>> And, obviously, no mention on whether Babbage himself knew it existed.
>> ;-)
>
> Electricity as such he knew about, even if only as static electricity.
> At that point in time small efficient electromotors were not available,
> nor was there a distribution grid
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents). It would not have been a
> viable choice, even less than the gears.

OK. Well that's essentially what I was asking.

Even more than whether it was "feasible", I was wondering whether it's 
an idea that anyone would have even thought of. Did people know enough 
about electricity to realise that you could use it to transmit information?

> IMHO asking about a connection of the analytic machine and electricity
> is as sensible as asking why the first combustion engines did not use a
> computer to adjust the timing. Something very wrong with the order of
> historic events. But I assume you asked because you didn't know the
> order of events.

Yeah. I vaguely gather that Babbage was a mad Victorian inventor. And 
I've heard the telegraph described as "the Victorian internet", so...

(When I first heard about the Analytical Engine, I had assumed it 
pre-dated the discovery of electricity, but clearly that isn't strictly 
true.)

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