ALS signed “C. Babbage,” one page, 5 x 8, May 30, 1834. Handwritten letter to Dunbar James Douglas, 6th Earl of Selkirk (1809-1885), inviting him to a lecture, in full: “Having learned from the Duke of Somerset that you have a great desire to see the Calculating engine I am happy to offer you an opportunity which will I hope be interesting. Lord and Lady Lansdowne and a very small party are coming to my house tomorrow evening at half past nine and Dr. [Dionysius] Lardner has sent his drawings and will give us a popular explanation of it. If Lady Selkirk and your sister will do me the honor of accompanying you I shall have much pleasure in seeing them at my house.” In fine condition.
This rare handwritten letter finds the father of computing making a last-ditch attempt to drum up aristocratic support, presumably for the doomed Difference Engine No. 1, with the project months away from its final collapse. The manufacturing engineer Joseph Clement had ceased work on the project in March 1833 following a financial dispute. He had, however, succeeded by 1832 in producing a fully functioning demonstration piece representing about one-seventh of the whole machine, which as the first known automatic calculator ‘ranks among the most celebrated icons in the prehistory of computing' (ODNB). Babbage himself published little on the design of either his difference or analytical engines, but he received prominent support from the Irish scientific writer Dionysius Lardner who, in 1834, delivered a series of lectures on the difference engine and contributed a lengthy article on the subject, titled 'Babbage’s Calculating Engine,’ to the Edinburgh Review.
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