Pre-Mechanical Computing in Gleik's "The Information" [DTC 356, post 1]

Chapter 4 of Gleik’s “The Information”  titled “To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work” demonstrated themes in the heart of the C in DTC (Digital Technology and Culture) by the story of Charles Babbage's pursuit for mechanical computation. Babbage sought to create a “rational machine. It would be a junction point for two roads – mechanism and thought” (Gleick 99). In Babbage’s time, the culture surrounding technology differed greatly from today’s culture. Much of this was to do with public understanding of technology and the volume of it invented at the time, but culture was also influenced by the rhetoric used to describe thoughts and objects related to technology.

Babbage's attempt at creating a universal language for his technology (I thought of it as a coding language, but for people to understand mechanics) showed him the challenges of capturing the quirks and kinks of communication. "As philosophers came face to face with the multiplicity of the world's dialects, they so often saw language not as a perfect vessel for truth but as a leaky sieve. Confusion about the meanings of words led to contradictions" (90). In his work – and indeed, the work of all mechanical and electrical inventors – clear and precise rhetoric was of the utmost importance. He mentioned the difficulty he had in describing his invention, and even more in explaining its usefulness. On page 104, Babbage was quoted to say of his fellow Englishman, "If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

In Babbage's time, there was a different attitude toward information. Babbage demonstrated this with his pyramid problem – supposing that a child wanted to find the number of bricks in any layer of a pyramid. It must have seemed not pointless, but because of the difficulty in trying to find the answer, a question unworthy of consideration. "Perhaps he might go to papa to obtain this information; but I much fear papa would snub hum, and would tell him that it was nonsense – that it was useless – that nobody knew the number, and so forth," Babbage pondered (95). That seemed to be Babbage’s most difficult endeavor: not to explain his technology, but to convey its usefulness.

This was a time in history when few may have imagined the ease with which they could do simple tasks with the help of technology. Those who did (Babbage) must have grown frustrated with the hassle caused by the gap in understanding. These days we take advantage of that mutual grasp – the imaginative power we possess that comes from understanding past and current technology, and its potential to make our lives better. Not to mention the ease of we have of explaining concepts or objects with tools like digital images or Google. We reference past technologies as well as those imagined in science fiction movies, and find fuel on the Internet to foster support other ideas. 

It is difficult to even consider what people must have thought about technology (or IF they did) before digital technology, let alone before mechanical technology.  Let alone FURTHER – how they talked about it, and what rhetorical strategies they used to describe.