17 Oct
2010
17 Oct
'10
7:37 p.m.
That was the conventional wisdom, but has since been
disproven by the
Science Museum in London. ?They measured the tolerances that Joseph Clement
achieved in the working models of the arithmetic mechanisms of the DE#1 that
he built for Babbage, and deliberately built a DE#2 using parts machined to
comparable tolerances and got it to work.
Unbuildable by *average* British machinists of the time, quite likely, but
Babbage didn't try to have it built by an average machinist.
That may be true, but pissing off one of the very few capable
machinists in Britain was kind of a show stopper. If Babbage was in
Germany or Switzerland or the US, he could have pissed off a whole
line of capable machinists, and there would be still more to pick from
- and maybe the machine actually finished.
--
Will