Page:Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/88

 account of the invention in French, which was afterwards translated into English and embellished with notes by Lady Lovelace, née Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of the poet Byron. This lady did not inherit the poetic genius of her father, but was remarkable for exact mathematical attainments, which were also possessed by her mother.

Babbage himself never wrote an extended account of the Analytical Engine; the memoir of Menabréa with the notes of Lady Lovelace gives the most complete account regarding it. In 1848 he made drawings for a new Difference Engine in which the adding was to be effected by his new contrivance. He was anxious to discharge whatever imagined obligation might be supposed to rest upon him in connection with the original undertaking, and an entirely practicable proposal was laid before the Premier (Lord Derby) by Lord Rosse, a mathematical nobleman. The Premier turned the matter over to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, who gave an adverse decision. The wrath of Babbage at the novelist was unbounded; he denounced him as the Herostratus of Science. A few years later a Difference Engine, suggested by Babbage's plans, was actually constructed in Sweden by a printer named Scheutz; it performed successfully the kind of work for which it was designed. The original Scheutz machine was bought by the Dudley Observatory at Albany, N. Y., and was used to a slight extent about 1878; a copy of it constructed for the English Government has been used for the calculation of insurance tables.

After the death of Babbage in 1871 what he had accomplished on the Analytical Engine was transferred for safe-keeping to the Museum at South Kensington. The British Association appointed a committee to examine it; in 1878 they reported that the part assembled was only a small portion of the mill sufficient to show the methods of addition and subtraction; that the drawings were complete in exhibiting every movement essential to the design of the machine. They concluded that the labors of Babbage, first on the Difference Engine, and afterwards on the Analytical Engine were a marvel of mechanical