From 1828 to 1839, Babbage was
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Not a conventional resident
don, and inattentive to his teaching responsibilities, he wrote three topical books during this period of his life. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1832. Babbage was out of sympathy with colleagues:
George Biddell Airy, his predecessor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, thought an issue should be made of his lack of interest in lecturing. Babbage planned to lecture in 1831 on
political economy. Babbage's reforming direction looked to see
university education more inclusive, universities doing more for research, a broader syllabus and more interest in applications; but
William Whewell found the programme unacceptable. A controversy Babbage had with
Richard Jones lasted for six years. He never did give a lecture. It was during this period that Babbage tried to enter politics.
Simon Schaffer writes that his views of the 1830s included
disestablishment of the
Church of England, a broader
political franchise, and inclusion of manufacturers as stakeholders. He twice stood for Parliament as a candidate for the borough of
Finsbury. In 1832 he came in third among five candidates, missing out by some 500 votes in the two-member constituency when two other reformist candidates,
Thomas Wakley and Christopher Temple, split the vote. In his memoirs Babbage related how this election brought him the friendship of
Samuel Rogers: his brother Henry Rogers wished to support Babbage again, but died within days. In 1834 Babbage finished last among four. In 1832, Babbage, Herschel and Ivory were appointed Knights of the
Royal Guelphic Order, however they were not subsequently made
knights bachelor to entitle them to the prefix
Sir, which often came with appointments to that foreign order (though Herschel was later created a
baronet).
"Declinarians", learned societies and the BAAS Babbage now emerged as a
polemicist. One of his biographers notes that all his books contain a "campaigning element". His
Reflections on the Decline of Science and some of its Causes (1830) stands out, however, for its sharp attacks. It aimed to improve British science, and more particularly to oust
Davies Gilbert as President of the Royal Society, which Babbage wished to reform. It was written out of pique, when Babbage hoped to become the junior secretary of the Royal Society, as Herschel was the senior, but failed because of his antagonism to
Humphry Davy. Michael Faraday had a reply written, by
Gerrit Moll, as
On the Alleged Decline of Science in England (1831). On the front of the Royal Society Babbage had no impact, with the bland election of the
Duke of Sussex to succeed Gilbert the same year. As a broad manifesto, on the other hand, his
Decline led promptly to the formation in 1831 of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). In the debate of the period on
statistics (
qua data collection) and what is now
statistical inference, the BAAS in its Statistical Section (which owed something also to
Whewell) opted for data collection. This Section was the sixth, established in 1833 with Babbage as chairman and
John Elliot Drinkwater as secretary. The foundation of the
Statistical Society followed. Babbage was its public face, backed by Richard Jones and
Robert Malthus.
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures Babbage published
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), on the organisation of
industrial production. It was an influential early work of
operational research.
John Rennie the Younger in addressing the
Institution of Civil Engineers on manufacturing in 1846 mentioned mostly surveys in encyclopaedias, and Babbage's book was first an article in the
Encyclopædia Metropolitana, the form in which Rennie noted it, in the company of related works by
John Farey Jr.,
Peter Barlow and
Andrew Ure. From
An essay on the general principles which regulate the application of machinery to manufactures and the mechanical arts (1827), which became the
Encyclopædia Metropolitana article of 1829, Babbage developed the schematic classification of machines that, combined with discussion of factories, made up the first part of the book. The second part considered the "domestic and political economy" of manufactures. The book sold well, and quickly went to a fourth edition (1836). Babbage represented his work as largely a result of actual observations in factories, British and abroad. It was not, in its first edition, intended to address deeper questions of political economy; the second (late 1832) did, with three further chapters including one on
piece rate. The book also contained ideas on rational design in factories, and
profit sharing.
"Babbage principle" In
Economy of Machinery was described what is now called the "Babbage principle". It pointed out commercial advantages available with more careful
division of labour. As Babbage himself noted, it had already appeared in the work of
Melchiorre Gioia in 1815. The term was introduced in 1974 by
Harry Braverman. Related formulations are the "principle of multiples" of
Philip Sargant Florence, and the "balance of processes". What Babbage remarked is that skilled workers typically spend parts of their time performing tasks that are below their skill level. If the labour process can be divided among several workers, labour costs may be cut by assigning only high-skill tasks to high-cost workers, restricting other tasks to lower-paid workers. He also pointed out that training or apprenticeship can be taken as fixed costs; but that
returns to scale are available by his approach of standardisation of tasks, therefore again favouring the
factory system. His view of
human capital was restricted to minimising the time period for recovery of training costs.
Publishing Another aspect of the work was its detailed breakdown of the cost structure of book publishing. Babbage took the unpopular line, from the publishers' perspective, of exposing the trade's profitability. He went as far as to name the organisers of the trade's restrictive practices. Twenty years later he attended a meeting hosted by
John Chapman to campaign against the Booksellers Association, still a
cartel.
Influence It has been written that "what
Arthur Young was to agriculture, Charles Babbage was to the
factory visit and machinery". Babbage's theories are said to have influenced the layout of the
1851 Great Exhibition, and his views had a strong effect on his contemporary
George Julius Poulett Scrope.
Karl Marx argued that the source of the
productivity of the factory system was exactly the combination of the division of labour with machinery, building on
Adam Smith, Babbage and Ure. Where Marx picked up on Babbage and disagreed with Smith was on the motivation for division of labour by the manufacturer: as Babbage did, he wrote that it was for the sake of
profitability, rather than productivity, and identified an impact on the concept of a
trade.
John Ruskin went further, to oppose completely what manufacturing in Babbage's sense stood for. Babbage also affected the economic thinking of
John Stuart Mill.
George Holyoake saw Babbage's detailed discussion of profit sharing as substantive, in the tradition of
Robert Owen and
Charles Fourier, if requiring the attentions of a benevolent
captain of industry, and ignored at the time.
Charles Babbage's Saturday night soirées, held from 1828 into the 1840s, were important gathering places for prominent scientists, authors and aristocracy. Babbage is credited with importing the "scientific soirée" from France with his well-attended Saturday evening soirées.
On the Economy of Machinery was translated in 1833 into French by
Édouard Biot, and into German the same year by Gottfried Friedenberg. The French engineer and writer on industrial organisation
Léon Lalanne was influenced by Babbage, but also by the economist
Claude Lucien Bergery, in reducing the issues to "technology".
William Jevons connected Babbage's "economy of labour" with his own labour experiments of 1870. The Babbage principle is an inherent assumption in
Frederick Winslow Taylor's
scientific management.
Mary Everest Boole claimed that there was profound influence – via her uncle
George Everest – of Indian thought in general and
Indian logic, in particular, on Babbage and on her husband
George Boole, as well as on
Augustus De Morgan: Think what must have been the effect of the intense Hinduizing of three such men as Babbage, De Morgan, and George Boole on the mathematical atmosphere of 1830–65. What share had it in generating the
Vector Analysis and the mathematics by which investigations in physical science are now conducted? He preferred the conception of creation in which a God-given
natural law dominated, removing the need for continuous "contrivance". The book is a work of
natural theology, and incorporates extracts from related correspondence of Herschel with
Charles Lyell. Babbage put forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator. In this book, Babbage dealt with relating interpretations between science and religion; on the one hand, he insisted that "there exists no fatal collision between the words of
Scripture and the facts of nature;" on the other hand, he wrote that the
Book of Genesis was not meant to be read literally in relation to scientific terms. Against those who said these were in conflict, he wrote "that the contradiction they have imagined can have no real existence, and that whilst the testimony of
Moses remains unimpeached, we may also be permitted to confide in the testimony of our senses." The
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise was quoted extensively in
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. The parallel with Babbage's computing machines is made explicit, as allowing plausibility to the theory that
transmutation of species could be pre-programmed. It was in The
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise where Babbage proposed his 'library in the air' concept, where every breath, word and motion was imprinted at the atomic level in a record that could be accessed after the events occurred. The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. s acquiring isolated real points Jonar Ganeri, author of
Indian Logic, believes Babbage may have been influenced by Indian thought; one possible route would be through
Henry Thomas Colebrooke. Mary Everest Boole argues that Babbage was introduced to Indian thought in the 1820s by her uncle George Everest: Some time about 1825, [Everest] came to England for two or three years, and made a fast and lifelong friendship with Herschel and with Babbage, who was then quite young. I would ask any fair-minded mathematician to read Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise and compare it with the works of his contemporaries in England; and then ask himself whence came the peculiar conception of the nature of miracle which underlies Babbage's ideas of Singular Points on Curves (Chap, viii) – from European Theology or Hindu Metaphysic? Oh! how the English clergy of that day hated Babbage's book!
Religious views Babbage was raised in the Protestant form of the Christian faith, his family having inculcated in him an orthodox form of worship. He explained: Rejecting the
Athanasian Creed as a "direct contradiction in terms", in his youth he looked to
Samuel Clarke's works on religion, of which
Being and Attributes of God (1704) exerted a particularly strong influence on him. Later in life, Babbage concluded that "the true value of the Christian religion rested, not on speculative [theology] ... but ... upon those doctrines of kindness and benevolence which that religion claims and enforces, not merely in favour of man himself but of every creature susceptible of pain or of happiness." In his autobiography
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), Babbage wrote a whole chapter on the topic of religion, where he identified three sources of divine knowledge: •
A priori or mystical experience • From Revelation • From the examination of the works of the Creator He stated, on the basis of the
design argument, that studying the works of nature had been the more appealing evidence, and the one which led him to actively profess the
existence of God. Advocating for natural theology, he wrote: Like
Samuel Vince, Babbage also wrote a defence of the belief in divine
miracles. Against objections previously posed by
David Hume, Babbage advocated for the belief of divine agency, stating "we must not measure the credibility or incredibility of an event by the narrow sphere of our own experience, nor forget that there is a Divine energy which overrides what we familiarly call the laws of nature." He alluded to the limits of human experience, expressing: "all that we see in a miracle is an effect which is new to our observation, and whose cause is concealed. The cause may be beyond the sphere of our observation, and would be thus beyond the familiar sphere of nature; but this does not make the event a violation of any law of nature. The limits of man's observation lie within very narrow boundaries, and it would be arrogance to suppose that the reach of man's power is to form the limits of the natural world." ==Later life==