Babbage's Calculating Engine [in vol CXX of The Edinburgh Review].

Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Company for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman.1834. 8vo. 2 vols bound in one, nos. CXIX and CXX of The Edinburgh Review, April - July 1834. Half brown calf, marbled boards, gilt rules and lettering to spine, marbled; pp. ii,1-262; ii, 263-545 (Babbage on pp.263 - 327), diagrams to text; spine with vertical crack and recently repaired to front hinge, occasional foxing especially to first and last few leavesFirst edition of Volume 59 of The Edinburgh Review. Scarce. Dionysius Lardner's long article on the calculating machine, written with the guidance of Babbage, came after a series of successful lectures that he gave in Edinburgh. It takes the form of a review of seven articles on the machine, including Babbage's own papers of 1822 and the Royal Society's report of 1829. Lardner, editor of the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopedia, was a well-known speaker and populariser of science, and his adoption of Babbage's cause seemed advantageous to the great mathematician.However, Lardner made a tactical error that meant that the machine did not receive the public funding Babbage sought. In order to make the subject palatable to a general audience, he concentrated on the machine's ability to correct errors in printed mathematical tables. While this was a valid view, and echoed Babbage's own 1822 papers which he wrote just as his project to build the machine was grinding to a halt, it also fatally underplayed the true mathematical potential of the engine to open up new avenues in computation. Lardner's presentation of the machine became the accepted interpretation, and one that was open to attack: "The utility of the Engines as a solution to table making was resoundingly rejected by experts in England and on the Continent: by George Biddell Airy in England, by Nils Selander in Sweden, and by Joseph Leverrier in France. By identifying the value of the Engines as the practical utility of eliminating errors in the production of tables, Lardner forced the Engine's advocates to defend the machine from a position of weakness" (Doron D. Swade, "Automatic Computation: Charles Babbage and Computational Method", The Rutherford Journal).Nevertheless, as a record of the workings of this wonderful machine in a manner intelligible to the general reader, and as a survey of Babbage's thought, this is still a crucial and fascinating paper.…