The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. James Gleick

the past.

      Like the looms, forges, naileries, and glassworks he studied in his travels across northern England, Babbage’s machine was designed to manufacture vast quantities of a certain commodity. The commodity was numbers. The engine opened a channel from the corporeal world of matter to a world of pure abstraction. The engine consumed no raw materials—input and output being weightless—but needed a considerable force to turn the gears. All that wheel-work would fill a room and weigh several tons. Producing numbers, as Babbage conceived it, required a degree of mechanical complexity at the very limit of available technology. Pins were easy, compared with numbers.

      It was not natural to think of numbers as a manufactured commodity. They existed in the mind, or in ideal abstraction, in their perfect infinitude. No machine could add to the world’s supply. The numbers produced by Babbage’s engine were meant to be those with significance: numbers with a meaning. For example, 2.096910013 has a meaning, as the logarithm of 125. (Whether every number has a meaning would be a conundrum for the next century.) The meaning of a number could be expressed as a relationship to other numbers, or as the answer to a certain question of arithmetic. Babbage himself did not speak in terms of meaning; he tried to explain his engine pragmatically, in terms of putting numbers into the machine and seeing other numbers come out, or, a bit more fancifully, in terms of posing questions to the machine and expecting an answer. Either way, he had trouble getting the point across. He grumbled:

      On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

      Anyway, the machine was not meant to be a sort of oracle, to be consulted by individuals who would travel from far and wide for mathematical answers. The engine’s chief mission was to print out numbers en masse. For portability, the facts of arithmetic could be expressed in tables and bound in books.

      To Babbage the world seemed made of such facts. They were the “constants of Nature and Art.” He collected them everywhere. He compiled a Table of Constants of the Class Mammalia: wherever he went he timed the breaths and heartbeats of pigs and cows. He invented a statistical methodology with tables of life expectancy for the somewhat shady business of life insurance. He drew up a table of the weight in Troy grains per square yard of various fabrics: cambric, calico, nankeen, muslins, silk gauze, and “caterpillar veils.” Another table revealed the relative frequencies of all the double-letter combinations in English, French, Italian, German, and Latin. He researched, computed, and published a Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breaking of Plate Glass Windows, distinguishing 464 different causes, no less than fourteen of which involved “drunken men, women, or boys.” But the tables closest to his heart were the purest: tables of numbers and only numbers, marching neatly across and down the pages in stately rows and columns, patterns for abstract appreciation.

      A book of numbers: amid all the species of information technology, how peculiar and powerful an object this is. “Lo! the raptured arithmetician!” wrote Élie de Joncourt in 1762. “Easily satisfied, he asks no Brussels lace, nor a coach and six.” Joncourt’s own contribution was a small quarto volume registering the first 19,999 triangular numbers. It was a treasure box of exactitude, perfection, and close reckoning. These numbers were so simple, just the sums of the first n whole numbers: 1, 3 (1+2), 6 (1+2+3), 10 (1+2+3+4), 15, 21, 28, and so on. They had interested number theorists since Pythagoras. They offered little in the way of utility, but Joncourt rhapsodized about his pleasure in compiling them and Babbage quoted him with heartfelt sympathy: “Numbers have many charms, unseen by vulgar eyes, and only discovered to the unwearied and respectful sons of Art. Sweet joy may arise from such contemplations.”

      Tables of numbers had been part of the book business even before the beginning of the print era. Working in Baghdad in the ninth century, Abu Abdullah Mohammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose name survives in the word algorithm, devised tables of trigonometric functions that spread west across Europe and east to China, made by hand and copied by hand, for hundreds of years. Printing brought number tables into their own: they were a natural first application for the mass production of data in the raw. For people in need of arithmetic, multiplication tables covered more and more territory: 10 × 1,000, then 10 × 10,000, and later as far as 1,000 × 1,000. There were tables of squares and cubes, roots and reciprocals. An early form of table was the ephemeris or almanac, listing positions of the sun, moon, and planets for sky-gazers. Tradespeople found uses for number books. In 1582 Simon Stevin produced Tafelen van Interest, a compendium of interest tables for bankers and moneylenders. He promoted the new decimal arithmetic “to astrologers, land-measurers, measurers of tapestry and wine casks and stereometricians, in general, mint masters and merchants all.” He might have added sailors. When Christopher Columbus set off for the Indies, he carried as an aid to navigation a book of tables by Regiomontanus printed in Nuremberg two decades after the invention of moveable type in Europe.

      Joncourt’s book of triangular numbers was purer than any of these— which is also to say useless. Any arbitrary triangular number can be found (or made) by an algorithm: multiply n by n + 1 and divide by 2. So Joncourt’s whole compendium, as a bundle of information to be stored and transmitted, collapses in a puff to a one-line formula. The formula contains all the information. With it, anyone capable of simple multiplication (not many were) could generate any triangular number on demand. Joncourt knew this. Still he and his publisher, M. Husson, at the Hague, found it worthwhile to set the tables in metal type, three pairs of columns to a page, each pair listing thirty natural numbers alongside their corresponding triangular numbers, from 1(1) to 19,999(199,990,000), every numeral chosen individually by the compositor from his cases of metal type and lined up in a galley frame and wedged into an iron chase to be placed upon the press.

      Why? Besides the obsession and the ebullience, the creators of number tables had a sense of their economic worth. Consciously or not, they reckoned the price of these special data by weighing the difficulty of computing them versus looking them up in a book. Precomputation plus data storage plus data transmission usually came out cheaper than ad hoc computation. “Computers” and “calculators” existed: they were people with special skills, and all in all, computing was costly.

      Beginning in 1767, England’s Board of Longitude ordered published a yearly Nautical Almanac, with position tables for the sun, moon, stars, planets, and moons of Jupiter. Over the next half century a network of computers did the work—thirty-four men and one woman, Mary Edwards of Ludlow, Shropshire, all working from their homes. Their painstaking labor paid £70 a year. Computing was a cottage industry. Some mathematical sense was required but no particular genius; rules were laid out in steps for each type of calculation. In any case the computers, being human, made errors, so the same work was often farmed out twice for the sake of redundancy. (Unfortunately, being human, computers were sometimes caught saving themselves labor by copying from one other.) To manage the information flow the project employed a Comparer of the Ephemeris and Corrector of the Proofs. Communication between the computers and comparer went by post, men on foot or on horseback, a few days per message.

      A seventeenth-century invention had catalyzed the whole enterprise. This invention was itself a species of number, given the name logarithm. It was number as tool. Henry Briggs explained:

      Logarithmes are Numbers invented for the more easie working of questions in Arithmetike and Geometrie. The name is derived of Logos, which signifies Reason, and Arithmos, signifying Numbers. By them all troublesome Multiplications and Divisions in Arithmetike are avoided, and performed onely by Addition in stead of Multiplication, and by Subtraction in stead of Division.

      In 1614 Briggs was a professor of geometry—the first professor of geometry—at Gresham College, London, later to be the birthplace of the Royal Society. Without logarithms he had already created two books of tables, A Table to find the Height of the Pole, the Magnetic Declination being given and Tables for the Improvement of Navigation, when a book came from Edinburgh promising to “take away all the difficultie that heretofore hath beene in mathematical calculations.”

      There