The Precision Dynamics Discovery Shed

In the Sydney northern beaches suburb of Mona Vale is located Bob Moran’s Discovery Shed.  Bob graciously picked me up from the Manly ferry and I spent a full afternoon looking around and chatting with the man himself. He used to have a business called “Precision Dynamics” that designed and constructed packaging machinery.  He was an engineer in possession of the appropriate equipment to pursue his own interest in the history of machinery. When he retired he made his company’s building into the Discovery Shed private museum and workshop. This is available for viewing by appointment and also provides facilities and space for others to become members and pursue their own passions.
A number of years ago Bob became enthralled with Charles Babbage’s computing machines as elucidated by the work of the late Allan Bromley of the University of Sydney. Bob is replicating Charles Babbage’s, working, small portion of Difference Engine No.1, as built by Joseph Clement in 1832, to as accurate a detail as possible, using modern techniques, from bronze and iron, similar to the original now in the Science Museum London. This replica is expected to work just as the original machine does. 
This is now on gleaming display and nearing completion, here is Bob with his creation:

To demonstrate that complete reconstruction (to the point where the project was abandoned) of the entire Difference Engine is possible using Babbage’s 1833 drawings, Bob has built a full-scale mock-up of the machine including much of the driving and printing mechanism. He has also captured Babbage’s 1833 engineering drawings in modern CAD form. Here is the mock-up (about 3.5 metres tall).

Bob also was fascinated by the Australian Julius totalisators and has preserved a portion of one of the machines in near-operating order:

If that were not enough, Bob has on display his comprehensive collection of early typewriters and mechanical calculating machines. This includes many choice pieces, including examples of Otto Steiger’s multipliers of the 1890s.

And there is much more. The Shed also houses sewing machines, a gyroscopic compass, gunfire control computers, phonographs and a pedal-powered dentist drill. There are also modern computers, a PDP-7 (on which Unix was developed) and a working PDP-8.
So. If you are a computing history aficionado, no visit to Sydney should be without a visit to the Discovery Shed. Bob Moran can be contacted at bob.moranj@gmail.com.
[Posted by Bob Doran]

Q. What did #Turing & #Babbage have in common?

It's not the easy answers I'm looking for like, both designed computers; Babbage the Analytical Engine and Turing the Pilot ACE. Or that both were mathematicians, or even both were obviously Englishmen.


The answer is... both were wartime codebreakers. Turing is of course celebrated for cracking German Naval Enigma whilst at Bletchley Park during WWII. He's also less well known for contributing to cracking the much more complex German High Command Lorenz code.
   What you probably didn't know is that Charles Babbage cracked the Vigenère cipher, which was a form of polyalphabetic substitution cipher (like Enigma) that had been in widespread use since the 16th century. Babbage is reputed to have cracked the cipher as early as 1846, but he didn't publish his method because the British were soon to be at war with Russian in the Crimea and the Russians were known to use the Vigenère cipher. Thus, as in WWII, the British would be able to read their enemies' intercepted messages and gain a strategic advantage. All of this history is my book The Universal Machine.

Charles Babbage was the first steampunk

A steampunk in costume

Steampunk, Wikipedia says, is a "genre which originated during the 1980s and early 1990s and incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and speculative fiction. It involves a setting where steam power is widely used—whether in an alternate history such as Victorian era Britain or "Wild West"-era United States, or in a post-apocalyptic time —that incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy."
   The Steampunk World's Fair was recently held in Piscataway, New Jersey, USA and had over 4,000 attendees. Of course the real steampunk was Charles Babbage, who features in Chapter 2, "The dawn of Computing," of The Universal Machine. Babbage actually tried to build a mechanical computer - the Analytical Engine. Although Babbage never managed to build his Engine the people at Plan 28 intend to complete his design and build a working mechanical computer.

A model of part of the Analytical Engine

In praise of... Pierre Jaquet-Droz

The Writer

Pierre Jaquet-Droz was a Swiss born watch and automata maker who died in 1790. His automata are machines of exquisite beauty and ingenuity; one The Writer had over 6,000 components. Wikipedia states that, "Some consider these devices to be the oldest examples of the computer. The Writer has an input device to set tabs that form a programmable memory, 40 cams that represents the read only program, and a quill pen for output. The work of Pierre Jaquet-Droz predates that of Charles Babbage by decades." If you've seen the excellent recent movie Hugo you'll have a good idea what this machine can do. 
    Of course course no scientist, or natural philosopher as they were then called, would have taken these machine seriously, as they were mere amusements for the wealthy. Yet, we can assume that Charles Babbage would have been intrigued, and even he considered building fairground automata that played games for a time.
    The following video is one of a series that showcases the remarkable work of Pierre Jaquet-Droz.

Other half of Babbage's brain found!

Charles Babbage & half his brain

If you follow this blog you'll know that earlier in the year I visited the London Science Museum to see the replica of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No.2. It was fascinating, but I was surprised to see that they had half of Babbage's brain pickled in a jar on display. Why I wondered did they half half of his brain? It didn't seem to serve any educational purpose. Also, where was the other half? This continued to occasionally trouble me. The mystery has been solved thanks to Wikipedia; the other half is preserved at the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons in London. I don't know if it's on display there (perhaps somebody can tell us). I haven't visited the Hunterian Museum, but I did visit the Surgeons' Hall Museum in Edinburgh in August, which was fascinating. A little macabre and ghoulish but very interesting.

Punch cards

Babbage's punch cards
Science Museum, London

Most people today don't remember punch cards, but for decades they were an important means of programming computers. Though I never used them, my first computer lab still had card punch machines and card readers, and some "old timers" still used them. Charles Babbage first thought of using them for his Analytical Engine, both to input programs and store data. He got the idea of course from the Jacquard Loom that used punch cards to input complex lace designs into lace weaving looms.
    Though not used by modern computers, punch cards are still used by knitting machines to input designs, as you can see from the card below.

Plan 28 - building the Analytical Engine

Part of the Analytical Engine
in the London Science Museum

Plan 28 - is an ambitious project to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine - the world's first mechanical computer. Babbage never built the Analytical Engine during his life and many doubted that it would work. However, since Doran Swade's successful project at the Science museum to build a replica of Babbage's Difference Engine No.2, which does work, many people believe Babbage's Analytical Engine would also work.
    The Analytical Engine would not be a giant mechanical calculator like the Difference Engine - it's a programmable computer. It has a mechanical memory, called the Store. a central processing unit, called the Mill, and can be programmed using punch cards for input and it can print out its results. It conceptual architecture is essentially the same as a modern digital computer. It would be the ultimate steam punk fantasy made real! For more information visit http://plan28.org

Very Exciting!!!

I'm at the Science Museum in London to see Babbage's Difference Engine No.2 replica & other exhibits. They have half of his brain on display. Bit weird really, why? Where's the other half?

The Origins of Punch Cards

Just found a great photograph of a Jacquard Loom used for weaving complex patterns in cloth. The program for the pattern was stored in punch cards that were adopted by Charles Babbage as the input mechanism for the Analytical Engine.

Punch cards are still used by some knitting machines, but no longer by computers.

The Writing Process

So let's look at how I've been writing my book so far. Basically I work chapter by chapter but not necessarily in linear (1, 2, 3...) order. In fact I don't complete a chapter before going to another (I'm not very methodical).

So far I've completed a good draft of Chapter 2 which is about Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine in Victorian times. I'll try to find a way of linking to or uploading this chapter so you have a good piece of material to read.

I research my material be reading books and web sources that I then collate and summarise - I'm trying to write a book that is fun and easy to read and most of the books that provide the source material are way too long and dull.

With this blog I now plan to put the rough notes of my research into the blog and use those as the basis for each chapter. Currently I'm using Google Docs to hold all my notes and chapter drafts. I like the sense of security it gives me of having my work in the cloud (I also export copies to my work and home computers).