By Tom Standage
The Difference Engine, an enormous mechanical calculator designed by Charles Babbage in the 1820s, is getting its first peripheral: an elaborate mechanical printer, also from a Babbage blueprint. With roughly US$1.2 million in funding from Microsoft bigwig Nathan Myhrvold, the same London Science Museum engineers who, in 1991, painstakingly constructed the inventor's never-completed calculating engine will build the compatible printer (along with a replica of the engine and the printer for Myhrvold's house). Once assembled, it will output in two, three, or four columns with adjustable margins and a choice of two fonts.
Babbage, who conceived the hand-cranked calculator in order to produce error-free mathematical tables, worried that mistakes would be made by humans transcribing the results from its 31 metal output wheels. Hence the need for a mechanical printer. Unfortunately, Babbage left no plans for a modem.
ELECTRIC WORD
Babbage Writer
