The greatest machine that never was - John Graham-Cumming

but Racine I'm going to talk to you about is what I call the greatest machine that never was it was a machine that was never built and yet it will be built it was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers if you know anything about the history of computers you will know that in the 30s and the 40s simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today and you would be correct except you'd have the wrong century the first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s not the 1930s and 1940s it was designed and parts of it were prototyped and the bits of it that were built are here in south kensington their machine was built by this guy Charles Babbage now I have a great affinity of Charles Babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture and he was a very wealthy man and a sort of part of the aristocracy of Britain and on a Saturday night in Marylebone were you part of the intelligentsia at that period you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree and he invited everybody kings the Duke of Wellington many many famous people and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines I really missed that area you know we could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you but Babbage Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century and was a fairly famous mathematician he held the post that Newton held at Cambridge and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking he's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them and the reason he never made any of them he's a classic nerd every time he had a good idea he thinks brilliant I'm going to start building that one I'll spend a fortune on it I've got a better idea I'm going to work on this one and let me do this one he did this until Sir Robert Peel then Prime Minister basically kicked him out of number 10 Downing Street and kicking him out in those days that meant saying I bid you good day sir um the thing he designed was this monstrosity here the analytical engine now just to give you an idea this is this is a view from above every one of these circles is a car a stack of cogs and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive so as I go through this talk I want you to imagine this gigantic machine we heard there's wonderful sounds of what this thing does sound like and I'm going to take you through the architectures machine that's why it's computer architecture and tell you about this this machine which is a computer so let's talk about the memory the memory is very like a memory of a computer today except it was all a made out of metal stacks and stacks of cogs 30 cogs hi imagine a thing this high of cogs hundreds and hundreds of them and they've got numbers on them it's a decimal machine everything's done in decimal he thought about using binary the prom with using binary the machine would have been so tall it would've been ridiculous as it is it's enormous so he's got memory the memory is this bit over here you see it all like this this monstrosity over here is the CPU the chip if you like of course it's this big completely mechanical this whole machine is mechanical this is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum the CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic so addition multiplication subtraction division which already is a bit of a feat in metal but it could also do something that a computer does in a calculator doesn't this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision it could do the if-then for basic programmers and that fundamentally made it into a computer it could compute it couldn't just calculate it could do more now if we look at this and we stop for a minute and we think about chips today we can't look inside a silicon chip it's just so tiny yet if you did you would see something very very similar to this there's this incredible complexity in the CPU and this incredible regularity in the memory if you ever seen an electron microscope picture you'll see this it all looks the same and there's a bit over here which isn't got to be complicated this all this cogwheel mechanism here is doing what the computer does but of course you need to program this thing and of course Babbage used the technology of the day and a technology it would reappear in the 50s 60s and 70s which is punch cards this thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here and this is a program in the Science Museum just not far from here created by Charles Babbage that is sitting there you can go see it waiting for the machine to be built and there's not just one of these as many of them he prepared programs anticipating this would happen now the reason we use punch cards was that jacquard in France had created the jacquard loom which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards so he was just repurposing the technology of the day and like everything else he did he's using the technology of his era so 1830s 1840s 1850s cogs steam mechanical devices ironically ball in the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday who had completely revolutionary ruthless never died everything with the Dynamo transform was always was things Babbage of course wanted to use proven technology so steam and things now he needs accessories obviously you got a computer now you've got punch cards a CPU and memory you need accessories you're going to come with you're not going to have that so first of all he had sound he had a bell so if anything went wrong or the machine needed the attendant to come to it there was a bell it could ring and there's actually instruction on the punch card that says ring the bell so you know madness ding you know just stopped Ramone imagine all those noise this thing's like the steam engine ding right and you also need a printer obviously everyone is a printer this is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his called The Difference Engine number 2 which he never built but which the science museum did build in the 80s and 90s it's a completely mechanical again a printer and it prints just numbers because he was obsessed with numbers and but it does print onto paper and even does word wrapping so to get to underline it goes round like that and you also need graphics right I mean if you going to do anything with graphics so he said well I need a plotter I got a big piece of paper an ink pen and I'll make it plot so he designed a plotter as well and and you know at that point I think he got pretty much pretty good machine and along comes this woman Ada Lovelace now imagine these soirees all these great and good comes along this lady is the daughter of mad and dangerous to know Lord Byron and her mother being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness thought I know the solution mathematics is the solution we'll teach her mathematics that'll calm her down because of course there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy so in an army file suddenly refi so she's got this mathematical and training and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother and Charles Babbage you know gets out his machine so Duke of Wellington is there you know again that machine obviously demonstrated and she gets it she's the only person in his lifetime really who said I understand what this does and I understand the future of this machine and we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her now some people call her the first programmer this is actually the from one of the paper that she translated this is a program written in a particular style it's not a historically totally accurate that she's the first programmer and actually she did something more amazing rather than just being a programmer she saw something that Babbage didn't Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics he was building a machine to do mathematics and Lovelace said you could do more than mathematics on this machine and just as you do everyone in this room has ready got a computer on them right now because I got a phone if you go into that phone every single thing in out phone or computer or anything any other computing device is mathematics it's all numbers at the bottom whether it's video or text or music or voice it's all numbers is all underlying it mathematical functions happening and Lovelace said just because you're doing mathematical functions and symbols doesn't mean this thing's can't represent other things in the real world such as music this was the huge leap because Babbage is there saying we get to complete these amazing functions and print out tables and numbers and draw graphs and Lovelace of those he says look this thing could even compose music if you told it a representation of music numerically so this is what I call Lovelace asleep when you say she's a programmer she did do some but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much much more than this now 100 years later this guy comes Long Island cheering and and in 1936 and invents the computer all over again now of course Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical cheering's machine was entirely theoretical both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective but cheering told us something very important he just laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science and said it doesn't matter how you make a computer it doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical like Babbage's was or electronic like computers are today or perhaps in the future cells or again mechanical again once we get into nanotechnology we could go back to Babbage's machine and just make it tiny all those things are computers there isn't a computing essence this is called the church during thesis and so suddenly you get this link where you say this thing Babbage built really was a computer in fact it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers only really slowly to give you an idea of how slowly we had about 1k of memory and it used punch cards which have been fed in and it ran about 10,000 times slower than the first zx81 it did have a ram pack you could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to so where does that bring us today so there's there's a there aplan over in Swindon the science museum archive there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine one of those is a set of plans that we call plan 28 and that is also the name of a charity that I started with Doron Swade who was the curator of computing at the Science Museum and also the person who drove the project to build difference engine and our plan is to build it here in South Kensington we will build the analytical engine the project has a number of parts to it one was the scanning of Babbage's archive that's been done the second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build the third part is a computer simulation of that machine and the last part is to physically build it at the science when it's built you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works because we're having a tiny chip in front of you you better look at this humongous thing and say ah I see the memory operating I see the CPU are breaking I hear it operating I probably smell it operating and but in between that we're going to do a simulation Babbage himself wrote that he said as soon as the analytical engine exists it will surely guide the future course of science because he never built it because he was always fiddling with new plans but when he did get built of course in the 1940s everything changed I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the CPU mechanism working so there's just three sets of cogs and it's going to add this is the adding mechanism in action so you imagine this gigantic machine so give me five years before the 2030s happen we'll have it thank you very much

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 1,756,025

Keywords: \John Graham-Cumming\, TED, TEDx, TEDxImperial, College, \lord, Byron\, \Ada, Lovelace\, \Charles, Babbage\, \computer, science\, TED-Ed, \TED, Ed\, TEDEducation

Id: FlfChYGv3Z4

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Mataxp]

nice vid.

[u/whitestguyuknow]

One of these is already built

Edit: Apologies I was confusing it with his difference machine which you can see here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BlbQsKpq3Ak Atleast you can get an example of the kind of machine they're discussing here