Science and Reform : Selected Works of Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was a key figure of a great era of British history.

Best remembered for his pioneering Difference and Analytical Engines, forerunners of the modern computer, Babbage was also an active reformer of science and society.

For more than a quarter of a century Babbage's brilliant soir6es attracted leading figures in London society: Dickens, Macaulay, Macready, Rogers, Darwin, Lyle, the Brunels; and many of the liberal intelligentsia of Europe, including Cavour and de Tocqueville besides leading men of science.

Among his friends were the Bonapartes, the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Somerset, Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace and the reforming Earl of Shaftesbury, whose interest Babbage directed to the factories.

In this book, Anthony Hyman, the acknowledged authority on Babbage's life and work has selected passages from Babbage's many publications, including his proposals on profit sharing and life peerages and his ideas on such topics as the applications of science, scientific management, taxation and life assurance - subjects which almost pre-empt the preoccupations of present-day society. Setting each extract in perspective, Anthony Hyman has provided the passages with an explanatory editorial commentary.

Babbage's interests ranged widely, from economic theory and statistics to lighthouse signalling and postal services.

His book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and Some of its Causes (1830) was a major attempt to re-organise scientific activity at a national level.

He also published widely on social reform and on theoretical and practical science.

Beyond all this his greatest claim to fame is as the founding father of computing.

He invented punched card input/output, separate store and mill, general conditional operations, binary addressing, micro-programming, and even array processing.

Together with his concern for the systematic application of science, technology and mathematical method to commercial, industrial and economic problems, his work on computing makes Charles Babbage one of the most remarkable as well as one of the most colourful figures in the history of science.