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
4
BABBAGE'S
CALCULATING
ENGINES AND
THE FACTORY
SYSTEM
Simon SCHAFFER
'I wish that my friends in Paris
should be acquainted with the Cal
culating
Engine and my mode of rep
resenting
the consecutive actions of
all machines which, having been
practically employed in the work
shop, is useful to the arts but which
is more interesting to the philoso
pher
as being one among those sys
tems of signs by which man aids his
reasoning power' (Charles Babbage,
1833)1
Introduction: the invisible
industry of astronomical
tables
The world of the scientific workplace
presents itself as a vast array of
commodities. Scientists rarely recognise
in these commodities the labour on
which they depend. They place their
trust in machines, texts and techniques
whose fragile and contingent construct
ion
they do not, need not and (some
times) must not investigate. The
production of Knowledge in the scientific
workplace depends on a fetishism
through which the products of others'
labours are treated as nature's living
representatives. Fleck's Denkkollektive,
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
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
the labour involved in making and veri
fying the hundreds of volumes of stellar
transit times and positions, logarithms
and trigonometric functions which
stocked their libraries. At the Royal
Observatory in Greenwich, 'for one per
son actively engaged at a telescope, the
visitor would see a dozen writing or com
puting
at a desk'. These observatories
were publicly compared by their spokes
men
to income tax offices, their ledgers
stuffed with figures and the principle of
division of clerical labour rigidly
enforced.3
Any discussion of the invisible presence
of industry in the scientific workplace
must raise these problems of commodity
production. I chose Victorian science.
273
Simon SCHAFFER
especially astronomy, because it institu
tionalised
these ways of dealing with comm
odities.
Marx was not the only
journalist in Victorian London who recog
nised the double process through which
labour power was reified and the prod
ucts of labour fetishised. Thus in 1843
George Dodd, author of a series of
best-selling surveys of the London facto
ries, explained to his metropolitan read
ersthat 'the simple fact that he who has
money can command every variety of
exchangeable produce seems to act as a
veil which hides the producer from the
consumer ... as in the case of other agenc
ies, the principals have but a vague
knowledge of the source whence the sup
ply is obtained'. The efficiency of the net
work
of consumption and production
simultaneously obscured its real worki
ng.4 Successive nineteenth-century exhi
bitions
of 'the works and industry of all
nations' were what Walter Benjamin
called 'sites of pilgrimages to the com
modity
fetish'. The Crystal Palace was a
literally transparent display of these com
modities
- only the production processes
were invisible and the prices of the goods
unmarked. Its 300,000 panes of glass
were made by the Birmingham glaziers
Chance Brothers. When the energetic
economic journalist Harriet Martineau
visited their glassworks the year after the
show she was warned against revealing
too much of their exploitative labour rela
tions to her keen readers.5
This interesting process of concealment,
display and commodification was obvi
ous in the work of Victorian astronomy.
In the first half of the nineteenth cen
tury, division of astronomical labour,
reification of its capacities and fetishisation of its products were all actively engi
neered.
Astronomers of the period were
remarkably self-conscious political
274
omists of the process of commerce and
manufacture. The historian William Ashworth points out that the founders of the
London Astronomical Society (1820),
including Charles Babbage, Francis
Baily and Henry Colebrooke, were active
in banking, insurance and fiscal reform.
They
computed
actuarial
tables,
launched new investment schemes and
developed a comprehansive theory of the
factory system. Their values were those
of finance
capital.6
Traditionally,
astronomers had been represented as
isolated observers in direct contact with
an unmediated sky. In the nineteenth
century, their private practice and their
public repute was increasingly related to
an industrial system of astronomical
work. The watchtower became the fac
tory.
Observatory managers spent as
much time watching their subordinates
as watching the stars. The doyen of Vic
torian
astronomers, John Herschel,
explained that 'in astronomy, the super
ior departments of theory are comp
letely
disjoined from the routine of
practical observation'. The aim of the
astronomer, and by implication any sci
entist,
was 'to make himself as far as
possible, independent of the imperfec
tions
incident to every work the [instr
umentmaker] can place in his hands'.
Independence from artisans and domi
nance over observers became the aims of
the observatory and laboratory mana
gers of Victorian Britain. Observatory
managers could become entirely inde
pendent
by watching others closely and
mechanising what they did.7
George Airy, the stern head of the Royal
Observatory, announced that astronomi
cal
observation should be treated like a
branch of the mining industry: 'an
observation is a lump of ore, requiring
for its production, when the proper
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
machinery is provided, nothing more
than the commonest labour, and without
value until it has been smelted'. Data
were fetishised, and the labour of
observers and calculators correspondi
ngly
reified, in the mechanised system
of the observatory. In 1832 Airy
explained that 'the work of a mere
observer is the most completely
horse-in-a-mill work that can be con
ceived.
The beau idéal of an observer of
the highest class is a compound of a
watchmaker and a banker's clerk'.8
Technical developments such as the
construction of the 'personal equation',
variable but measurable reaction-times
for different observers, demanded the
regimentation of each observatory
worker. Artificial stars moving at a
known rate across the telescope's filar
micrometer were used to calibrate each
observer's performance at the eyepiece.
Galvanic and mechanical stopwatches
were used to effect the calibrations. Cont
rol over the act of observation was dis
placed
from each individual observer to
the collective regime of managers,
clock-makers
and
electricians.
Publicly-funded European observatory
managers such as Airy, Quetelet (Bruss
els), Struve (Pulkovo) and Arago (Paris)
routinely performed calibration trials on
their employees. Arago wrote of his
reliance on clock-makers' skill and on
the division of the labour of observation
to which it led. Machines carried the
burden of trust: *when one wishes in
future to become independent of per
sonal errors, it will be necessary, so to
speak, to leave to the stopwatch the bur
den of evaluating the second and frac
tion of a second corresponding to the
passages of stars', declared Arago. An
American contemporary classed an
observer as 'but an imperfect and vari
able machine'. Any meridian transit
'observation' now became the result of
teamwork linking observatory workers
and large numbers of collaborators.9
Astronomers' references to 'imperfect
and variable machines' drew attention to
those elements of their new networks
upon which they could not yet rely.
Unreliable elements could not function
as commodities, because their public
status could not be guaranteed and the
details of their production became all too
obvious. In the case of observers, mecha
nisation
and subordination turned
imperfect variation into calculable pre
dictability.
But an even more serious
problem existed in the persons of the
astronomical 'computers' and in their
tables. There is perhaps no better examp
leof the invisibility of industry in the
scientific workplace than the presence of
mathematical tables. Here trust must be
absolute and the labour required to veri
fyor challenge a tabulated number cor
respondingly
immense. Early nineteenth
century astronomers faced a crisis with
respect to their own computers, because
they could not be trusted and their
labour could obviously not be reified.
The rest of this paper is devoted to one
enterprise which dealt with this crisis:
Charles Babbage's attempts from 1821
until the mid- 1850s to build calculating
machines which would produce reliable
mathematical tables.10
The course of this enterprise illuminates
several aspects of the relationship
between industrial supply and scientific
work:
(a) Products such as astronomical tables
could not become commodities in sc
ience unless they were reliable and free of
error. Producing reliable tables by
human or mechanical computation was
very much like disciplining the indust
rialworkforce.
275
Simon SCHAFFER
(b) This similarity became explicit when
Babbage designed calculating machines
to
produce
mathematical
tables,
because his machines were organised
like factories of numbers. He drew
analogies between the factory system,
the working of the calculating engines,
and the organisation of science.
(c) The calculating machines were never
used to make astronomical tables
because they never became commoditi
es.
Conflicts with the existing workf
orce, with the observatory managers
and with exhibition organisers all vit
iated the image of the machines as rel
iable substitutes for human computers.
When labour processes remain visible, it
is hard to secure the status of industrial
products.
(d) The calculating machines did acquire
exemplary status in Victorian science as
tokens of nature's true properties. The
theatrical display of the calculating
machines helped convince Darwin that it
was possible to explain the origin of
species by natural mechanisms, and the
presence of such engines in his college's
museum helped Maxwell to develop a
model which represented electr
omagnetic ether as countless rows of gear
wheels. Manufacture plays ideological
and practical roles in the formation of
science's stories about nature.
economy of manufactories', George Dodd
pointed out that 'it must be obvious that
where some hundreds of men are
employed, some working by the day, and
others by piece-work, and where scores
of different materials are used; the com
mercial
accounts of a factory must
require extreme care and a well-orga
nized
system; to prevent the most inex
tricable
confusion'. The aim of the new
observatory managers was to adopt just
such a system in the administration of
their underlings and the production of
their clerical accounts." These new
observatories formed an integral part of
an expanding fiscal- military state and
an increasingly regulated industrial sys
tem. Airy boasted that in his observatory
'a mass of observations was accumulati
ng
which, though confined in its object,
surpassed in regularity and accuracy,
and perhaps in general value, any other
observations made at that time'. Thus
'the Royal Observatory is quietly con
tributing
to the punctuality of business
through a large portion of this busy
country'.12
The Utopia of tabulation embodied sev
eral salient features of Victorian culture.
It was claimed that reliable computation
was a matter of moral rectitude. Airy
fired operatives who were 'unpunctual in
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
probity he could rely. Babbage was just
matical
handbooks.
Numerical
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
staff as a computer until Herschel di
of nineteenth-century physical science.
ssuaded
him from the thankless task.13
Tables of logarithmic and trigonometric
functions, of meridian times and of
This moral rectitude was most obviously
worked out in campaigns for universal
lunar positions, played a role in the
observatory equivalent to that of the
standards in which Babbage, Airy and
Barrême in the counting house. Thus in
Herschel all took part. Metrological
tabulation fetishised the labour of
his exposé of what he called the 'private
276
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
computational staff. Victorian experts
reckoned that the 'general value' of
imperial standards hinged on the labour
expended in their production, and yet
that this labour had to be invisible when
these standards were established and
deployed. They all worked hard to make
the work involved in making standards
vanish. Thus, while Herschel described
the 'extraordinary pains taken in the
construction' of the imperial yard by a
series of controversial commissions and
state-funded industrial projects between
1824 and 1855, he insisted that 'our
yard is a purely individual material
object from which all reference to a nat
ural origin is studiously excluded as
much as if it had dropped from the
clouds'. The length standard became a
national fetish, its copies bricked up in
the walls of the Board of Trade, the
Houses of Parliament and the Royal
Observatory.14 In the 1830s, Babbage
tried to make a paper collection of such
standards, an all-embracing Table of the
Constants of Nature and Art. The phrase
'constant of nature' was a neologism
Babbage helped coin. He urged the labo
rious preparation of an encylopaedia
which would contain 'all those facts
which can be expressed by numbers in
various sciences and arts'. The Table
would 'call into action a permanent
cause of advancement towards truth,
continually leading to the more accurate
determination of established facts and
measurement of new ones'.15 The apothe
osis
of this vision was reached later in
the century, when the pre-eminent Glas
gow physicist and entrepreneur Sir
William Thomson hammered home the
message that perfect numerical tabula
tion
would guarantee the independence
of exact science from any locale. In a
remarkable exercise in science fiction,
Thomson sketched the career of a
tific traveller roaming over the universe'
equipped with nothing but experimental
cunning and a completely reliable book
of tables. 'For myself, Thomson told his
colleagues in the Society of Civil Engi
neers, 'what seems the shortest and
surest way to reach the philosophy of
measurement is to cut off all connection
with the Earth and think what we must
then do to make measurements which
shall be definitely comparable with those
which we now actually do make in our
terrestrial workshops and laboratories.
Suppose then the traveller to have lost
his watch and his measuring rod, but to
have kept his scientific books'. Thomson
imagined a scientific traveller so
equipped recapturing the units of
length, time and electrical resistance by
calibrating improvised trials against the
authoritative numbers his 'scientific
books' contained. Through the extension
of these techniques any lone Victorian
could apparently rebuild his culture if
only he could rely on the values of his
tables.16
This was a Victorian Utopia - it hap
pened nowhere. At the start of the nine
teenth century, many scientists' libraries
would hold at least 125 volumes of
tables. They might contain thousands of
errors, due to computation, copying, ver
ifying
and printing. Dionysius Lardner,
the journalist who acted as Babbage's
publicity agent, estimated in 1834 that a
random selection of 40 tabulations con
tained
3,700 acknowledged errors and
innumerable others. The crucially signif
icant Nautical Almanac contained at
least one thousand errors, while the
multiplication tables its computers used
sometimes erred at least 40 times per
page. Such handbooks were rarely com
puted from scratch and typically relied
on collation of previous data; thus, in
277
Simon SCHAFFER
1825 it was reported that in twenty
apparently independent tables at least
six common errors could be found. Such
errors were infections in the body of sci
ence.
John Herschel compared them to
'sunken rocks', where errant navigators
would quite literally come to grief. Babbage once estimated that at least £3 mil
lion had been lost to the state through
errors in annuity tables.17
contained further errors. In the 1860s
Babbage could still report that such
pre-eminent tables as the data on lunar
motion used by Airy and the French
analysts Pontécoulant and Delaunay
were getting even worse, their errata
tables doubling in length over a period of
five years. These were moral, economic
and practical issues which threatened
the very basis of the Victorian regime of
certain calculation and fetishistic preci
sion. The great importance of having
Babbage, a banker's son and heir, a
accurate tables is admitted by all who
Cambridge mathematician and obses
understand their uses; but the multi
sive analyst, owned more than 300
tude of errors really occurring is comp
books of tables. Among his treasures
aratively
little
known',
Babbage
were some pages of G. F. Prony's cel
announced.
'It
is,
however,
fair
that the
ebrated decimal tables of the 1790s, com
eminent men who presided over the
missioned
by the French state for
preparation of these works for the press,
geodesy and the establishment of the
observe that the real fault lay not in
metric system. These tables were never
them but in the nature of things'. By dis
published but remained emblematic for
the error of tabulation and trying
British proponents of mechanised calcu playing
to
change
the nature of things, Babbage
lation, who often retold the story of
simultaneously called into question and
Prony's application of Smith's division of
made visible the industry on which tab
labour to the work of computation and
ular authority rested. This was why his
the success of his subordinate compute
rs
who lacked all knowledge of arith campaign for the production of tables
through industrial engineering remained
metic apart from the rules of addition
at the very centre of Victorian accounts
and subtraction. When Babbage visited
of science and the factory system.19
Paris in 1819 he met the printer of the
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
calculating engines
compilation to his son in his will.18
Other, harsher, legacies dominated BabIn what follows, I explore the co-product
ion
of ideologically laden accounts of
bage's perception of the tables crisis. In
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
machines look intelligent it was neces
finding 32 errors in his manuscript and
8 more after typesetting. This was an
sarythat the sources of their power, the
labour force which surrounded and ran
astonishing accomplishment. He left the
them, be rendered invisible. This is why
state a copy of his own work to check the
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
torian
mathematical Utopia with the
Victorian geography of industrial, com
mercial
and philosophical London. Lon
don in the 1820s and 1830s was a
fractured world. The map of London at
that time is significant because of the
interesting relationship between visibil
ity
and mechanisation. South of the
river, in Lambeth, were the workshops of
the machinists whose labours drove the
production of automatic tools and accu
rate design. In the fashionable milieu of
the West End, genteel Londoners could
see the triumphs of these new machine
systems in public lectures and carefully
orchestrated museums. Here, too, were
the wardens of scientific reason, the
Astronomical Society, the Royal Society,
the Royal Institution. Northwards again,
in the fashionable houses of Marylebone,
lived men such as Charles Babbage and
Charles Darwin, ambitious reformers
who sought to rethink human nature in
the name of a reconstructed scientific
and social order. And in the north-east
were the huge working-class districts,
areas where Babbage sought to run for
parliamentary office and where his
socialist critics debated with him on the
hustings about the effects of industriali
sation.
This is the geography of Babbage's genius, the world where his
systematic vision was forged.20
In Babbage's world, the automisation of
the factory system went hand in hand
with the idea that its mechanical compo
nentspossessed intelligence. In the pro
ject to mechanise the production of
tables, Babbage subjected the industrial
basis of his own enterprise to unprece
dentedscrutiny. He tried to make indust
ry,especially the machine-tool trades,
uniquely visible to its managers so as to
guarantee a reliable quality of output.
But in order to make the products of this
industry into secure commodities he had
to make the labour which produced
them invisible to the consumers. The
users of tables were told that they had
been produced by machines alone and
were thus autonomous from errant
human labour. Contemporaries were
keenly aware of this double process of
the surveillance of industry and the reification of its labour. In his address to the
Astronomical Society in early 1824, its
president, the financier and mathematic
ian
Henry Colebrooke, eulogised Bab
bage's planned machine. 'In other cases,
mechanical devices have substituted
machines for simpler tools or for bodily
labour. ... But the invention to which I
am adverting ... substitutes mechanical
performance for an intellectual process'.
In other words, 'Mr Babbage's invention
puts an engine in place of the computer',
the human on whose virtues tables had
previously relied.21 Babbage, far from
inventing computers, tried to abolish
them. He reckoned he could police the
London machine-tool workshops well
enough to make tables independent of
these workshops' vagaries.
Babbage's designs for calculating
engines dominated his career from the
moment he reached London as a wealthy
and ambitious analyst in the 1810s. His
Difference Engine was based on the
mathematical principle that the success
ive
differences of values of polynomials
were ultimately constants, so tables of
these values could be computed by addi
tion and subtraction of such predeter
mined constants. For astronomical
work, the important functions were transcendentals which could be approxi
mated in a given interval by some
polynomial function. The values of this
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
ingbut teaching the Engine to foresee
developing values for a higher order of
and then to act upon that foresight
differences and by lessening the interpo
lationinterval. So the original Difference
could ever lead me to the object I
desired'.22 The science of operations, that
Engine of the 1820s was to be made of a
is to say, an algebra of machine analysis,
series of axes each carrying sets of inde
pendent
toothed
wheels,
parallel
was thus proposed as an intellectual dis
columns of which would represent
cipline
and as material for producing
precise
values.
columns of numbers. Geared operations
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 ion
transparent. 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
al
management. 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
ing
a 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
ing
of 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
bodies of men' but also 'in the form of a
the store of the Difference Engine; the
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
be
a source of trouble - it could make
the operating sections of the mill. Such
tables err or factories fail - but it could
distribution could itself be modified by
not be seen as a source of value. The
variables set by the existing state of
panoptic gaze which revealed the reliable
operations in the machine. These crucial
280
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
working of the calculating engines, the
order of the factory system and the
mechanism of the body, also rendered
the customary skills of the workforce
and its resistance rather hard to see.23
As historians such as Maxine Berg have
demonstrated, these machines for manu
facturing
numbers were developed
alongside the discourse of Ricardian
political economy. The 'philosophy of
manufactures' provided Babbage with
an account of what he called the 'domest
ic
economy of the factory' and also with
an analysis of the skilled labour embodi
ed
in machinery. Babbage's publica
tionson the economy of the factory
culminated in his great survey of 1832,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manuf
actures,
a work based on intelligence
gathered throughout the factories of
Britain and soon translated into every
major European language. As the Anal
ytical Engine was a 'manufactory of fig
ures',
so Babbage had to outline his
definition of a 'manufactory'. 'A consider
able
difference exists between the terms
making
and
manufacturing',
he
explained in his economics text. The dif
ference
lay in the economical regulation
of the domestic system of the factory.
This led to Babbage's reinterpretation of
Adam Smith's notion of the division of
labour, and, as he emphasised, the fun
damental
principle of that division which
allowed the sensitive analytical regula
tion
of the process of manufacture. The
'Babbage principle', as it came to be
known, applied equally to the regulation
of the factory and of the calculating
machines:
That the master manufacturer, by
dividing the work to be executed into
different processes, each requiring
different degrees of skill or of force,
can purchase exactly that precise
quantity of both which is necessary
for each process; whereas if the
whole work were executed by one
workman, that person must possess
sufficient skill to perform the most
difficult and sufficient strength to
execute the most laborious of the
operations into which the art is
divided'.24
As Babbage and his allies amang the
political economists showed, the disaggregation of the production process into
its simplest components allowed a series
of economies and practices of surveil
lance. Mechanised production required
strict discipline. The same was true of
the calculating machines. Parcelling the
processes of Lagrangean analysis into
specific
components
allowed
the
increase in speed of the machine, the
transformation of infinities of space into
manageable durations of time, the most
economical recompense to each compo
nentin terms of consumed power (if
mechanical) or consumed wages (if
human). The whole history of the inven
tionhas been a struggle against time',
Babbage wrote in 1837. The replacement
of individual human intelligence by
machine intelligence was as apparent in
the workshop as in the engines. This
task was both politically and economic
ally
necessary. 'One great advantage
which we derive from machinery is the
check which it affords against the inat
tention,
idleness or the dishonesty of
human agents'. Such failings could pro
duce the erroneous results which vit
iated calculation and stopped tables
being treated as reliable commodities.
This was why Babbage was always fasc
inated by the fact that Prony's least intel
ligent computers, when subject to the
right management, were the most reli
able. Unreliable agents could also form
281
Simon SCHAFFER
trade union combinations, which, Babbage held, were always 'injurious' to the
workforce itself. His aim here was to
contest the influence of 'designing per
sons' and show the working classes that
'the prosperity and success of the master
manufacturer is essential to the welfare
of the workman', even though 'this con
nexion
is in many cases too remote to be
understood by the latter'.25
Babbage's political strategies during the
strife-ridden 1830s outlined a crucial
role for the analytic manager. The
machinery of the factory and the calcu
lating engines largely replaced the indi
vidual
intelligence of the worker. Only
the superior combination and correlation
of each component guaranteed efficient,
economical, planned and therefore intel
ligent performance. This abstract behavi
our,almost as if in obedience to a law,
was visible only to the overseers, men
such as Babbage. No doubt his own sta
tus as a gentlemanly specialist helped.
He inherited £100,000 from his banker
father in 1827, while the state spent
more than £17,000 on his machines in
the next decade. The efforts for the
improvement of its manufactures which
any country can make with the greatest
probability of success', he argued in his
text on machinery, 'must arise from the
combined exertions of all those most
skilled in the theory, as well as in the
practice of the arts; each labouring in
that department for which his natural
capacity and acquired habits rendered
him most fit'. Such declarations made
the new class of managerial analysts the
supreme economic managers and legis
lators of social welfare. In good Bonapartist style, Babbage thought they
should be rewarded with new-fangled life
peerages and political power.26 The sc
ience of calculation became the supreme
282
legislative discipline, just as the calcu
lating engines provided both legislative
and executive co-ordination. This politi
caland managerial language was not
merely an elegant reformist metaphor
hatched in wealthy London drawing
rooms. The calculating machines were
themselves products of the system of
automatic manufacture which Babbage
sought to promote. They were some of
that system's most famous and most vis
ible accomplishments.
The visible industry of the
factory system
The calculating machines completed for
the polite attention of fashionable soci
etywith the vast array of automata and
mechanisms on display in London show
rooms. In early 1834 two models of the
Difference Engine were made by the
instrument designer Francis Watkins,
who plied his trade as electrician and
showman at the Adelaide Gallery, the
leading London showcase for new engi
neering.
The Adelaide Gallery also con
tained
a
Jacquard
loom,
a
programmable machine often mentioned
when explaining the principle of 'weav
ingnumbers' with Babbage's Analytical
Engine. 'In each of these valuable reposi
tories of scientific illustration', London
readers were told in a commentary on
the Analytical Engine, 'a weaver is con
stantly
working at a Jacquard loom and
is ready to give any information that may
be desired'. This was deeply ironic: the
Jacquard system had almost completely
destroyed the traditional weaving trades
which had previously employed so much
of London's workforce. Display mediated
the effects of mechanisation on everyday
life. This was why, when the Difference
Engine had been abandoned, Babbage
insisted 'it should be placed where the
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
public can see if. It was put on display
in the museum of King's College, Lon
don. Next door, at the Admiralty
Museum in Somerset House, visitors
could view Henry Maudslay's celebrated
block-making machinery designed for
the Portsmouth naval dockyards. These
technical systems were on show as the
highest achievements of the early Victo
rianmachine-tool industry.27
Two salient features of these displays
mattered for Babbage's own project.
First, the systématisation of machinetool production was highly charged polit
ically. Secondly, this process demanded
the reorganisation of the productive
body and the space in which it per
formed.
The pre-eminent example was
provided at Portsmouth dockyard, the
very earliest site at which the automatic
machine-tool system was implemented.
Between 1795 and 1807 the entire sys
tem of production of pulley-blocks for
the Royal Navy was overhauled. Tradi
tionally
this production had relied on
specialised crafts in woodworking and
milling highly resistant to line manage
ment
and control. In the face of mass
protests, military force was used. As his
torians
Carolyn Cooper and Peter
Linebaugh have explained, the new pro
duction-line
system destroyed and reor
ganised
every feature of this pattern.
Pulley-blocks were standardised and
marked to prevent what was now called
'theft'.
Standardised
machinists
replaced specialist craftsmen. Wood was
replaced by steam-driven all-metal
machinery and separate artisan tasks
embodied in purpose-built lathes and
clamps. The protagonists of this reor
ganisation
were also the protagonists of
much wider social change. The system
was developed by Samuel Bentham, the
inspector of naval works, who in
ration with his brother Jeremy had
already introduced an identical system
of surveillance in Russian woodworking
schemes in the early 1780s, a scheme
soon to be known as the panopticon. The
engineering works were laid out by Marc
Brunei and implemented by his close
ally Maudslay. These were the men who
introduced Clement to Babbage, and the
men who made this system of inspect
ion,regulation and line-production a
visible exemplar of rational managem
ent.28
Samuel Bentham and his colleagues
made Portsmouth dockyard a site of
'incessant work' and then turned it into
a tourist attraction. The Portsmouth
team argued that public visibility could
be an invaluable aspect of their indust
rialreformation. Bentham 'considered it
highly conducive to the hastening of the
introduction of a general System of
machinery that public opinion should be
obtained in its favour, and that this was
likely to be more surely effected by a dis
play of well arranged machines'. So from
the 1810s the block machinery became a
common resort for interested visitors.
The new system of technological repres
sioncan be taken as exemplary of the
emergence of the wage form and of the
productive labourer. A guidebook to the
dockyard commented that 'on entering
the block mill, the spectator is struck
with the multiplicity of its movements
and the rapidity of its operations'.29 The
impersonal pronouns in this account are
eloquent. To see the automatic world as
a reliable system of commodity product
ion,
it was important not to see the cul
ture of the workforce.
The London machine shows exhibiting
the
Difference
Engine
and
the
Portsmouth lathes were designed to win
income and teach important lessons to a
283
Simon SCHAFFER
wide range of publics. Babbage's lessons
hinged on the proper ownership of
machinery and thus, in the jargon of his
favourite science, the source of product
ive
value. The rights of the workers to
the whole value of their labour informed
much of the radical protest of these key
years.
Who
should
'own' these
machines? Whose labour did they
embody? Reformist journalists were per
sistently
struck by 'the systematic way
in which the people proceeded', while the
'people' themselves protested against the
campaigns 'to make us tools' or
'machines'. These issues made urgent
the problem of the source and ownership
of the skills embodied in machines con
fessedly
designed to perform mental
work.30
Working class interests appealed to tra
ditional
custom, in which skill was
recognised as a property inherent in the
persons of the workers themselves. Skill
was reckoned to be scarcely communicab
le
outside carefully controlled milieux
which were designed to remain opaque
to the surveillance of managers and
inspectors. Thus attempts by observers
such as Babbage to gather intelligence
about machines and the workforce were
politically controversial. In contrast to
the traditional model, philosophers of
machinery promoted an account of ratio
nalvaluation, attempting to render the
labour process transparent and skills
fairly easily measurable in the market
place
of wage labour. These are the early
nineteenth century English conflicts
which, following E. P. Thompson, we
now typically associate with political
economic campaigns against the Corn
Laws and the customary moral economy
of the grain rioters, where economic
rationality came into conflict with tradi
tional forms of exchange, or, following
284
Michel Foucault, with Benthamite
strategies for the surveillance of the
body in the illuminated spaces of the
panopticon. Babbage's campaigns for
machine intelligence take their place
alongside these more familiar strategies
for the reconfiguration of the productive
body within the factory system.31
The factory system was first represented
under this name in a powerful series of
journalistic reports produced in the
1830s and 1840s, of which Friedrich
Engels's Condition of the Working Class
in England (1845) is only the most noto
rious, though certainly one of the more
perceptive. Babbage's work on political
economy and on machine intelligence
took its place in this genre of works
which were both products of well-publi
cised
tours of the workshops and also
producers of intelligence about the fac
tory system. Maxine Berg emphasises
that 'the factory system itself was a term
which frequently concealed more than it
revealed'.32 Babbage's tours were no
exception. His was one of the handbooks
with which factory tourists were supp
lied.
Other
representative
texts
included The Philosophy of Manufactures
in 1835 from the same publisher as Bab
bage's work and written by the Scottish
consulting chemist Andrew Ure, and
reports on the Lancashire factories pro
duced
in the 1840s by the Irish journali
st
William Cooke Taylor. In their
well-marketed texts, the factory guides
emphasised that inside the automatic
system tourists would see those
'admirable adaptations of human skill
and intelligence' by which 'we are giving
to the present age its peculiar and wond
erful
characteristic, namely the tr
iumph
of mind over matter'.33
Literary companions were produced as a
skilful mixture of travel diary and tourist
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
guide.
Readers
were
repeatedly
instructed on the right mode of deport
mentwhen on tour in the manufacturing
districts. Cooke Taylor was a notable
propagandist for free trade and the manu
facturing
interests of Manchester and
an amateur ethnographer, the author of
a treatise on The Natural History of Soci
ety (1840) in which class struggle was
explained in terms of mutual ignorance.
In his Factories and the Factory System
of 1844, a work dedicated to the Tory
premier and reluctant free trader Robert
Peel, Cooke Taylor noted the contrast
between hasty visions of the industrial
sublime and philosophical meditation on
the systematic benefits of the factory. 'It
is not surprising that many false notions
should prevail respecting the influence
of machinery; the tourist, visiting a fac
tory district for the first time, cannot
contemplate without wonder and even
some emotions of involuntary fear the ...
mighty steam-engine performing its
functions with a monotonous regularity
not less impressive than the enormous
force which it sets in motion. His earliest
impression is that fire and water proverbially the best servants and the
worst masters - have here established
despotic dominion over man, and that
here matter has acquired undisputed
empire over mind'. Such errors, which
Cooke Taylor reckoned had bred unfor
tunate evangelical efforts to limit and
control factory conditions, could only be
corrected by 'time and patience,
repeated observation, and calm reflec
tion'. The philosophic gaze would see
that 'the giant, steam, is not the tyrant
but the slave of the operatives, not their
rival but their fellow-labourer, employed
as a drudge to do all the heavy work,
leaving to them the lighter and more del
icate operations'. Under Cooke Taylor's
wizardry, steam power was elevated to
the status of human labour, and human
labour transformed into a form of deli
cate leisure.34
These careful transformations were
hammered home in the tour guides pro
duced
in the 1830s and 1840s. A hand
book for visitors to Manchester, the
'metropolis of manufactures', produced
in 1839, counselled all tourists to read
Ure thoroughly and then obtain letters of
introduction to the mills run by Fairbairn and Nasmyth, the bastions of
mass-production engineering and of the
deployment of machine tools on a large
scale. With almost one hundred various
machine firms in the city to be seen,
walking through Fairbairn's ironworks,
or travelling on a specially-built train
through
Nasmyth's
Bridgewater
treat'
would give
Foundry, a 'gratifying
the appropriate sense of wonder together
with the understanding of regular sys
tem. The visitor should take a walk
among the mills, and whatever his
notions may be respecting their smoke
and steam and dust, he will be comp
elled to indulge in feelings of wonder at
their stupendous appearance'. But in
troubled times such feelings, as Cooke
Taylor also stressed, should be immedia
tely
tempered by the sense of regular
order. The Bridgewater Foundry, for
example, was established in 1836, where
major strikes of Lancashire engineers
soon erupted in protest against harsh
wage rates and the destruction of the
apprentice system. From summer 1838
Chartist demonstrations in Manchester
demanding the enfranchisement of the
working class commanded more than
fifty thousand marchers. In contrast, the
ideal tourist would expect to see Nas
myth's
'straight-line system' of through
put
and the widespread application of
self- acting machine tools. At Fairbairn's
285
Simon SCHAFFER
works 'in every direction the utmost sys
tem prevails, and each mechanic
appears to have his peculiar description
of work assigned with the utmost eco
nomical
subdivision of labour'.35
This triumph was at once a claim for the
machine tool system, and thus the cont
rol of matter by human intelligence, and
for labour discipline, and thus the cont
rol of the workforce by its masters. Ure
stressed the relation between 'the auto
matic plan' and 'the equalization of
labour'. The grand object therefore of
the modern manufacturer is, through
the union of capital and science, to
reduce the task of his work-people to the
exercise of vigilance and dexterity'. It
was precisely for this reason that in his
tours Ure judged the factory as a form of
laboratory, a potentially Utopian site
devoid of strife and replete with scientific
truth. Here the industrialist simply
became a scientist. The science of the
factory' was at once a means of disciplin
ing
labour and an object-lesson in ther
mal physics, 'better studied in a week's
residence in Lancashire than in a ses
sion of any university in Europe'. The
Manchester guidebook explained that
the self-acting principle applied to slide
control in machine lathes 'is that which
enables a child or the machine itself to
operate on masses of metal and to cut
shavings off iron as if it was deprived of
all hardness and so mathematically cor
rect that even Euclid himself might be
the workman!' The tour guides agreed
that accuracy was both demanded by,
and a corrective to, labour resistance.
The frequent and insufferable annoy
ances which engineers have experienced
from trades unions' produced 'those
admirable contrivances which are
enabling mechanicians to perform such
wonders in overcoming the resistance of
286
the material world'.36 In their accounts of
this resistance, a characteristic series of
themes was developed in the literature of
factory tourism. The apparently ove
rwhelming
power of the works should
rightly be understood as labour disci
pline within a system of division and
co-ordination, producing geometrical
precision out of mere manual skill in
despite of proletarian resistance.
In this context, the faculties of reliability
and mechanical production of tabulated
data with which Babbage sought to
endow his engines and their output also
characterised his self-presentation as
the unique author of the calculating
machines and of the factory survey.
They embodied his control over the
engine and disembodied the skills, and
camouflaged the workforce, on which it
depended. They made the engine into a
fetish. Babbage explained his view of the
property of skill involved in the calculat
ing
engines in an appeal to the premier,
the Duke of Wellington, about their
future in late 1834. 'My right to dispose,
as I will, of such inventions cannot be
contested; it is more sacred in its nature
than any hereditary or acquired prope
rty, for they are the absolute creations
of my own mind'.37 This remarkable dec
laration
followed a decade of strife with
Clement, the brilliant (but here charact
eristically
unnamed) engineer on whose
work so much of the engine's develop
mentdepended. When the project was
inaugurated Babbage had to work out
whether the design was in 'such a form
that its execution [might be] within the
reach of a skilful workman'. In turn, this
prompted his immediate examination 'in
detail of machinery of every kind'. Fights
were endemic about Babbage's claims
that the workforce should submit to,
and only needed slavishly to follow, his
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
detailed design for the calculating
engines and that any results of this
labour would belong to himself.38
Babbage's
specifications
placed
unprecedented demands on the capacit
ies
of the machine tool workshops and
soon turned those workshops into revo
lutionary
sites of innovation and train
ing.For the first engine mill he required
at least six coaxial gear wheels turned to
an extraordinary exactitude, while the
printing system needed a further set of
interlocking gears engraved with letters
and figures. A report drafted in 1829 for
the Royal Society by Babbage's closest
allies, including Herschel, conceded that
'in all those parts of the machine where
the nicest precision is required the
wheelwork only brings them by a first
approximation (though a very nice one)
to their destined places, and they are
then settled into accurate adjustment by
peculiar contrivances which admit of no
shake or latitude of any kind'.39 The
troublesome terms in these bland
remarks by the gentlemen of science
were the references to nice precision,
accurate adjustment and shake or lat
itude. What might seem to a scientist to
be a matter of irrational judgement, were
key aspects of the customary culture of
the industrialising workshop. The Manc
hester
engineer William Fairbairn remi
nisced
that 'the millwright of former
days was to a great extent the sole repre
sentative
of mechanical art'. But in very
rapid succession, in fields such as clock
making, ornamental turning and, above
all, the development of steam pistons
and screw gears, masters such as
Joseph Bramah and his chief workman
Maudslay began to design self-moving
cutting lathes to allow the production of
precise planes, reliable screws and
slide-rests to control the work in the
chuck. Their network of machine-tool
firms dominated the training and regula
tion
of precision engineering. Maudslay
set up his own London works in Lam
beth in 1797, and employees there fo
llowed
suit: Richard Roberts in 1814 in
Manchester, James Nasmyth, hired by
Maudslay in 1829 before setting up in
Manchester in 1836, and Joseph Whitworth, who began working for Maudslay
in early 1825 and established his own
firm in Manchester in 1833. The careers
of all these men were charted and
moralised in the mid-century by Samuel
Smiles, the indefatigable chronicler of
self-improvement
and
engineering
achievement.40
Clement was one of Smiles's heroes and
a veteran of this system too. The son of a
handloom weaver, the trade which suf
fered most from rapid mechanisation,
Clement worked as a turner in Glasgow
before training with Bramah and Mauds
layin the 1810s. In 1817 he set up
shop in Southwark, near Maudslay and
the centre of the London engineering
trade, where he soon introduced a new
form of slide rest to render lathe-work
regular and manageable. This remained
essentially domestic labour. When Babbage commissioned him in 1823 on the
recommendation of the eminent engi
neer Marc Brunei, Clement had just one
lathe set up in his own kitchen. As cash
began to flow for the calculating engine
project, Clement's firm soon expanded to
a scale of workforce, and of individual
machine tools, quite new in the trade.
Up to one-third of his business
depended on the Difference Engine pro
ject. Whitworth was hired to work for
Clement on the design. The Manchester
City News observed that 'Mr Clement
contrived and manufactured numerous
tools for executing the several parts of
287
Simon SCHAFFER
this [calculating] machine, educating, at
the same time, special workers to
manipulate and guide them. ... Mr Whitworth was possessed of a special apti
tude for that minute accuracy of detail in
mechanical work which necessarily
must bave been a marked characteristic
of the skilled workmen engaged on Babbage's machine'.41
These workshops were designed to train
apprentices in the production of regular
and consistently accurate work through
the use of highly standardised and auto
matic tools. A Lancashire engineer work
ingin the 1840s recalled that 'men in
large shops are not troubled with a vari
ety of work, but had one class of work
and special tools. The men soon became
expert and turned out a large quantity of
work with the requisite exactness with
out a little of the thought required of
those who work in small shops where
fresh work continually turns up but
always the same old tools'. However, as
the comments of Whitworth reveal, the
shops were also highly private sites of
specialist aptitude routinely judged to be
the personal quality of some privileged
individual. Nasmyth remembered how
his drawings of high pressure steam
engines were decisive in obtaining
employment
at Maudslay's
shop:
'Mechanical drawing is the alphabet of
the engineer. Without this the workman
is merely a hand; with it, he indicates
the possession of a head'. Such local
entanglements of standardised product
ion
and individualised skill were not
easily unravelled by Babbage's campaign
for the mechanisation and quantification
of the value of mental and manual
labour.42 Two critical problems haunted
the work on the calculating engines.
First, the place of skill and the social and
cognitive distance between designers,
288
machinists and draughtsmen was vital
to the project. When Babbage set out on
a European tour in 1828 he left Clement
what he reckoned were 'sufficient draw
ingsto enable his agents to proceed with
the construction of the Difference
Engine during his absence'. Such writ
ten instructions soon proved hopelessly
inadequate. Two years later, on his
return, Babbage demanded that the
engine construction site be moved from
Clement's works across the river to Bab
bage's
own house in Dorset Street.
Brunei helpfully suggested a compro
mise
site at the British Museum. When
the government funded a new workshop
next door to Dorset Street, Clement
demanded a large financial recompense
for the costs of splitting his workforce
between two places. The financiers
refused and Clement sacked most of his
men. Jarvis, Clement's ex-draughtsman
and future co-designer of the Analytical
Engine, explained to Babbage why it was
important that work proceed 'under your
immediate inspection': 'you might be at
once appealed to whenever it was found
very difficult to produce nearly [the
desired] effect - which is a very common
case in machinery'. The lesson is a famil
iarone. The production and reproduct
ion
of skills and material technology
requires intense and immediate interac
tion
in spaces specifically designed for
the purpose. Such designs violated the
conventions by which the machinists
plied their trade. In Maudslay's works, a
large locked door protected 'his beautiful
private workshop' where 'many trea
sured relics of the first embodiments of
his constructive genius' were hung.
They were kept as relics of his progress
towards mechanical perfection'. Such
shrines were, significantly, protected
from the intrusions of customers and
patrons alike. Clement, for example,
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
always refused to make out bills for his
work and tools 'because it not the cus
tom of engineers to do so'.43
A second decisive problem for the engine
project was therefore the issue of owner
shipand public knowledge. The costs of
the work were traditionally in the hands
of the engineer, while his tools, in this
case the lathes, planes and vices, were
always his own property. Thus the ques
tion of whether the Difference Engine
was itself a tool became relevant. From
1829 Babbage and Clement were in dis
pute about property and prices. Clement
nominated Maudslay and Babbage nomi
nated
Bryan Donkin, designer of
machinery for national weights and
measures, to arbitrate in the dispute.
Clement at once appealed to the cus
toms of his craft: all the tools, especially
the new self-acting lathes, belonged
exclusively to him and he insisted on his
right to make more calculating engines
without Babbage's permission. Once
again, Jarvis explained the point to the
infuriated mathematician:
'It should be borne in mind that the
inventor of a machine and the maker
of it have two distinct ends to obtain.
The object of the first is to make the
machine as complete as possible.
The object of the second - and we
have no right to expect he will be
influenced by any other feeling - is
to gain as much as possible by maki
ng the machine, and it is in his
interest to make it as complicated as
possible'.44
Babbage's characteristic solution was to
propose the nationalisation of the
engine, the tools and the designs. He
was pursuing what he reckoned was the
practical logic of much of the machinetool industry. Babbage was forced to
explain how rationally managed design
might look like costly disorder. He told
Wellington in the summer of 1834 that
the shift from the Difference to the Anal
ytical design was part of this order. The
fact of a new superseding an old
machine in a very few years is one of
constant occurrence in our manufactor
ies
... half finished machines have been
thrown aside as useless before their
completion'. This scarcely consoled the
administration nor did it easily engage
with the culture of the machine shops,
where personal skill and thus individual
property was at stake in every 'improved'
design and workshop layout. Once the
engine had been nationalised and
shifted to Babbage's own workshop, it
was proposed that Jarvis work there but
remain under Clement's management.
Clement refused the deal because 'my
plan may be followed without my being
in any way a gainer', and Jarvis refused
because he would be blamed for any fai
lure 'as being necessarily most familiar
with the details, whereas all the praise
which perfection would secure would
attach to Mr Clement who would come
over now and then and sanction my
plans only when he could not substitute
any of his own'. The machinist refused to
become 'party to my own degradation'.
Babbage and his Royal Society allies
might judge this as rational manage
ment,
while the engineers often saw it as
a challenge to their rights and skills".45
But while Babbage's early projects col
lapsed
under the force of these chal
lenges,
his campaign for automatic
calculation successfully captured the
interests of the engineering managers
and their new system. The intelligence
gathered for his work on manufacture
offered two important lessons about
wage rates and skill patterns. The engi
neers were prepared to value the calcu289
Simon SCHAFFER
lating engine project by raising the
wages of workmen who had been
involved in the scheme. They were also
committed to the design of increasingly
automated systems which would break
down craft divisions and allow the
employment of increasingly cheap hands
and increasingly subordinate labour
processes. In a telling annotation to his
correspondence with Wellington, Babbage remarked that 'I have been
informed by men who are now scattered
about in our manufacturing districts,
that they all get higher wages than their
fellow workmen in consequence of hav
ing worked at that machine'. Babbage's
source was Richard Wright, whom he
first employed as a valet on his Euro
pean tour in 1828. Five years later,
Wright set up as an engineer in Lambeth
Road, very near Maudslay. Armed with
Babbage's instructions, the young man
set out on a tour of the northern work
shops as part of the campaign to gather
intelligence for Babbage's book. In the
summer of 1834 Wright went to Manc
hester
to work for Whitworth, who had
opened his mill there a year earlier after
leaving the Difference Engine project.
They are building as large a Factory as
any in Manchester', Wright told Babbage. The struggle between craft custom
and innovative production-line tech
niques
was striking. According to an
American visitor to the Whitworth fac
tory, because of subordination of the
workforce and the increasing use of
self-operating machines 'no-one in his
works dared to think'. So Wright set out
to make himself fit for the Babbage
engine scheme. He went to classes at the
local Mechanics' Institute and drawing
academy. He reported to Babbage that
'there is much talk about the [calculat
ing]
Machine here, so much so that a
man who has worked at it has a greater
290
chance of the best work and I am proud
to say that I am getting more wages than
any other workman in the Factory'.
Wright offered himself to Babbage as a
possible master engineer. 'I should be
glad to convince you that I am able to
complete it by making either a model ...
or by making any difficult part of the
Machine either calculating or printing'.
During the later 1830s Wright was trav
elling extensively throughout the factory
system. In 1835, for example, he walked
from London to Yorkshire, where he sur
veyed the factories and the mines, then
on to Scotland, Ulster and Lancashire.
Though he complained that 'the habits
and conversation of the Factory are
indeed disgusting to a thinking mind', by
the end of the decade he had set up his
own works in Manchester, where 'I
intend to employ nothing but the best
workmen and material', and from the
early 1840s was in active consultation
on the Analytical project. By making
himself a 'thinking mind', Wright became
Babbage's ideal, a Smilesian paragon
who reckoned that rational management
and the careful surveillance of the divi
sion of labour provided the key to suc
cess in making the calculating engines.
In a lengthy epistle Wright explained to
Babbage how the new system should
work and how management should rule
the skills of the workforce:
The man you select for the work
shop ought to be a good general
workman both at Vice and Lathe for
such a man can see by the way a
man begins a job whether he will fin
ish it in a workmanlike manner or
not. Perhaps you are not quite aware
that at Mr Clement's and most other
Factories the work is divided into the
branches Vice and Lathe, and in
most cases the man who works at
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
the one is nearly ignorant of the
other ... He ought above all to have
studied the dispositions of workmen
so as to keep the workshop free from
contention and disorder and the
causes of the repeated failures of so
much new Machinery for I am sure
there are more failures through
waste of labour and bad manage
ment
than there are through bad
schemes or any other cause".46
Wright's was the anonymous voice
recorded in the pages of Babbage's Econ
omy of Machinery and which, through
this text, helped articulated the con
cerns
of those employed in the auto
matic system in the machine-tool trades.
In the philosophy of manufacture much
was made of the highly personal skills
embodied in the master-engineers. In
his travel notes for the engine survey,
Babbage recorded that 'causes of failure'
should be found by consulting a 'man of
science on the principle' and 'a practical
engineer on mechanical difficulties'. It
was acknowledged, and celebrated, that
manual dexterity remained a central
attribute of 'the skilled workman*. Bab
bage reckoned that 'the first necessity'
for his Difference Engine was 'to pre
serve the life of Mr Clement... it would be
extremely difficult if not impossible to
find any other person of equal talent
both as a craftsman and as a mechanic
ian'.
Engine masters became heroes.
According to Nasmyth 'by a few masterly
strokes Maudslay could produce plane
surfaces so true that when their accu
racy was tested by a standard plane sur
face of absolute truth, they were never
found defective'. At the same time,
'absolute truth' was increasingly vested
in the standardised tool-kit of the
machine shops. No doubt this was why
the authoritative scales and tools in use
were so often fetishised. Maudslay's
benchtop scale was 'humourously called
... The Lord Chancellor', while Nasmyth
and his colleagues boasted of 'the prog
eny of legitimate descendants' which
they had produced.47
In London, Lancashire, Clydeside and
elsewhere, the systems these men
helped forge were the sites of a new
managerial and technical network,
dependent as much on strenuous regu
lation of the labour process as on the
development of new automatic machine
ry.
The development of ready-made
metal textile machinery, for example,
was a result of this system. In the
process, craft customs were subverted
and standardised, and accurate product
ion
secured.48 The managers of the most
advanced workshops eventually became
Babbage's closest allies and sources of
intelligence and support. In his Economy
of Machinery Babbage made much of the
means through which the lathe would
guarantee 'identity' and 'accuracy', and
then accounted accuracy as an economy
of time, since 'it would be possible for a
very skilful workman, with files and pol
ishing
substances', to produce a perfect
surface. So artisan skill could be trans
muted into its wage equivalent. In 1847,
he contributed a discussion of this the
ory of lathe-work and metal-turning to
the definitive textbook produced by
Charles Hotzapffel, doyen of specialist
lathe designers. Holtzapffel himself then
contributed a long description of Bab
bage's
own tools on the engine project.
In the next decade, both Whitworth and
Nasmyth offered Babbage support in
completing the Analytical Engine and
testified in public to the benefits of the
calculating engines for their own trade.
Babbage's friend the dissenting mathe
matician Augustus de Morgan brilliantly
291
Simon SCHAFFER
summarised the relation between the
lathe, emblem of automatic skill, and
Babbage, master of mechanical analysis,
in a cartoon showing him at the lathe
armed only with a series of logarithmic
functions. In this image, the support
staff and the workshops on whose
virtues Babbage depended are invisible.
Mathematical analysis is now identified
with the automatic machine and its
master.49
Conclusion: the fabrication
and exhibition of reliable
numbers
Despite these images of mastery and
mechanism, Babbage's engines were
never used to make the tables for which
they were designed. In this sense, they
provide an object lesson in the difficul
ties
of marketing science commercially.
Michel Callon warns us that economistic
analogies for the processes of science,
however appealing, 'are really more dan
gerous
than useful, because they end up
blocking the only question that matters:
how does research manage to create in
one and the same movement both new
products and the demand which is asso
ciated with them 9'50 Babbage's project
helped produce a demand it did not
meet. Its principal impact on the conf
licting
fields of Victorian scientific man
agement
and precision measurement
was the production of that demand. In
Victorian scientific
culture,
these
demands were often produced through
public exhibition and then analysed in
moral and disciplinary terms. The histo
rian Michael Lindgren recently showed
that Lardner's 1830s publicity for Bab
bage's
schemes soon prompted the
Swedish engineers Georg and Edvard
Scheutz to build a series of difference
engines, completed in the 1850s. Public
292
display of these devices as commodities
was decisive. Babbage's erstwhile collab
orator Bryan Donkin brought the
Scheutz machine to London in 1854,
showed it to the Royal Society, and even
tually persuaded the General Register
Office to use such an engine to compute
its life tables. One version was shown at
the Paris international exhibition in
1855, a show which Babbage described
as 'remarkable beyond all former ones
for the number and ingenuity of the
machines which performed arithmetical
operations'. Scheutz's machine was
thence shipped to the Dudley Observat
ory
in New York State for astronomical
tabulation. This engine ended up in a
Chicago Museum, and a huge version of
it, designed by Barnard Grant, was put
on display at the Philadelphia Centenn
ial
Exhibition in 1876. Babbage himself
was obsessed by the place (and the
absence) of his own engines at success
ive
London exhibitions. He reckoned
they had been deliberately excluded
from the Crystal Palace in 1851. Even
when shifted from King's College
Museum to be put on display at the
International Exhibition of 1862, the
Difference Engine was 'placed in a small
hole in a dark corner where it could, with
some difficulty, be seen by six people at
the same time'.51 These exhibitions
simultaneously turned machines into
commodities and provided the sites at
which the disciplinary and industrial
division of labour could be mapped and
reinforced. In his manifesto for the Cryst
alPalace, Prince Albert made the point
pithily: 'the great principle of the division
of labour, which may be called the movi
ng power of civilisation, is being
extended to all branches of science and
industry'. In the exhibitions, the com
plex interaction between science as the
producer of industrial know-how and
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
science as the consumer of industrial
products was displayed, debated and
defined.52
Both apologists of the factory system
and eulogists of the exhibitions often
lauded machines, including the calculat
ing
engines, because they disciplined the
workforce, prevented errors and guarant
eed
reliable production. Proletarian vis
itors
to the machine shows equally
frequently complained that their own
role in manufacture was invisible there.
Thus Andrew Ure characteristically
lapsed into the imagery of Olympus and
of Frankenstein to describe Richard
Roberts's new spinning mule installed in
the Manchester mills as 'the Iron Man
sprung out of the hands of our modern
Prometheus at the bidding of Minerva - a
creation destined to restore order among
the industrious classes'. In his story,
scientific wisdom taught industry how to
run its affairs and mechanise its labour
process. But the displacement of handic
raftby the machine was neither uni
form nor universal. As Raphael Samuel
has demonstrated, mid-Victorian indust
rialmechanisation was accompanied by
the preservation, intensification and
expansion of skilled manual labour
throughout the economy. The mid-Vic
torianengineer was still characteristi
cally
a craftsman, an artisan or
mechanic rather than an operative or
hand'. The invisibility of human labour
in the automatic system was a political
and moral image never justified by fac
tory life nor by mathematical tabulation.
As William Lazonick has argued, for
example, in the cotton factories over
lookers
preferred less mechanical meth
ods for winding yarn onto spindles
because such methods yielded much
greater discipline of the conduct and
quality of labour.53 The same conflicts
were apparent in the career of the calcu
lating machines. The boss of the General
Register Office, William Fair, confirmed
that the Difference Engine 'required
incessant attention. ... The work had to
be watched with anxiety and its arith
metical
music had to be elicited by fr
equent
tuning and skilful handling'. It
was by no means obvious to all Victorian
scientists that it was desirable to dis
place
such skills. At Greenwich, Airy
was never convinced that it was possible
to mechanise the highly moral and
mathematically complex functions of his
computers. In 1842 he told the Chancell
or
of the Exchequer Henry Goulburn
that 'scarcely a figure of the Nautical
Almanac could be computed by it.... the
difficult part must be done by human
computers'. Fifteen years later, when
Donkin and Scheutz were propagandisi
ng
for the difference, engines at the
(General Register Office, Airy conceded
that the simple functions required for a
life table might be mechanised, but
wanted Greenwich Observatory kept as a
human preserve. In the Observatory 'no
advantage would be gained by the use of
the Machine and (Airy) would prefer the
pen computation of human computers
in the way in which it has hitherto been
employed'.54 These were controversial
views. Some critics reckoned that the
mathematical discipline which Airy
admired so much was little better than
working a prison treadmill. Far from pre
serving
human skill, they complained,
Airy's Cambridge-trained mathematic
ians
were actually reducing it to
mechanical rote. Thus the Edinburgh
moralist William Hamilton reckoned that
both Cambridge mathematics and the
treadmill 'equally educate to a mechanic
al
continuity of attention, as in each the
scholar is disagreeably thrown out on
the slightest wandering of thought'. To
293
Simon SCHAFFER
such a hostile observer there seemed lit
tle to choose between calculating
engines and Greenwich computers. So if
Airy claimed that a machine which could
only compute using fourth differences
was inadequate for the analysis his
astronomical tabulations needed, Babbage countered that it was 'really extra
ordinary
that when it was demonstrated
that all tables are capable of being com
puted by machinery, and even when a
machine existed which computed certain
tables, the Astronomer Royal did not
become the most enthusiastic supporter
of an instrument which could render
such invaluable service to his own sci
ence'.
The calculating engines did not
become commodities in the Royal Observ
atory.55
For some pre-eminent Victorian scient
ists, however, these machines func
tioned as practical symbols of nature's
capacities. The calculating engines could
become powerful emblems of the way the
universe really worked. Here are two
examples. Throughout the 1830s Babbage regaled his house-guests with a
portentous party trick. He could set the
Difference Engine to print the series of
integers for an apparently endless
period. Any observer of the machine's
output would assume that this series
would continue indefinitely. But the ini
tial setting of the machine could be
adjusted so that at a certain point the
machine would then advance in steps of
ten thousand. An indefinite number of
different rules might be programmed in
this way. To the observer, each disconti
nuity
would seem to be a 'miracle', an
event unpredictable from the apparently
immutable course of the machine. Yet in
fact the manager of the system would
have planned it beforehand. His onlook
ers
were almost always impressed.
294
tors 'went to see the thinking machine
(for such it seems)' and were treated to
Babbage's miraculous show of appare
ntlysudden breaks in its output. There
was a sublimity in the views thus opened
of the ultimate results of intellectual
power', one onlooker reported. A few
streets away, the young naturalist
Charles Darwin learnt his lesson and set
out to use Babbage's system as an ana
logue for the origin of species by natural
law without divine intervention. Darwin
larded his Origin of Species (1859) with
arguments he found in Babbage's
description of this phenomenon. He
found in the calculating engine the mes
sage that the world could be represented
as a mechanical array visible as a sys
tem from the point of view of the philoso
pherand in no need of immediate
miracles to maintain its regular order.56
Another example of the universalisation
of such engines is found in the origin of
the electromagnetic theory of light.
Between 1843 and 1862, as we have
seen, Babbage's Difference Engine stood
in the Museum of King's College, Lon
don. During the 1850s the College's pro
fessor
of manufacturing art and
machinery, the Cambridge mathematic
ian
Thomas Goodeve, lectured on the
machines in his Museum, demonstrated
their properties and produced an influ
ential textbook, Elements of mechanism
(1860). Gear wheels and pulley blocks,
trains and lathes all provided matter for
his clasies.57 Soon after Goodeve left the
College another Cambridge mathematic
ian,
James Clerk Maxwell, was
appointed as natural philosophy profes
sor
at King's. Maxwell was still in post
when Babbage's calculating engine was
at last put on public show at the 1862
industrial exhibition in London. At the
same time, Maxwell published a radical
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
new model of the behaviour of luminiferous ether, the principal topic of mid-Vic
torianmathematical physics. Maxwell
cited Goodeve's textbook for the
mechanical analogy he constructed for
the ether. In this model, Maxwell envis
aged an infinite array of gear wheels sep
arated
by the idle wheels he found
described in Goodeve's text. The velocity
of each gear wheel was analogised to the
local magnetic field strength and the
motion of the idle wheels to the flow of
electric current. This model warranted
Maxwell's calculation that by setting the
torsion coefficient of the gears and
wheels appropriately, the speed of prop
agation
of an impulse through the gear
array would be identical to that of light
in the ether.58
Here, perhaps, was another legacy of
Babbage's project. It had become plausi
ble
that natural objects really behaved in
the way that geared engines did. At the
end of his Economy of Machinery and
Manufactures, first published three
decades earlier, Babbage had described
'a higher science' which 'is now prepar
ing
its fetters for the minutest atoms
that nature has created: already it has
chained the etherial fluid, and bound in
one harmonious system all the intricate
and splendid phenomena of light. It is
the science of calculation which becomes
continually more necessary at each step
of our progress, and which must ult
imately
govern the whole of the applica
tionsof science to the arts of life'.59 It is
significant for this story of the product
ion
of knowledge and machines that a
prophecy of the role of tabulated calcula
tion
in classical physics appears at the
end of a text on the factory system.
Thanks to Billy Ashworth, Bob Brain, William
Ginn, Ben Marsden, Iwan Moras, Otto Sibum,
Richard Staley and Andy Warwick for their gener
oushelp. In this paper I cite manuscripts held in
the Cambridge University Library (Babbage
Papers and Airy Papers), the Royal Society
Library (Herschel Papers) and the British Library
(Babbage Papers).
Notes
British
1 Babbage
Library toMSSDupin,
ADD 3718X
20 December
f.l 17.
1833,
2 For science as a system of organised trust
(rather than scepticism) see Steven Shapln, A
Social History of Truth (Chicago: Chicago Univers
ity
Press, 1994), chapter 2. The sources ment
ioned here are Ludwick Fleck, Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1979); T. S. Kuhn, 'Second
Thoughts on Paradigms', in The Essential Tension
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), chapt
er12; I. Lakatos, 'Falsification and the Methodo
logyof Scientific Research Programmes', in I.
Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds.. Criticism and the
Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971), 91-195; M. Callon, 'El
ements pour une sociologie de la traduction', L'An
néesociologique (Paris: PUF, 1986), 169-208.
3 Astronomer Royal's Report, 1853, cited by J.
A. Bennett, 'George Biddell Airy and Horology',
Annuls of Science 37 (1980), 269-85, p. 282; Walt
er Maunder, The Royal Observatory Greenwich
(London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), p. 137.
See Robert W. Smith, 'A National Observatory
Transformed: Greenwich in the Nineteenth Cent
ury', Journal for the History of Astronomy 22
(1991), 5-20.
4 George Dodd, Days at the Factories (Charles
Knight: London, 1843), p.l.
5 Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitale du XIXe
Siècle, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd éd. (Paris: Le
Cerf, 1993), p. 39. Thomas Richards, The Com
modity Culture of Victorian England (Verso: Lon
don, 1991); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas:
the Expositions Universelles. Great Exhibitions
and World Fairs 1851-1939 (Manchester Univers
ity
Press: Manchester, 1991); Armand Martelait.
L'invention de la communication (La Découverte:
Paris, 1994), pp. 132-9. For Chance Brothers and
Martineau see Clive Behagg, 'Secrecy, Ritual and
Folk Violence: the Opacity of the Workplace in the
First Half of the Nineteenth Century', in R. D.
Storch, éd., Popular Culture and Custom in Nine
teenth Century England (London: Croom Helm,
1982), 154-79, pp. 156-9.
6 William Ashworth, The Calculating Eye'.
British Journal for the History of Science 28
(1994).
7 Herschel's comments on the 'superiority' of
theory are In his Preliminary Discourse on the
Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman,
Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831), p. 132. His
remarks on instruments are in his Outlines of
Astronomy, 4th ed. (London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, 1851), p.76.
8 G. B. Airy, 'Report on the Progress of Astron
omy
during the Present Century', in Report of the
Second Meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science (John Murray: London
1833) 125-89 p. 184; Airy to Harcourt. 5 Septem
ber
1832. in Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray,
295
Simon SCHAFFER
Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence of the
British Associationfor the Advancement of Science
(Royal Historical Society: London. 1984), p. 151.
9 D. J. F. Arago, 'Mémoire sur un moyen très
simple de s'affranchir des erreurs personelles', in
M. J. A. Barrai, éd.. Oeuvres complètes de
François Arapo (Gide: Paris, 1859), 5: 233-44. On
mechanizing the personal equation see Simon
Schaffer, 'Astronomers Mark Time', Science in
Context 2 (1988), 115-145.
Crisis'
10 SeeinforCharles
exampleBabbage
Doron and
Swade,
his The
Calculating
Tables
Engines (London: Science Museum, 1991), pp.
1-5.
1 1 The best discussion of the problem of tables'
reliability is Andrew Warwick, The Laboratory of
Theory', in M. Norton Wise, éd.. Values of Preci
sion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994); the citation is from Dodd, Days at the Fact
ories, p. 517.
12 Airy, "Report on the Progress of Astronomy
during the Present Century', p. 124; for the fi
scal-mil tary
state see John Brewer, The Sinews of
Power: War Money and the English State (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989).
13 Allan Chapman, 'Sir George Airy and the Con
cept of International Standards in Science. Time
keeping
(1985)' 321-8
and Navigation',
and William Vistas
Ginn, Philosophers
in Astronomyand
28
Artisans: Men of Science and Instrument Makers in
London 1820-1860 (PhD thesis, Kent University,
1991), p. 237; Herschel to Babbage, 25 October
1814, Royal Society HS 2.31.
14 John Herschel, The Yard, the Pendulum and
the Metre' (1863), in Familiar Lectures on Scient
ificSubjects (London: Alexander Strahan, 1867),
419-51, pp. 429-32; see Julian Hoppit. 'Reform
ing
Britain's Weights and Measures', English His
torical Review (1993), 82-104.
15 Charles Babbage, 'On tables of the constants
of nature and art', Smithsonian Institution Annual
Report (1856), 289-302, pp. 289, 293-^. For 'con
stants'
see Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p.57.
16 William Thomson, Popular Lectures and
Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1894), 2: 120.
For background to Thomson's remarks, see
Simon Schaffer, 'Victorian Metrology and its
Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms', in
Susan Cozzens and Robert Bud, eds. Invisible
Connexions (Bellingham: SPIE Press, 1992),
23-56. p. 42.
17 Swade, The Tables Crisis'; Michael Williams,
The Difference Engines', Computer Journal 19
(1976). 82-9.
18 Babbage, A Letter to Humphry Davy (London:
Booth, 1822), p.8. The gift from Didot in 1819 is
recorded at the front of Babbage's copy of the sine
tables, Cambridge University Library MSS ADD
8705.37. For other responses to Prony, see
[Dionysius Lardner], 'Babbage's Calculating
Engines', Edinburgh Review 59 (1834), 263-327,
p. 275. For the Revolutionary context of Prony's
work see Lorraine Daston's forthcoming paper in
Critical Inquiry (1994). For Prony, geodesy and
the division of labour see Jean-Claude Perrot,
296
Une histoire intellectuelle de l'économie politique
(Paris: EHESS, 1992), p 411 and Mattelart, L'in
vention de communication, p. 78.
19 Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a
Philosopher (London: Longmans. 1864), pp.
138-40 (Babbage's emphasis).
20 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization takes com
mand: a contribution to anonymous history (Nor
ton: New York, 1969). p. 3: 'history writing is ever
tied to the fragment'. For London's geography see
Iwan Morus, Jim Secord and Simon Schaffer.
'Scientific London'. in Celina Fox éd.,
London-World City 1800-1840 (Yale: New Haven,
1992/Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Essen), pp. 129-42.
21 Henry Colebrooke, "Address on presenting
the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to
Charles Babbage', Memoirs of the Astronomical
Society 1 (1825), 509-12, pp. 509-10.
22 Charles Babbage, Passages, p. 1 14. See H. W.
Buxton, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the late
Charles Babbage, ed. R. A. Hyman (1880; Camb
ridge,
MA.: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 80-102;
Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the
Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), pp. 123-35; Michael Lindgren, Glory and
Failure: the Difference Engines of Johann Muller,
Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz
(Cambridge, MA.: M.I.T.Press, 1990), pp. 52-59.
23 Babbage, 'On a Method of Expressing by
Signs the Action of Machinery', Philosophical
Transactions 116 (1826). 250-65 and draft in
Cambridge University Library MSS ADD 8705.2 1 ;
[Lardner], 'Babbage's Calculating Engine', pp.
318-319. For Lardner's collaboration on mechani
cal
notation with Babbage, and its publicity in
Paris and Berlin, see Babbage to Dupin, 20
December 1833 and Babbage to Humboldt,
December 1833, British Library MSS ADD 37188
ff. 117, 123.
24 Ada Lovelace. 'Sketch of the Analytical
Engine by L.F.Menabrea', Taylor's Scientific Memo
irs3 (1843), 666-731. p. 690; Maxine Berg. The
Machinery Question and the Making of Political
Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge. 1980), pp. 182-89; Babbage,
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 120,
175. See Richard M. Romano, The Economic
Ideas of Charles Babbage'. History of Political
Economy 14 ( 1982), 385-405, p. 391. For Marx's
response to the Babbage principle see Karl Marx,
Capital: Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1976), p.469: 'the collective worker now pos
sesses all the qualities necessary for production
in an equal degree of excellence, and expends
them in the most economical way'.
25 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, pp. 54,
250-1: Buxton Memoir of Babbage. p. 194. Very
useful discussions of the theory of calculation
involved in the engines are Jean Mosconi,
'Charles Babbage: vers une théorie du calcul
mécanique'. Revue de l'Histoire des Sciences 36
(1983). 69-107 and especially Marie-José
Durand-Richard, "Charles Babbage: de l'Ecole
Algébrique anglaise à la 'Machine Analytique'
Mathématiques. Informatique. et Sciences
Humaines. 118 (1992), 5-31.
BABBAGE'S CALCULATING ENGINES AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM
26 Babbage. Economy of Machinery, pp. 379,
388; Hyman, Babbage p.86; Buxton, Memoir of
Babbage. pp. 215, 111. For Babbage on honours
see The Exposition of 1851. 2nd ed. (London:
John Murray, 1951), pp.220-49 and for the
Bonapartist connection see Reflections on the
Decline of Science in England (London: Fellowes,
1930), pp. 25-7.
27 Hyman, Babbage. p. 192; Carolyn Cooper,
The Portsmouth System of Manufacture', Tech
nology and Culture 25 (1984), 182-225, p. 213.
For Watkins' models see Watkins to Babbage, 15
January 1834, British Library MSS ADD 37188
f. 160. For machine exhibitions in the early nine
teenth century see Richard Altick, The Shows of
London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1978), pp.
375-89. For the Analytical Engine and the
Jacquard Loom, see Lovelace, 'Sketch of the Anal
ytical Engine", p. 706; for the Jacquard Loom's
effects on the weavers, see Dorothy George, Lon
don Life in the Eighteenth Century (London: Pere
grine. 1966), p. 191.
28 Cooper, 'Portsmouth
System';
Peter
Linebaugh, 'Technological Repression and the
Origin of the Wage', London Hanged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), chapter 11.
Thanks to William Ashworth for information
about Samuel Bentham's role.
29 Cooper, 'Portsmouth System', pp. 213-14;
Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 399-401.
30 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English
Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
pp. 889, 915; John Rule, The Labouring Classes
in Early Industrial England (London: Longman,
1986), pp. 357-63.
31 E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the
English Crowd'. Past and Present 38 (1967) and
Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin,
1991), chapters 4 and 5; Michel Foucault, SurvexSXir et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gal
limard.
1975), part 3 and Foucault (with M.
Perrot and J. P. Barou), 'L'oeil du pouvoir', in J.
Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris: Bellond, 1977).
For customary skill see John Rule, The Property
of Skill in the Period of Manufacture', in Patrick
Joyce, éd.. The Historical Meanings of Work (Camb
ridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987),
99-118.
32 Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures
1700-1820 (London: Fontána, 1985), p. 229. For
factory tourism see Stephen Marcus, Engels.
Manchester and the Working Class (New York:
Norton, 1985), pp. 30-66; Francis Klingender, Art
and the Industrial Revolution (Frogmore: Paladin,
1972), pp. 109-117.
33 Manchester as it is (Manchester: Love and
Barton, 1839), p. 217.
34 William Cooke Taylor, Factories and the Fac
tory System (London: Jeremiah How, 1844). p. 1 1.
For his ethnography see Christopher Herbert,
Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in
the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 1991), pp. 61-64.
35 Manchester as it is, pp. 201-2, 210. For Nasmyth on the strikes see Nasmyth, Autobiography,
pp. 222-8. For Manchester and machine tools see
A. E. Musson, 'Joseph Whitworth and the Growth
of Mass-production Engineering', Business His
tory 17 (1975), 109-49, p. 113. For Chartist
demonstrations see Dorothy Thompson, The
Chartists (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1984), ch.
3.
36 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures
(London: Charles Knight, 1835), pp. 20-21. 25;
Manchester as it is. pp. 217, 32-33. Further ev
idence is available in Maxine Berg, éd.. Technology
and Toil in Nineteenth Century Britain (London:
CSE Books, 1973), esp. p. 159.
37 Babbage to Wellington, 23 December 1834,
British Library MSS ADD 4061 1 f. 181.
38 Babbage, (1822)
mechanism'
The science
in Buxton,
of number
Memoir
reduced
of Bab
to
bage, p. 65.
39 Buxton, Memoir of Babbage. p.86.
40 William Fairbairn, Treatise on Mills and
Machines (London, 1861), p. v; Samuel Smiles,
Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool
Makers (London, 1863). The 'Life of Clement' is
chapter 3.
41 K. R. Gilbert, 'Machine-Tools', in С Singer et
al, eds.. History of Technology Volume 4 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1958), 417-41; Musson, 'Whitworth
and the Growth of Mass Production Engineering',
p. 115.
42 "Autobiography of Thomas Wood' in John
Burnett, éd.. Useful Toil Autobiographies of Worki
ngPeople (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p.
310; Nasmyth, Autobiography, p. 125.
43 Buxton, Memoir of Babbage, pp. 81-2, 97;
Hyman, Babbage, pp. 125, 130-2; Nasmyth,
Autobiography, p. 130. For the move to Dorset
Street, see Babbage to Clement, 18 May 1832,
British Library MSS ADD 37186 f.400. For
Clement's refusal to give bills, see Clement to
Babbage, 18 November 1829, British Library
MSS ADD 37184, f. 419.
44 Hyman, Babbage. pp. 124, 128 and Jarvis to
Babbage, February 1831, British Library MSS
ADD 37185 f.419. The best discussion of the fight
with Clement is William Ginn. Philosophers and
Artisans: the relationship between men of science
and instrument makers in London 1820-1860
(PhD thesis, Kent, 1991), pp. 157-69.
45 Babbage to Wellington, July 1834, in Buxton,
Memoir of Babbage. p. 104; Jarvis and Clement to
Babbage, in Hyman, Babbage: pp. 131-2.
46 Wright to Babbage. 18 June 1834 and 13
January 1839, British Library MSS ADD 37188
f.390 and 37191 ff.99-100; compare Hyman,
Babbage, pp. 66, 107.
47 Babbage. 'Notes for Economy of Manufact
ure',
University Library Cambridge MSS ADD
8705.25 p. 10; Babbage, 'Report on the Calculat
ing
Machine', 1830. British Library MSS ADD
37185 f.264; Nasmyth, Autobiography, pp.
148-9, 179. Compare Ginn, Philosophers and
Artisans, p. 167, on the uniqueness of artisan
skill.
48 John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial
Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1974), pp. 224-5; Ian Inkster, Science and Tech
nology in History (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp.
82-83.
297
Simon SCHAFFER
49 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, p. 67;
Charles Hotzapffel, Turning and Mechanical
Manipulation, 5 vols. (London, 1843-1884), 2:
984-91; Nasmyth to Babbage, 22 June 1855 and
Babbage to Whitworth, July 1855, British Library
MSS ADD ff.249, 366. The cartoon is in de Mor
gan to Babbage, 21 October 1839, British Library
MSS ADD 37191 1. 256.
50 Michel Callon, 'Introduction' in Callon, éd..
La Science et ses Réseaux (Paris: La Découverte,
1989), p. 14 n.2.
51 Lindgren Glory and Failure, pp. 279-82
Michael R. Williams, A History of Computing Tech
nology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1985),
pp. 174-82; Babbage, Passages, pp. 150-9 (Babbage's emphasis).
52 Mattelart, L'invention de la communication, p.
135; Prince Albert, speech at the Guildhall, 1849,
in Robert Brain, Going to the Fair: Readings in the
Culture of Nineteenth Century Exhibitions (Camb
ridge: Whipple Museum. 1993), p. 24.
53 Tine Bruland, 'Industrial Conflict as a source
of technical innovation: the development of the
automatic spinning mule'. Economy and Society
11 (1982), 91-121; Ure, Philosophy of Manufact
ures,
p. 367; William Lazonick, 'Industrial Rela
tions and Technical Change: the case of the
self-acting mule', Cambridge Journal of Economi
cs
3 (1979), 231-262; Raphael Samuel, The
Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand
Technology in mid -Victorian Britain', History
Workshop Journal 3 (1977), 6-72, p. 41). Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was subtitled The
modern Prometheus".
54 Airy to Goulburn, September 1842, Royal
Greenwich Observatory MSS 6/427 ff.65-66; Airy
to Trevelyan, 30 September 1857, in Lindgren,
298
Glory and Failure, p. 280; Farr. Tables of Lif
etimes (1864) in Williams, Computing Technology,
p. 180.
55 (William Hamilton), 'Study of Mathematics',
Edinburgh Review 62 (1836), 409-55, p. 429;
Babbage, Passages, p. 139.
56 Charles Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.
2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1838), pp. 32-43;
Lady Byron to King, 21 June 1833, in Doris Langley Moore, Ada Countess of Lovelace (London:
John Murray. 1977), p.44. Darwin's use of Babbage's argument is discussed in Adrian Desmond
and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Pen
guin, 1991), chapter 15.
57 Thomas Goodeve, The Elements of Mecha
nism( London: Longmans, 1860), pp. 72 (for idle
wheels) and 136-7 (for counting wheels); F. J. С
Hearnshaw, History of King's College London
(London: Harrap, 1929), pp. 191. 247-60. Some
of these King's College machines, including the
counting machines, are now illustrated in Alan
Morton and Jane Wess, Public and Private Sci
ence: the King George III Collection (London: Sci
ence Museum, 1993), pp. 35-37 and 552-67.
58 James Clerk Maxwell, "On Physical Lines of
Force: Part 3'. in W. D. Niven, éd.. Scientific
Papers of James Clerk Maxwell 2 vols. (Camb
ridge; Cambridge University Press, 1890), 1:
499-500. See Salvo d'Agostino, 'Weber and
Maxwell on the Discovery of the Velocity of Light',
in M. D. Grmek et al., eds., On Scientific Discov
ery
(Dordrecht: Reidel. 1980), 281-93. p. 287 and
Daniel M. Siegel, Innovation in Maxwell's Electr
omagnetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers
ity
Press, 1991), pp. 136-43.
59 Babbage, Economy of Machinery, p. 387.