London, Longman, Keene et al. / Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 1834. Original edition.
Two quarterly issues bound in one volume.
Hardcover. Half-leather and paper covered boards, gilt rules and lettering on spine and on red spine label, octavo, ii, ii, 546 pages.

Very old book plate on front pastedown. The text on the plate is masked by ink.

"Babbage's Calculating Engine"by Dionysius Lardner was a lengthy (64 pages, with diagrams) article published in the July 1834 quarterly issue of the journal. The article was based on seven articles on the machine including Babbage's own papers of 1822 and the Royal Society's report of 1829. as well as on Lardner’s lectures on Babbage’s invention. In the article, Lardner provided the first detailed public description of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine; describing the mechanical, automatic, and printing nature of the Difference Engine, often using the analogy of an engine replacing a human "computer".

Lardner’s article was the first to make the subject of machine computing known to the general public. He also highlighted the technical challenges, immense costs, and lack of government support for Babbage’s project.


The Difference Engine, an early calculating machine, verging on being the first computer, designed and partially built during the 1820s and ’30s by Charles Babbage. Babbage was an English mathematician and inventor; he invented the cowcatcher, reformed the British postal system, and was a pioneer in the fields of operations research and actuarial science. It was Babbage who first suggested that the weather of years past could be read from tree rings. He also had a lifelong fascination with keys, ciphers, and mechanical dolls (automatons).

As a founding member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Babbage had seen a clear need to design and build a mechanical device that could automate long, tedious astronomical calculations. He began by writing a letter in 1822 to Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, about the possibility of automating the construction of mathematical tables—specifically, logarithm tables for use in navigation. He then wrote a paper, “On the Theoretical Principles of the Machinery for Calculating Tables,” which he read to the society later that year. (It won the Royal Society’s first Gold Medal in 1823.) Tables then in use often contained errors, which could be a life-and-death matter for sailors at sea, and Babbage argued that, by automating the production of the tables, he could assure their accuracy. Having gained support in the society for his Difference Engine, as he called it, Babbage next turned to the British government to fund development, obtaining one of the world’s first government grants for research and technological development.

The Difference Engine was more than a simple calculator, however. It mechanized not just a single calculation but a whole series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem. It went far beyond calculators in other ways as well. Like modern computers, the Difference Engine had storage—that is, a place where data could be held temporarily for later processing—and it was designed to stamp its output into soft metal, which could later be used to produce a printing plate.

Nevertheless, the Difference Engine performed only one operation. The operator would set up all of its data registers with the original data, and then the single operation would be repeatedly applied to all of the registers, ultimately producing a solution. Still, in complexity and audacity of design, it dwarfed any calculating device then in existence.

The full engine, designed to be room-sized, was never built, at least not by Babbage. Although he received several government grants, they were sporadic—governments changed, funding often ran out, and he had to personally bear some of the financial costs—and he was working at or near the tolerances of the construction methods of the day and ran into numerous construction difficulties. All design and construction ceased in 1833, when Joseph Clement, the machinist responsible for actually building the machine, refused to continue unless he was prepaid.

Dionysius Lardner FRS FRSE (3 April 1793 – 29 April 1859) was an Irish scientific writer and science and technology populariser who edited the 133-volume The Cabinet Cyclopædia.

Lardner showed himself to be a successful populariser of science, giving talks on contemporary topics such as Babbage's Difference Engine (1834). He was the author of numerous mathematical and physical treatises on such subjects as algebraic geometry (1823), differential and integral calculus (1825), and the steam engine (1828). He also wrote handbooks on various departments of natural philosophy (1854–1856). However, it is as the editor of The Cabinet Cyclopædia (1830–1844) that he is best remembered.

CONDITION: Covers are worn at edges and corners, some chipping at edges of leather, rubbing and spotting on leather and boards, leather corners are darkened.
The page edges are dust soiled.
Old ex-libris label with ink masking on front pastedown.
The Contents are complete, clean and intact except for very light foxing spots on the Title Page, and a few leaves with a small creased corner.