On 07/04/2011 04:57 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> 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?

yes Marconi... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi

>
>> 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.)

Post a reply to this message