babbage

Nineteenth-century British mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage has a host of inventions to his name, including the standard railroad gauge, the cowcatcher and the ophthalmoscope. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET A famous design he never built is his Difference Engine No. 2, a piece of Victorian technology meant to tussle with logarithms and trigonometry. Working from Babbage’s 1849 plans, Doron D. Swade, a curator at London’s Science Museum, constructed the first working version of it in 1991 [see “Redeeming Charles Babbage’s Mechanical Computer”; SciAm, February 1993], which is on display at the museum. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NETNow Swade has constructed a second engine, unveiled on May 10 for a one-year exhibition at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. It consists of 8,000 bronze, cast-iron and steel parts, weighs five tons and measures 11 feet (3.4 meters) long and seven feet (2.1 meters) high.