Created: 05/02/2008
Video description: Considered one of the most startling achievements of the 19th century, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 has come to life 150 years later. CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi visits the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to see the machine in action and meet the men who turned Babbage's dream into a reality.
Difference Engine No. 2 Video Transcript
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>> Hey there. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News.com. Can you tell me what's five tons, 11 feet tall, and seven feet long? Not an elephant, but this guy. This is Babbage's Difference Engine #2. And it's modeled after the designs from the Victorian Age.
>> The machine was the first successful transference of human intelligence to machine. So that really is the significance, in historical terms, of the engine.
>> Doron Swade is a world-renowned expert on Charles Babbage, a British inventor and mathematician from the 1800s. In the 1840s he drafted the blueprints for the difference engine, but it was considered ahead of its time and never built.
>> In retrospect this stuff was a quantum leap in logical complexity and physical size. It was a huge leap beyond anything that had been conceived of up to that point. The big breakthrough was it's automatic. You exert physical energy, and you get results, which up to that point in time you could only get by thinking.
>> 20 years ago, Swade picked up where Babbage left off, and has built not one, but two difference engines.
>> You turn the crank, and then what happens?
>> You turn the crank and the crank turns a set of -- a thing called camstacks, a whole series of cams. That orchestrates all the internal motion, harmonizes and phases the timing of all the internal actions. It performs seven 31-digit additions in six seconds. So every time you turn the handle, it adds a number to another number, another number, another number, and so on. And it does that in rather intricate and sophisticated way. But essentially it works by repeated addition, and that particular technique, called the method of differences, eliminates the need for multiplication and division, which you would ordinarily need to do that particular calculation. So that's what's clever about it. The upper apparatus does two things. It produces an inked hard copy over there, and it takes an impression from these print wheels. So the result appears on these wheels over here, automatically transferring from the end of the machine onto these wheels. So each time you turn the handle through one cycle, send the machine through one cycle, this piece of paper sweeps up and takes an impression, and you get a hard copy print out over there.
>> The technology world is largely a world that has no rear-view mirror. You know, all the focus is what's the next thing? What's the cool thing, the high performance? You tend to talk about next year's thing like it's present tense, and two years from now is right around the corner.
>> With that obsession on the future, Nathan Myrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, dropped some serious cash to sponsor the engine's construction.
>> It weighs five tons, and I kind of feel like I bought it by the pound.
>> As someone who has worked in the Valley, Myrvold has certain sympathies for a genius like Babbage who couldn't find a way to take his idea to market.
>> He wasn't a good manager. And he was kind of prickly and a little off-putting. He was a brilliant guy who couldn't get traction. And it turns out, from 10 miles of this museum, there's lots of little companies and big companies that have some brilliant people that probably also aren't getting traction.
>> After six years of construction, and made of bronze, iron, and steel, and with more than 8,000 parts, the engine brings to life the plan that sat dormant for 150 years.
>> Even though it didn't directly lead you in an - sort of unbranching path to where we are today, it was an idea that ultimately would totally change the world. Without people dreaming big dreams and trying to make something happen, we'd have a static society. And we wouldn't enjoy all the benefits of technology and medicine, and other things that we've been enjoying.
>> It remains, even at this late date, an object of wonder to me. I look at it and think this is a beautiful thing. This is a wondrous object. This is a sumptuous piece of engineering.
>> If you'd like to see the engine in action, you've got one year, starting May 2008, to come down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to check it out. After it makes its North American debut here, it goes into Nathan's private collection. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET New.com.
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Difference Engine No. 2
Considered one of the most startling achievements of the 19th century, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 has come to life 150 years later. CNET News.com's Kara Tsuboi visits the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to see the machine in action and meet the men who turned Babbage's dream into a reality.
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