Piece Description

A Different Engine  tells the story of the 19^th C. English mathematician Charles Babbage who originated the idea of a programmable computer in the 1820s.  Though his “Difference Engine” was never built during his lifetime, in 1985 the London Science Museum set out to construct a working Difference Engine No. 2 built faithfully to Babbage's original designs.  The project took seventeen years to complete. The calculating section was finished in 1991, in time for the bicentenary of Babbage's birth, and the printing and stereotyping apparatus was completed in 2002.  The radio play depicts Babbage’s efforts to convince his contemporaries that he was not just some curmudgeonly lunatic and to secure funding to bring his project to completion.  He was helped by Ada Lovelace, a brilliant mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron.  She was among the few of Babbage’s contemporaries who fully understood his ideas.  Working with him, she developed a program, which, had Babbage’s invention actually been built, would have been able to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.  Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer.