Comment by dmvdoug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmvdoug | Hacker News Reader

> I'm confused though. Babbage came up with the blueprints for his Difference Engine in the 1820s. I know he never succeeded at actually building it, but he never really had a fair chance if you ask me.

Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The idea that if only he had had a better chance the difference engine would’ve been successful is just simply a misreading of what happened. It didn’t help that after the British government poured tens of thousands of pounds into the project Babbage suddenly decided to start pushing analytical engine before he had even finished the difference engine. That made it look like these were just wild, cockeyed schemes, when Babbage was supposed to be engaged in a practical, mechanical calculating project (to help reduce the labor expended on computing, for example, navigational tables).

A Swedish family, called Scheutz, finished the Difference Engine within a few years after Babbage gave up, and sold them very profitably for many decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Georg_Scheutz

It wasn't too hard for the time... Babbage just kept getting distracted.

He has been said to have Aspergers/ADHD (as much as one can diagnose from biographical information, which is not that little), so this figures!

> The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be

This is true of many (most?) innovations. E.g. the steam engine: people knew about steam power, and built primitive steam engines. Watt succeeded eventually in manufacturing one that had the right mix of reliability, power, cost, maintainability to be widely useful. E.g. the jet engine : Whittle conceived of turbine aircraft power during WW1, but didn't succeed in manufacturing a viable engine and putting it in a plane until the end of WW2.

A lot of similar things come into play if you ask questions like "Could the Romans have invented $X?"

Some cultural factors like slavery meant they were less interested in e.g. labor-saving inventions. And there probably were health and life sciences concepts you could introduce--but might have limited ability to prove. But, for the most part, there are technology trees that you can't really shortcut and, even with the right high-level knowledge, it's hard to accelerate things too mych.

Steam power was more of toy for the Romans. Some made dioramas with statues of the gods moved by steam.

I read a good description of the affair in James Essinger's "Jacquard's Web" - came down to the machinist cutting the gears not-to-spec, for the geartrains to function smoothly they would have needed precision not achieved for decades. The Royal Society was willing to fund the project but it became a bottomless money pit as Babbage kept sending the parts back to the kitchen so to speak.

reminds me of fusion energy promises, or at least "the bottomless money pit". The science is solid, but the engineering challenges delayed even proof-of-concept experiment literally until next century.

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