made and found useful. Where various permutations of numbers or other
symbols are required, such a mechanical tool is often the fastest way of
pairing them up. Even in the field of writing, a Lullian device was
popular a few decades ago in the form of the “Plot Genii.” With this
gadget the would-be author merely spun the wheels to match up various
characters with interesting situations to arrive at story ideas. Other
versions use cards to do the same job, and one called Plotto was used by
its inventor William Wallace Cook to plot countless stories. Although
these were perhaps not ideas for great literature, eager writers paid as
much as $75 for the plot boiler.
Not all serious thinkers relegated Lull to the position of fanatic
dreamer and gadgeteer. No less a mind that Gottfried Wilhelm von
Leibnitz found much to laud in Lull’s works. The _Ars Magna_ might well
lead to a universal “algebra” of all knowledge, thought Leibnitz. “If
controversies were to arise,” he then mused, “there would be no more
reason for philosophers to dispute than there would for accountants!”
Leibnitz applied Lull’s work to formal logic, constructed tables of
syllogisms from which he eliminated the false, and carried the work of
the “gifted crank” at bit nearer to true symbolic logic. Leibnitz also
extended the circle idea to that of overlapping them in early attempts
at logical manipulation that foreshadowed the work that John Venn would
do later. Leibnitz also saw in numbers a powerful argument for the
existence of God. God, he saw as the numeral 1, and 0 was the
nothingness from which He created the world. There are those, including
Voltaire whose _Candide_ satirized the notion, who question that it is
the best of all possible worlds, but none can question that in the
seventeenth century Leibnitz foresaw the coming power of the binary
system. He also built arithmetical computers that could add and
subtract, multiply and divide.
A few years earlier than Leibnitz, Blaise Pascal was also interested in
computing machines. As a teen-ager working in his father’s tax office,
Pascal wearied of adding the tedious figures so he built himself a
gear-driven computer that would add eight columns of numbers. A tall
figure in the scientific world, Pascal had fathered projective geometry
at age sixteen and later established hydrodynamics as a science. To
assist a gambler friend, he also developed the theory of probability
which led to statistical science.
Another mathematical innovation of the century was that of placing
logarithms on a stick by the Scot, John Napier. What he had done, of
course, was to make an analog, or scale model of the arithmetical
numbers. “Napier’s bones” quickly became what we now call slide rules,
forerunners of a whole class of analog computers that solve problems by
being actual models of size or quantity. Newton joined Leibnitz in
contributing another valuable tool that would be used in the computer,
that of the calculus.
_The Computer in Literature_
Even as Plato had viewed with suspicion the infringement of mechanical
devices on man’s domain of higher thought, other men have continued to
eye the growth of “mechanisms” with mounting alarm. The scientist and
inventor battled not merely technical difficulties, but the scornful
satire and righteous condemnation of some of their fellow men. Jonathan
Swift, the Irish satirist who took a swipe at many things that did not
set well with his views, lambasted the computing machine as a substitute
for the brain. In Chapter V, Book Three, of _Gulliver’s Travels_, the
good dean runs up against a scheming scientist in Laputa:
The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with Forty Pupils
about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a
Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of
the Room; he said, perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a
Project for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical
Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness; and
he flattered himself, that a more noble exalted Thought never sprang in
any other Man’s Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is
of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most
ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour,
may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and
Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led
me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks.
It was a Twenty Foot Square, placed in the Middle of the Room. The
Superfices was composed of several Bits of Wood, about the Bigness of a
Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by
slender Wires. These Bits of Wood were covered on every Square with
Papers pasted on them; and on these Papers were written all the Words of
their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but
without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was
going to set his Engine to work. The Pupils at his Command took each the
hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges
of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of
the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded Six and Thirty of the
Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame;
and where they found three or four Words together that might make Part
of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were
Scribes. This work was repeated three or four Times, and at every Turn
the Engine was so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as
the square Bits of Wood moved upside down.
Six hours a-day the young Students were employed in this Labour; and the
Professor showed me several Volumes in large Folio already collected, of
broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those
rich Materials to give the World a compleat Body of Art and Sciences;
which however might be still improved, and much expedited, if the
Publick would raise a Fund for making and employing five Hundred such
Frames in _Lagado_....
Fortunately for Swift, who would have been horrified by it, he never
heard Russell Maloney’s classic story, “Inflexible Logic,” about six
monkeys pounding away at typewriters and re-creating the world great
literature. _Gulliver’s Travels_ is not listed in their accomplishments.
The French Revolution prompted no less an orator than Edmund Burke to
deliver in 1790 an address titled “Reflections on the French
Revolution,” in which he extols the virtues of the dying feudal order in
Europe. It galled Burke that “The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of
sophists, economists, and _calculators_ has succeeded, and the glory of
Europe is extinguished forever.”
Seventy years later another eminent Englishman named Darwin published a
book called _On the Origin of Species_ that in the eyes of many readers
did little to glorify man himself. Samuel Butler, better known for his
novel, _The Way of All Flesh_, wrote too of the mechanical being, and
was one of the first to point out just what sort of future Darwin was
suggesting. In the satirical _Erewhon_, he described the machines of
this mysterious land in some of the most prophetic writing that has been
done on the subject. It was almost a hundred years ago that Butler wrote
the first version, called “Darwin Among the Machines,” but the words
ring like those of a 1962 worrier over the electronic brain. Butler’s
character warns:
There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical
consciousness in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness
now. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made
during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and
vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organized machines are
creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to
speak, in comparison with past time.
Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually
existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than
a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the
future as the early Saurians to man ... what I fear is the extraordinary
rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what
they are at present.
Butler envisioned the day when the present rude cries with which
machines call out to one another will have been developed to a speech as
intricate as our own. After all, “... take man’s vaunted power of
calculation. Have we not engines which can do all manner of sums more
quickly and correctly than we can? What prizeman in Hypothetics at any
of our Colleges of Unreason can compare with some of these machines in
their own line?”
Noting another difference in man and his creation, Butler says,
... Our sum-engines never drop a figure, nor our looms a stitch; the
machine is brisk and active, when the man is weary, it is clear-headed
and collected, when the man is stupid and dull, it needs no slumber....
May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An
affectionate machine-tickling aphid?
It can be answered that even though machines should hear never so well
and speak never so wisely, they will still always do the one or the
other for our advantage, not their own; that man will be the ruling
spirit and the machine the servant.... This is all very well. But the
servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master, and we have
come to such a pass that, even now, man must suffer terribly on ceasing
to benefit the machines. If all machines were to be annihilated ... man
should be left as it were naked upon a desert island, we should become
extinct in six weeks.
Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we
reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as
slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of
the mechanical kingdom?
Butler considers the argument that machines at least cannot copulate,
since they have no reproductive system. “If this be taken to mean that
they cannot marry, and that we are never likely to see a fertile union
between two vapor-engines with the young ones playing about the door of
the shed, however greatly we might desire to do so, I will readily grant
it. [But] surely if a machine is able to reproduce another machine
systematically, we may say that it has a reproductive system.”
Butler repeats his main theme. “... his [man’s] organization never
advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machine
is advancing. This is the most alarming feature of the case, and I must
be pardoned for insisting on it so frequently.”
Then there is a startlingly clear vision of the machines “regarded as a
part of man’s own physical nature, being really nothing but
extra-corporeal limbs. Man ... as a machinate mammal.” This was feared
as leading to eventual weakness of man until we finally found “man
himself being nothing but soul and mechanism, an intelligent but
passionless principle of mechanical action.” And so the Erewhonians in
self-defense destroyed all inventions discovered in the preceding 271
years!
_Early Mechanical Devices_
During the nineteenth century, weaving was one of the most competitive
industries in Europe, and new inventions were often closely guarded
secrets. Just such an idea was that of Frenchman Joseph M. Jacquard, an
idea that automated the loom and would later become the basis for the
first modern computers. A big problem in weaving was how to control a
multiplicity of flying needles to create the desired pattern in the
material. There were ways of doing this, of course, but all of them were
unwieldy and costly. Then Jacquard hit on a clever scheme. If he took a
card and punched holes in it where he wanted the needles to be actuated,
it was simple to make the needles do his bidding. To change the pattern
took only another card, and cards were cheap. Patented in 1801, there
were soon thousands of Jacquard looms in operation, doing beautiful and
accurate designs at a reasonable price.
To show off the scope of his wonderful punched cards, Jacquard had one
of his looms weave a portrait of him in silk. The job took 20,000 cards,
but it was a beautiful and effective testimonial. And fatefully a copy
of the silk portrait would later find its way into the hands of a man
who would do much more with the oddly punched cards.
At about this same time, a Hungarian named Wolfgang von Kempelen decided
that machines could play games as well as work in factories. So von
Kempelen built himself a chess-playing machine called the Maelzel Chess
Automaton with which he toured Europe. The inventor and his machine
played a great game, but they didn’t play fair. Hidden in the innards of
the Maelzel Automaton was a second human player, but this disillusioning
truth was not known for some time. Thus von Kempelen doubtless spurred
other inventors to the task, and in a short while machines would
actually begin to play the royal game. For instance, a Spaniard named L.
Torres y Quevedo built a chess-playing machine in 1914. This device
played a fair “end game” using several pieces, and its inventor
predicted future work in this direction using more advanced machines.
Charles Babbage was an English scientist with a burning desire for
accuracy. When some mathematical tables prepared for the Astronomical
Society proved to be full of errors, he angrily determined to build a
machine that would do the job with no mistakes. Of course calculating
machines had been built before; but the machine Babbage had in mind was
different. In fact, he called it a “difference engine” because it was
based on the difference tables of the squares of numbers. The first of
the “giant computers,” it was to have hundreds of gears and shafts,
ratchets and counters. Any arithmetic problem could be set into it, and
when the proper cranks were turned, out would come an answer—the right
answer because the machine could not make a mistake. After doing some
preliminary work on his difference engine, Babbage interested the
government in his project since even though he was fairly well-to-do he
realized it would cost more money than he could afford to sink into the
project. Babbage was a respected scientist, Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at Cambridge, and because of his reputation and the promise
of the machine, the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised to underwrite
the project.
For four years Babbage and his mechanics toiled. Instead of completing
his original idea, the scientist had succeeded only in designing a far
more complicated machine, one which would when finished weigh about two
tons. Because the parts he needed were advanced beyond the state of the
art of metalworking, Babbage was forced to design and build them
himself. In the process he decided that industry was being run all
wrong, and took time out to write a book. It was an excellent book, a
sort of forerunner to the modern science of operations research, and
Babbage’s machine shop was doing wonders for the metalworking art.
Undaunted by the lack of progress toward a concrete result, Babbage was
thinking bigger and bigger. He was going to scrap the difference engine,
or rather put it in a museum, and build a far better computer—an
“analytical engine.” If Jacquard’s punched cards could control the
needles on a loom, they could also operate the gears and other parts of
a calculating machine. This new engine would be one that could not only
add, subtract, multiply, and divide; it would be designed to control
itself. And as the answers started to come out, they would be fed back
to do more complex problems with no further work on the operator’s part.
“Having the machine eat its own tail!” Babbage called this sophisticated
bit of programming. This mechanical cannibalism was the root of the
“feedback” principle widely used in machines today. Echoing Watt’s steam
governor, it prophesied the coming control of machines by the machines
themselves. Besides this innovation, the machine would have a “store,”
or memory, of one thousand fifty-digit numbers that it could draw on,
and it would actually exercise judgment in selection of the proper
numbers. And as if that weren’t enough, it would print out the correct
answers automatically on specially engraved copper plates!
[Illustration:
_Space Technology Laboratories_
“As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the
future course of science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid,
the question will then arise—by what course of calculation can these
results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?” Charles
Babbage—_The Life of a Philosopher_, 1861.
]
It was a wonderful dream; a dream that might have become an actuality in
Babbage’s own time if machine technology had been as advanced as his
ideas. But for Babbage it remained only a dream, a dream that never did
work successfully. The government spent £17,000, a huge sum for that day
and time, and bowed out. Babbage fumed and then put his own money into
the machine. His mechanics left him and became leaders in the
machine-tool field, having trained in Babbage’s workshops. In despair,
he gave up on the analytical engine and designed another difference
engine. An early model of this one would work to five accurate places,
but Babbage had his eyes on a much better goal—twenty-place accuracy. A
lesser man would have aimed more realistically and perhaps delivered
workable computers to the mathematicians and businessmen of the day.
There is a legend that his son did finish one of the simpler machines
and that it was used in actuarial accounting for many years. But Babbage
himself died in 1871 unaware of how much he had done for the computer
technology that would begin to flower a few short decades later.
Singlehandedly he had given the computer art the idea of programming and
of sequential control, a memory in addition to the arithmetic unit he
called a “mill,” and even an automatic readout such as is now standard
on modern computers. Truly, the modern computer was “Babbage’s dream
come true.”
_Symbolic Logic_
Concurrently with the great strides being made with mechanical computers
that could handle mathematics, much work was also being done with the
formalizing of the logic. As hinted vaguely in the syllogisms of the
early philosophers, thinking did seem amenable to being diagrammed, much
like grammar. Augustus De Morgan devised numerical logic systems, and
George Boole set up the logic system that has come to be known as
Boolean algebra in which reasoning becomes positive or negative terms
that can be manipulated algebraically to give valid answers.
John Venn put the idea of logic into pictures, and simple pictures at
that. His symbology looks for all the world like the three interlocking
rings of a well-known ale. These rings stand for the subject, midterm,
and predicate of the older Aristotelian syllogism. By shading the
various circles according to the major and minor premises, the user of
Venn circles can see the logical result by inspection. Implicit in the
scheme is the possibility of a mechanical or electrical analogy to this
visual method, and it was not long until mathematicians began at least
on the mechanical kind. Among these early logic mechanizers,
surprisingly, was Lewis Carroll who of course was mathematician Charles
L. Dodgson before he became a writer.
Carroll, who was a far busier man than most of us ever guess, marketed a
“Game of Logic,” with a board and colored cardboard counters that
handled problems like the following:
All teetotalers like sugar.
No nightingale drinks wine.
By arranging the counters on Carroll’s game board so that: All M are X,
and No Y is not-M, we learn that No Y is not-X! This tells the initiate
logician that no nightingale dislikes sugar; a handy piece of
information for bird-fancier and sugar-broker alike.
[Illustration:
Lewis Carroll’s “Symbolic Logic.”
]
Charles, the third Earl Stanhope, was only slightly less controversial
than his prime minister, William Pitt. Scientifically he was far out
too, writing books on electrical theory, inventing steamboats,
microscopes, and printing presses among an odd variety of projects; he
also became interested in mechanical logic and designed the “Stanhope
Demonstrator,” a contrivance like a checkerboard with sliding panels. By
properly manipulating the demonstrator he could solve such problems as:
Eight of ten children are bright.
Four of these children are boys.
What are the minimum and maximum number of bright boys? A simple sliding
of scales on the Stanhope Demonstrator shows that two must be boys and
as many as four may be. This clever device could also work out
probability problems such as how many heads and tails will come up in so
many tosses of a coin.
In 1869 William S. Jevons, an English economist and expert logician,
built a logic machine. His was not the first, of course, but it had a
unique distinction in that it solved problems faster than the human
brain could! Using Boolean algebra principles, he built a “logical
abacus” and then even a “logical piano.” By simply pressing the keys of
this machine, the user could make the answer appear on its face. It is
of interest that Jevons thought his machine of no practical use, since
complex logical questions seldom arose in everyday life! Life, it seems,
was simpler in 1869 than it is today, and we should be grateful that
Jevons pursued his work through sheer scientific interest.
More sophisticated than the Jevons piano, the logic machine invented in
America by Allan Marquand could handle four terms and do problems like
the following:
There are four schoolgirls, Anna, Bertha, Cora, and Dora.
When Anna or Bertha, or both, remain home, Cora is at home.
When Bertha is out, Anna is out.
Whenever Cora is at home, Anna is too.
What can we tell about Dora?
The machine is smart enough to tell us that when Dora is at home the
other three girls are all at home or out. The same thing is true when
Dora is out.
_The Census Taker_
Moving from the sophistication of such logic devices, we find a
tremendous advance in mechanical computers spurred by such a mundane
chore as the census. The 1880 United States census required seven years
for compiling; and that with only 50 million heads to reckon. It was
plain to see that shortly a ten-year census would be impossible of
completion unless something were done to cut the birth rate or speed the
counting. Dr. Herman Hollerith was the man who did something about it,
and as a result the 1890 census, with 62 million people counted, took
only one-third the time of the previous tally.
Hollerith, a statistician living in Buffalo, New York, may or may not
have heard the old saw about statistics being able to support
anything—including the statisticians, but there was a challenge in the
rapid growth of population that appealed to the inventor in him and he
set to work. He came up with a card punched with coded holes, a card
much like that used by Jacquard on his looms, and by Babbage on the
dream computer that became a nightmare. But Hollerith did not meet the
fate of his predecessors. Not stoned, or doomed to die a failure,
Hollerith built his card machines and contracted with the government to
do the census work. “It was a good paying business,” he said. It was
indeed, and his early census cards would some day be known generically
as “IBM cards.”
While Jacquard and Babbage of necessity used mechanical devices with
their punched cards, Hollerith added the magic of electricity to his
card machine, building in essence the first electrical computing
machine. The punched cards were floated across a pool of mercury, and
telescoping pins in the reading head dropped through the holes. As they
contacted the mercury, an electrical circuit was made and another
American counted. Hollerith did not stop with census work. Sagely he
felt there must be commercial applications for his machines and sold two
of the leading railroads on a punched-card accounting system. His firm
merged with others to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company,
and finally International Business Machines. The term “Hollerith Coding”
is still familiar today.
[Illustration:
_International Business Machines Corp._
Hollerith tabulating machine of 1890, forerunner of modern computers.
]