Edward Cherlin wrote
>Two Babbage Difference Engines were built by other companies, with
>his blessing, but nobody has ever attempted an Analytical Engine to
>this day.
But they did....
quote from the Science Museum
"Analytical Engine Mill by Henry Prevost Babbage, 1910.
Babbage bequeathed his workshop, experimental work, drawings and other
material relating to the Analytical Engine to his son Henry Prevost. To
'justify the confidence he had shown' in him, Henry wished to realise in
metal some of his father's designs. This portion of the mill, the arithmetic
unit and printing mechanism, was the result. It was worked on intermittently
from the 1880s until 1910 in the workshop of R W Munro. It was designed to
perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Henry records
that in 1910 it printed the first twenty two multiples of Pi to 28 places.
These were later found to contain mistakes. It is questionable whether the
machine ever worked."
www.sciencemuseum.org.uk
There is a picture of the Engine on the web site.
Suzanne Giles
PS we are implementing a new bibliographic system at the British Library in
the UK and are using Unicode as we use so many different scripts when
cataloguing. This news group is very interesting. Thanks one and all.
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