I always like checking out the Science Museum and today’s visit comes about because I’ve got a lunch meeting in Victoria and after dropping my son at school I reckon there’s no point going home and fiddling with email for an hour. So I’m there at 10, virtually the first to enter the museum, along with all the children on school trips.
Entry is free but there’s a sign suggesting an donation of £3, €3 or $3 which means at the current exchange rates it’s cheapest to be American (£1.80) whilst Europeans donate about £2.50. I pretend to be Scottish and throw in a quid. Ha.
I’m drawn to the computer section where hulking great lumps of old technology sit behind rope. I think it’s the act of putting this stuff in a museum and saying it has value is what I love. I’d quite happily have a proper national museum of computers that took us from an abacus to the world’s most powerful current computer, the IBM Roadrunner. It would be quite a hit with the ladies.
In front of me is a recreation of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and some parts of his slightly less famously named Analytical Engine, the unfinished computer he started in 1837. If he’d have finished the construction, this general purpose mechanical computer would have been “Turing complete” i.e. capable of performing any calculation it’s possible to devise. Basically the same as a modern PC but millions of times slower. Possibly very similar to Windows Vista.
However, work was never completed, the project died with him and the world would have to wait until the 1940s, nearly 100 years later, until we hear the famous names of Colossus, ENIAC and the Manchester Mark 1. BTW: The Germans actually got there first in 1941 with the Zeus Z3, but what with World War II and Hitler, nobody likes to shout about it much. Except me, that is.
There’s no doubt Babbage had an extraordinary brain – half of it is in a jar on display – but he had a fatal flaw, summed up by the statement on a plaque by the exhibit which says that his projects weren’t completed for “funding problems and personality issues.”
Personality issues? So Babbage had had the insight to create the world’s first programmable computer and couldn’t get it made because he was a bit of a shit and nobody could work with him? Fantastic.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers points out that that one crucial element in success isn’t just being dreadfully clever but having the support of a loving family from day one. “It doesn’t start with talent, it starts with love”, as the promotional posters say. He mentions Oppenheimer, best known as “The Father of the Atomic Bomb”, who whilst a Cambridge undergraduate, attempted to poison Professor Patrick Blackett, a lecturer he took a dislike to. Criminal proceedings were avoided by the intervention of Oppenheimer’s father who persuaded the university that some psychiatric sessions would be more than enough.
Sadly Babbage’s Father was never going to solve his son’s problems – he died in 1927 along Babbage’s wife and son, triggering a mental breakdown which delayed the construction of his machines. And I wonder if he’d had better luck with his home life, he might have been nicer to his contractors and we’d have had the computer built 100 years earlier?
Suddenly consumed with the desire to learn more about Babbage – I visit the instore bookshop – hopeful they can supply me with a nice pop science biography, but all they’ve got is an extremely academic reprinting of some personal papers. So, baring in mind that my head has been filled with a warning from beyond the grave: nurture your kids or else they might accidentally invent the future but be too socially fucked up to communicate it to their peers, I buy an educational toy for my 4 year old son: A robot kangaroo.
I figure we can built it together and it’ll engender a life-long love of engineering and he’ll go on to discover the cure to space-AIDS or something.
* * *
I get home. We build the robot kangaroo. There’s nine steps, my son is bored by step three and leaves me to watch Waybuloo on iPlayer. I listen to David Bowie’s Low. My wife asks, “what’s this amazing prog rock?”
The next morning our son finds the kangaroo and thinks it’s so great that he sticks it on my head, and the battery operated legs wind up my hair and pull it out until I start shouting in pain. My wife tries to help and pull it out and OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!
The kangaroo is banished to a top-shelf.
hehehe :D nice! i love the science museum wish i lived near london – actually i wish i had money to visit london :D
My mum used to buy stuff from there for my brother at Christmas, some of their stuff is complete shite. We have one of their “flying UFOs” that you stick in the little charger thing and fly it, it’s supposed to hover around the room, it just flys into the wall and explodes. If that’s science, I’m moving to religion.
Attempted poisioning to the most destructive weapon ever devised…that Oppenheimer, what a card!
That kangaroo shouldn’t be on a desk, it should be on Paris Hilton, she’d love it!
You might like the Bletchley Park Museum (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/museum.rhtm).
I was in the editing suite of Waybuloo yesterday. Brother-in-law is the editor and had to drop some stuff off to him. His last one was In The Night Garden.
There’s my story.
Wasn’t charlie babbage the character in Rain Man – kkkkkkmart, kkkkkkkmart, gotta go to kkkkkkmart, uh oh uh oh etc etc ?
Actually Rob – how about making a Rain Man sat nav ? ttttturn left at the next junction, gotta turn left at the next junction, always turn left at the next junction on Thursdays, always turn left on Thursdays uh oh uh oh….etc etc – we could be rich – rich beyond our wildest dreams..or not probably…..
I got a picture of my wife with a real kangaroo. Wanna see it?
She looks ok, but was a real cow.
There’s a wombat there somewhere too.