin, 1991), chapter 11. Clarendon, 1958), 417-41; Musson, 'Whitworth Thanks to William Ashworth for information and the Growth of Mass Production Engineering', about Samuel Bentham's role. p. 115. 29 Cooper, 'Portsmouth System', pp. 213-14; 42 "Autobiography of Thomas Wood' in John Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 399-401. Burnett, éd.. Useful Toil Autobiographies of Worki 30 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English ngPeople (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 310; Nasmyth, Autobiography, p. 125. pp. 889, 915; John Rule, The Labouring Classes 43 Buxton, Memoir of Babbage, pp. 81-2, 97; in Early Industrial England (London: Longman, Hyman, Babbage, pp. 125, 130-2; Nasmyth, 1986), pp. 357-63. Autobiography, p. 130. For the move to Dorset 31 E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the Street, see Babbage to Clement, 18 May 1832, English Crowd'. Past and Present 38 (1967) and British Library MSS ADD 37186 f.400. For Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, Clement's refusal to give bills, see Clement to 1991), chapters 4 and 5; Michel Foucault, Sur- Babbage, 18 November 1829, British Library vexSXir et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gal MSS ADD 37184, f. 419. limard. 1975), part 3 and Foucault (with M. 44 Hyman, Babbage. pp. 124, 128 and Jarvis to Perrot and J. P. Barou), 'L'oeil du pouvoir', in J. Babbage, February 1831, British Library MSS Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris: Bellond, 1977). ADD 37185 f.419. The best discussion of the fight For customary skill see John Rule, The Property with Clement is William Ginn. Philosophers and of Skill in the Period of Manufacture', in Patrick Artisans: the relationship between men of science Joyce, éd.. The Historical Meanings of Work (Camb and instrument makers in London 1820-1860 ridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), (PhD thesis, Kent, 1991), pp. 157-69. 99-118. 45 Babbage to Wellington, July 1834, in Buxton, 32 Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures Memoir of Babbage. p. 104; Jarvis and Clement to 1700-1820 (London: Fontána, 1985), p. 229. For Babbage, in Hyman, Babbage: pp. 131-2. factory tourism see Stephen Marcus, Engels. 46 Wright to Babbage. 18 June 1834 and 13 Manchester and the Working Class (New York: January 1839, British Library MSS ADD 37188 Norton, 1985), pp. 30-66; Francis Klingender, Art f.390 and 37191 ff.99-100; compare Hyman, and the Industrial Revolution (Frogmore: Paladin, Babbage, pp. 66, 107. 1972), pp. 109-117. 47 Babbage. 'Notes for Economy of Manufact 33 Manchester as it is (Manchester: Love and ure',University Library Cambridge MSS ADD Barton, 1839), p. 217. 8705.25 p. 10; Babbage, 'Report on the Calculat 34 William Cooke Taylor, Factories and the Fac ingMachine', 1830. British Library MSS ADD tory System (London: Jeremiah How, 1844). p. 1 1. 37185 f.264; Nasmyth, Autobiography, pp. For his ethnography see Christopher Herbert, 148-9, 179. Compare Ginn, Philosophers and Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in Artisans, p. 167, on the uniqueness of artisan the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of skill. Chicago Press. 1991), pp. 61-64. 48 John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial 35 Manchester as it is, pp. 201-2, 210. For Nas- Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, myth on the strikes see Nasmyth, Autobiography, 1974), pp. 224-5; Ian Inkster, Science and Tech pp. 222-8. For Manchester and machine tools see nology in History (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. A. E. Musson, 'Joseph Whitworth and the Growth 82-83. 297 Simon SCHAFFER

49 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, p. 67; Glory and Failure, p. 280; Farr. Tables of Lif Charles Hotzapffel, Turning and Mechanical etimes (1864) in Williams, Computing Technology, Manipulation, 5 vols. (London, 1843-1884), 2: p. 180. 984-91; Nasmyth to Babbage, 22 June 1855 and Babbage to Whitworth, July 1855, British Library 55 (William Hamilton), 'Study of Mathematics', MSS ADD ff.249, 366. The cartoon is in de Mor Edinburgh Review 62 (1836), 409-55, p. 429; gan to Babbage, 21 October 1839, British Library Babbage, Passages, p. 139. MSS ADD 37191 1. 256. 56 Charles Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. 50 Michel Callon, 'Introduction' in Callon, éd.. 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), pp. 32-43; La Science et ses Réseaux (Paris: La Découverte, Lady Byron to King, 21 June 1833, in Doris Lan- 1989), p. 14 n.2. gley Moore, Ada Countess of Lovelace (London: 51 Lindgren Glory and Failure, pp. 279-82 John Murray. 1977), p.44. Darwin's use of Bab- Michael R. Williams, A History of Computing Tech bage's argument is discussed in Adrian Desmond nology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1985), and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Pen pp. 174-82; Babbage, Passages, pp. 150-9 (Bab- guin, 1991), chapter 15. bage's emphasis). 57 Thomas Goodeve, The Elements of Mecha nism( London: Longmans, 1860), pp. 72 (for idle 52 Mattelart, L'invention de la communication, p. wheels) and 136-7 (for counting wheels); F. J. С 135; Prince Albert, speech at the Guildhall, 1849, Hearnshaw, History of King's College London in Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the (London: Harrap, 1929), pp. 191. 247-60. Some Culture of Nineteenth Century Exhibitions (Camb of these King's College machines, including the ridge: Whipple Museum. 1993), p. 24. counting machines, are now illustrated in Alan 53 Tine Bruland, 'Industrial Conflict as a source Morton and Jane Wess, Public and Private Sci of technical innovation: the development of the ence: the King George III Collection (London: Sci automatic spinning mule'. Economy and Society ence Museum, 1993), pp. 35-37 and 552-67. 11 (1982), 91-121; Ure, Philosophy of Manufact ures,p. 367; William Lazonick, 'Industrial Rela 58 James Clerk Maxwell, "On Physical Lines of tions and Technical Change: the case of the Force: Part 3'. in W. D. Niven, éd.. Scientific self-acting mule', Cambridge Journal of Economi Papers of James Clerk Maxwell 2 vols. (Camb cs3 (1979), 231-262; Raphael Samuel, The ridge; Cambridge University Press, 1890), 1: Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand 499-500. See Salvo d'Agostino, 'Weber and Technology in mid -Victorian Britain', History Maxwell on the Discovery of the Velocity of Light', Workshop Journal 3 (1977), 6-72, p. 41). Mary in M. D. Grmek et al., eds., On Scientific Discov Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was subtitled The ery(Dordrecht: Reidel. 1980), 281-93. p. 287 and modern Prometheus". Daniel M. Siegel, Innovation in Maxwell's Electr 54 Airy to Goulburn, September 1842, Royal omagnetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers Greenwich Observatory MSS 6/427 ff.65-66; Airy ityPress, 1991), pp. 136-43. to Trevelyan, 30 September 1857, in Lindgren, 59 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, p. 387.

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