Babbage's Calculating Engines and the Factory System In: Réseaux, 1996, Volume 4 N°2

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

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