Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage.
Geneva and Paris: Bureau de la Bibliothèque Universelle (B. Glaser); Anselin, 1842. First edition, the journal issue, of the first published account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine — and, printed a full year before Ada Lovelace’s celebrated English translation of it, the first appearance in print of computer programs: the operation-tables setting out, step by step, how Babbage’s projected machine would be driven through a calculation. The paper appeared only in this Swiss journal, which survives chiefly in institutionally-stamped subscription copies; the present example is uncommon in carrying no library stamp at all. Babbage had conceived the Analytical Engine in 1834, in the aftermath of his uncompleted, government-funded Difference Engine. It was to be a general-purpose programmable calculating machine — never built in his lifetime, yet embodying in its design most of the essential features of the modern digital computer. From the Jacquard loom Babbage took control by punched cards; from the vocabulary of the textile trade he took the names of its parts, calling the processing unit the ‘mill’ and the memory the ‘store’. Its signal feature, and the hardest for his contemporaries to grasp, was its capacity to govern its own course: to advance or back its cards according to the results of its own previous calculations — what is now called conditional branching. Babbage’s countrymen showed little curiosity about the machine, and he never presented it publicly in England. The one occasion on which he set out its principles before a company of competent scientists came abroad. In 1840, pressed by the Turin astronomer Giovanni Plana (1781–1864), he travelled to the congress of Italian scientists at Turin, carrying drawings, models and sheets of his mechanical notation, and over several mornings in his apartments expounded the Engine to Plana, Menabrea, Mossotti, MacCullagh, Plantamour and others. The difficulty, as Anthony Hyman records, lay less in the mechanism than in the concept: Mossotti could accept that the machine handled arithmetic and even algebra, but balked at how it might take a course of action determined by its own results — until Babbage, by a series of examples, brought his listeners to see how the Engine could advance or back its operation cards by any number of steps. The Turin discussions, Hyman writes, were ‘the only public presentation before a group of competent scientists during Babbage’s lifetime’ of the ideas behind the modern digital computer. Plana had meant to write up the lectures himself, but he was old and ill, and the task fell to the youngest of the group — Luigi Federico Menabrea (1809–1896), a captain of military engineers (‘capitaine du génie militaire’, as the paper styles him) who taught mechanics at the Turin military academy and would rise to become Prime Minister of the newly united Kingdom of Italy. Babbage sent him further explanations to supplement the notes taken at Turin; Menabrea rewrote the article entirely, and on 27 January 1842 wrote that he would give it its last touches and send it to Geneva. It appeared that October, as number 82 of the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. Babbage had chosen the venue deliberately, wanting the machine’s existence not to rest, as he put it, upon his ‘unsupported testimony’: the discovery, he wrote, was ‘so much in advance of my own country, and I fear even of the age’ that he had selected the celebrated Turin academy as the place of its first announcement. Menabrea’s account said little of mechanical detail. What it did instead was decisive: to show what the machine could do, he printed several tables — ‘cartons des opérations’, ‘cartons des variables’ — setting out the ordered sequence of operations through which the Engine would be directed to solve a given problem, from a difference-table for the series of squares to the working of a pair of simultaneous equations. These tables, reproduced from those Babbage had brought to Turin, are what Hook and Norman call ‘the first examples of computer programs ever published’; Dorothy Stein, tracing them to Babbage’s own charts, likewise finds that they ‘constituted the first computer programs’. They precede by a year the more famous program with which the paper is now usually associated. In 1843 Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), Byron’s daughter, translated Menabrea’s memoir into English as ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine … with Notes by the Translator’ (in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, volume 3), appending seven notes of her own, signed only ‘A.A.L.’, that ran to some three times the length of the original; the last, Note G, set out a method for computing the Bernoulli numbers that is often — though the attribution is contested — called the first algorithm written for a computer. That fuller, later program built directly upon the operation-tables first printed here. The paper is genuinely rare, and rarer still as here. It was issued in no separate form — no offprint of Menabrea’s French text is recorded — so the journal number is the only shape in which the first edition exists; and the Bibliothèque Universelle circulated chiefly by institutional subscription, so that most surviving copies bear the stamps of the libraries, military and technical schools prominent among them, that took the run. Unstamped copies are the exception. The trade benchmark is the copy from Hook and Norman’s own Origins of Cyberspace collection, in a later binding, sold at Christie’s in 2005; the two further copies to reach auction since have both carried institutional stamps. Jeremy Norman, offering a stamped copy, could call it only the second he had handled in more than forty years’ trading. The timing of the paper was cruelly apt. In the very autumn that the machine’s first account reached print abroad, Babbage’s own government was giving it up: within weeks of the paper’s appearance Sir Robert Peel, advised that the engines were useless, withdrew the last of the state’s support. Menabrea’s paper and Lovelace’s translation of it would remain, for more than twenty years, among the only substantial published descriptions of the Analytical Engine, until Babbage set down his own in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864). Menabrea wrote almost nothing further on the machine; he went on to sign the treaty ceding Venetia to Italy, to lead his country’s government, and to serve as its ambassador in London and Paris. What he had transcribed as a young captain was never finished, and much of what he described lay unrealised for a century — but it was here, in some two dozen pages of a Swiss review, that programmable computation first reached print. References: Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002), No. 60 — Tomash & Williams M82 — A. Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, 1982), pp. 181–190 — D. Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy (MIT Press, 1985), p. 92 — L. F. Menabrea (trans. A. A. Lovelace), ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage’, in R. Taylor (ed.), Scientific Memoirs, volume 3 (1843), pp. 666–731. ‘Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage’, pp. 352–376 in: Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, Nouvelle Série, Tome 41, no. 82 (October 1842) — the whole volume. 8vo (202 × 129 mm), pp. [5], 6–420, with a folding table and several operation- and difference-tables printed within the text (the programme-tables at pp. 355, 363 and 369). Contemporary green quarter sheep and marbled boards, the spine ruled in gilt with a red morocco lettering-piece (spine a little worn, with minor restoration). Without institutional stamps. Title-page imprint dual: Geneva (au Bureau de la Bibliothèque Universelle, chez B. Glaser) and Paris (chez Anselin).
Item #6376
Price: $25,000.00
