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4 Charles Babbage's
Analytical Engine,
1871.
Engine, which was comparatively simple, being intended only to
calculate and print out such tables. The second, the 'Analytical
Engine', had it been completed, would have been programmable, and
able to calculate any formula, and to compare numbers and decide
how to proceed with the operation it was performing. The engines
were modelled on industrial machinery and built using the same
techniques. But they also invoked the newly emerging digital
technologies of control. Babbage intended employing the punched
cards used by Jacquard in his loom as a method of programming
his Analytical Engine. What Babbage hoped to achieve for his
Analytical Engine is less extraordinary than some of the ideas of his
colleague Ada Lovelace (illus.
). She remarked that the Analytical
Engine 'can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as
if they were
letters
or other
general
symbols'. She also suggested that
the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music
of 'any degree of complexity or extent'. Remarking on the use of
punched cards as used in the Jacquard Loom she wrote 'We may say
most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just
as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves'.
8
Though Babbage
did not think of employing his engines in pursuit of efficient
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