On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

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Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

He earns degrees in mathematics and astronomy as a young scholar, but maintains his interest in machines by studying the new factory systems that are sprouting across England’s industrial north. Almost thirty years after his visit to Merlin’s, he publishes a seminal analysis of industrial technology, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, a work that would go on to play a pivotal role in Marx’s Das Kapital two decades later. Around the same time, Babbage begins sketching plans for a calculating machine he calls the Difference Engine, an invention that will eventually lead him to the Analytical Engine several years later, now considered to be the first programmable computer ever imagined.

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227–30 artists as toolmakers, 175–81 Au Bonheur des Dames (Zola), 43–44 auditory illusions, 158–59, 165–66 automata clockworks, 6–7 Digesting Duck, 7, 79 flute player, 76–79 “Instrument Which Plays by Itself, The,” 73–76, 75 lifelike simulations of individual organisms, 7, 77 “Mechanical Turk,” 14 Writer, the, 7, 8 Babbage, Charles Analytic Engine, 10 Calculating Engine, 82 Difference Engine, 10, 14 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 10 inspired by Merlin’s Mechanical Museum, 9, 184, 284 interest in the technology of the Jacquard loom, 80–82 Baghdad (formerly Madinat al-Salam), 1–3 city design, 1–3 House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), 3 intellectual culture, 3–5 ball, importance of the, 210–15, 211, 212 Ballet Mécanique, 95–98 Balmat, Jacques, 263 Banu Musa, 3–5, 73–76 Banvard, John, 167, 172, 266 Barbon, Nicholas, 30 Barker, Robert, 5, 160–64, 167 baseball Cooperstown, New York, 199–200 lineage of, 199–200 Baudrillard, Jean, 273 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 166 Bellier-Beaumont, Ferréol, 129–30 Berry, Miles, 89 Birth of A Consumer Society, The (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb), 37 black belt, the, 33–34 Black Cat Tavern, 242–44 Black Death, 136–37 bodily humors, 134–35 bone flutes, 65–70, 66 Le Bon Marché, 41–46, 45 Book of Games of Chance, The (Cardano), 205, 207 Book of Ingenious Devices, The (Banu Masu), 3–5, 4, 73 Book of the Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanisms, The (al-Jazari), 2, 3–5 Boorstin, Daniel, 183 Boucicaut, Aristide, 40, 41–42, 48–49 Bradley, Milton, 195 Brand, Stewart, 219–20 Braudel, Fernand, 39–40 Brewer, John, 37 Brewster, David, 154–56, 156, 160 Brewster Stereoscope, 160 British East India Company, 28 British Magazine, 39 British Museum, 256–57 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 160, 175, 179 brutality of the Dutch regime Bandanese people of the Spice Islands, 119 Caribbean, 120, 120–21 Burrows, Edward G., 234 Burton, Mary, 235 “cabinet of wonders” (Wunderkammerns), 255–57, 256 caffeine as a memory enhancer, 247–48 as a natural weapon of the coffee plant, 247 calico “Calico Madams,” 28 made popular by window displays, 31 vivid colors of chintz and, 26–27, 27 capsaicin, 142 Cardano, Girolamo, 204, 205, 207–209, 222 Carlyle, Thomas, 153 casino games, 221–27 Caxton, William, 188 Cecil, William, 240 celebrities, 182–84 Cessolis, Jacobus de, 187–92, 194 chance.

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See cinema Mumford, Lewis, 50 Murch, Walter, 175 murex snails sea voyages in search of, 18–19 source of Tyrian purple, 17–18, 19 music Ballet Mécanique, 95–98 boxes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 76 consonance vs. dissonance, 68 cultural invention vs. evolutionary adaptation, 69–72 drawing wave patterns to produce, 103–106 electronic, 101–106 experimental, 95–98 fourths and fifths, 67 intermedi, 83–85 origins of, 67 phonograph, 94–95 physics of intervals, 67–68 Steven Pinker, 70–71 pinned cylinder, 74–77 pursuit of innovation in, 72 Pythagorean tuning, 68 and ratios, 68 recorded, sharing, 106–107 tempo, 96–97 musical instruments bone flutes, 65–70, 66 “Instrument Which Plays by Itself, The,” 73–76, 75 of the Medici intermedi, 84–85 Oramics Machine, 102–106, 105 panharmonicon, 166 pianoforte, 88, 92 player piano, 89, 92–95, 93 natural selection, 269–70 nature as a relaxing escape, 260–66 Nossa Senhora dos Martires (“Pepper Wreck”), 115–16, 117 “novelty bonus” when perceiving new experiences, 281, 282 nutmeg, 113–15, 114, 122–25 Obama, Barack, 33–34 occult shows, 149–50 Oldenburg, Ray, 246 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 274 On Painting (Alberti), 160 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Babbage), 10 open-ended functionality of machines “Instrument Which Plays by Itself, The,” 75, 75–77 opium trade, 119 optical illusions, 155–56 Brewster Stereoscope, 160 Conflagration of Moscow, The, 164–66 evolutionary adaptations that allow, 174–75 eye as the source of most illusions, 157–58, 159 Kanizsa triangle, 157, 158 Kopfermann cube, 158, 158 linear perspective, 160–61 “Moving Panorama,” 167 Necker cube, 157–58, 158, 159 Panorama paintings, 160–64 persistence of vision, 172, 184 thaumatrope, 172, 174 zoetrope, 172 Oram, Daphne, 102–106, 105 Orlando, Florida, 274 outdoors, the Albert Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc (performance), 266 biophilia, 260 celebrated in art, 266 Claude glass, 265, 265–66 fear of wilderness, 260 Mont Blanc, 262–64 mountaineering, 262–64 national parks and wilderness preservation, 266 nature tourism, start of, 264–65 Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, 261, 262–64 Paccard, Michel, 263 panharmonicon, 166 Panorama paintings, 160–64, 162, 266 Parker Brothers, 199 Pascal, Blaise, 207–209 Patrickson, Thomas, 119 pepper biochemistry of, 142–43 Cookbook (Apicus), 118 as currency, 116 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 118 Nossa Senhora dos Martires (“Pepper Wreck”), 115–16, 117 Queen Elizabeth I’s quest to acquire, 139–41 role in the fall of the Roman Empire, 118 perception, 159–60 Phantasmagoria, the, 150–55, 151 phase transitions, 181–82 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 151 Philidor, Paul, 149–50 Philipsthal, Paul de, 5, 154 phonograph, 94–95 Pilon, Mary, 195 Pinker, Steven, 70–71 piperine, 142–43 play encourages exploration and innovation, 73, 282 as insight into the future, 15 player piano concept of paying for new programming, 94 difficulties synchronizing more than one, 96–97 early versions, 89 pianola, 92–95, 93 pleasure, seeking, 71–73 “pleasuring grounds,” 274–76 Pliny the Elder, 118, 142 Plumb, J.

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

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

TO THROW THE POWERS OF THOUGHT INTO WHEEL-WORK ♦ The original writings of Charles Babbage and, to a lesser extent, Ada Lovelace are increasingly accessible. The comprehensive, thousand-dollar, eleven-volume edition, The Works of Charles Babbage, edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, was published in 1989. Online, the full texts of Babbage’s Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), and The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) can now be found in editions scanned from libraries by Google’s book program. Not yet available there (as of 2010), but also useful, is his son’s volume, Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them (1889).

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As for the Lovelace letters and papers, they are in the British Library, the Bodleian, and elsewhere, but many have been published by Betty Alexandra Toole in Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers (1992 and 1998); where possible I try to cite the published versions. ♦ “LIGHT ALMOST SOLAR HAS BEEN EXTRACTED”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), 300; reprinted in Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage, ed. Anthony Hyman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 200. ♦ THE TIMES OBITUARIST: “The Late Mr. Charles Babbage, F.R.S.,” The Times (London), 23 October 1871. Babbage’s crusade against organ-grinders and hurdy-gurdies was not in vain; a new law against street music in 1864 was known as Babbage’s Act.

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Dodge, “Charles Babbage,” Smithsonian Annual Report of 1873, 162–97, reprinted in Annals of the History of Computing 22, no. 4 (October–December 2000), 20. ♦ NOT “THE MANUAL LABOR OF ROWING”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 37. ♦ “ ‘THE TALL GENTLEMAN IN THE CORNER’ ”: Ibid., 385–86. ♦ “THOSE WHO ENJOY LEISURE”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), v. ♦ HE COMPUTED THE COST OF EACH PHASE: Ibid., 146. ♦ “AT THE EXPENSE OF THE NATION”: Henry Prevost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History and Construction (London: E. & F.

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

John Lawrence Hammond and Barbara Bradby Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832 (London, 1913), p. 116. 14. James Mill (ed.), review of Malcolm’s Agriculture of Surrey, in Literary Review 1:5 (May 1806), p. 485. 15. Board of Agriculture, On the Subject of Manures (London, 1795); Frederick Falkner, The Muck Manual (London, 1843), p. 106. 16. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture, 4th edn (London, 1846), p. 218. 17. ‘Agricultural Chemistry’, Chester Chronicle, 28 January 1814, p. 4; Falkner, Muck Manual, p. 95. 18. ‘At the Durham Assizes’, Oxford University and City Herald, 20 April 1811, p. 4. 19. Falkner, Muck Manual, p. 95; ‘Soot Manure’, Chester Courant, 30 October 1821, p. 4; ‘Universal Chimney Doctor’, Stamford Mercury, 26 January 1827, p. 3. 20.

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David Barnett, ‘The Structure of Industry in London 1775–1825’, unpublished PhD thesis, Nottingham University, 1996, p. 187; BM, Prints & Drawings, Banks, 70, 49, trade card of Robert Ledger; James Raven, Publishing Business in Eighteenth Century England (Woodbridge, 2014), p. 61; ‘Buckram Manufactory, London’, Norfolk Chronicle, 15 November 1788, p. 3. 28. Simmonds, Waste Products, p. 19; Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture, 4th edn (London, 1846), p. 11. 29. Larvik Museum, Norway, trunk by Henry Nickles, https://digitaltmuseum.no/021026961918/kiste 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Trade Cards 28(54), Samuel Pratt, trunk-maker. 31. Mary Thale (ed.), Autobiography of Francis Place (London, 1972), pp. 47–9. 32.

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Talbot, Millions from Waste, pp. 19, 32, 35; see also Thomas Greenwood, ‘The Utilisation of Waste II’, Leisure Hour, 35, October 1886, pp. 707–9. 18. Ian Buxton and Ian Johnston, Battleship Builders (Barnsley, 2013), p. 306. 19. Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory (originally 1979, reprint edn, London, 2017), p. 115. 20. Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture, pp. 148–9. 21. ‘London’, Hampshire Chronicle, 23 May 1803, p. 2. See also ‘Gathering Up the Fragments’, Kirkintilloch Herald, 3 April 1918, p. 7. See, for example, Thomas Tusser, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandry (London, 1570), fol. 33v. 22. Strasser, Waste and Want. 23.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

He envisioned the world’s first computer, the Difference Engine, and incorporated Jacquard’s punched card system in his second attempt to build a computer, the Analytical Engine. These machines were intended to replace the personnel, at the time known as ‘computers’, who were then employed to calculate mathematical tables. In addition to figuring out the principles of computing, Charles Babbage was also a pioneer in writing management literature. In On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, published in 1832, he advised factory owners how to break up the labour process into simple tasks that could be operated by workers with the least possible skills. His deep understanding of technology did not fail him when assessing the expediency of machinery on the factory shop-floor: “One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents.”9 Charles Babbage’s words inadvertently point to the antagonistic relation between labour and capital that computing has grown out of.

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Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just For Fun—The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2001); hereafter cited in text. 8. ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson & L. Willoughby, On the Aesthetic Education of Man—In a Series of Letters/Friedrich Schiller (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982), 9; hereafter cited in text as Letters. 9. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (New York: Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1971), 54. 10. Jason Scott, BBS the Documentary (2004). 11. Andrew Sullivan, “Counter Culture: Dot-communist Manifesto”, New York Times (Sunday 11, June 2000). 12. Slavoj Zizek, “A Cyberspace Lenin: Why Not?”, International Socialism Journal 95, (summer 2002). 13.

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Thomas Jefferson—Political Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ed. Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998). Axelos, Kostas. Alienation, Praxis, and Techné in the Thought of Karl Marx, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976. Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, New York: Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1971. Baden, John, and Douglas Noonan. Managing the Commons, London: Indiana University Press, 1998. ed. Balakrishnan, Gopal. Debating Empire, London: Verso, 2003. Barabási, Albert-László. Linked—The New Science of Networks, Cambridge Mass.: Perseus Publishing, 2002.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Swade notes that Babbage never considered the cost-benefit aspect of his great projects, assuming that government officials would be as drawn as he was to “ingenuity, intricacy, mastery of mechanism, and the seductive appeal of control over number.”37 Babbage was undoubtedly at the extreme end of other-worldliness, but he had a large and responsive audience. A book he published in 1833, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing,38 has an arid, academic tone; the first third is an exhaustive classification of machines as those for “Accumulating Power,” “Regulating Power,” “Extending the Time of Action of Forces,” and much else in that vein. Yet the first printing of 3,000 copies was sold out within a few weeks, and there were two more editions the next year.

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(New York: Dover, 1961), 346–354, quote at 351, plates at 380–384. 32 Swade, personal communication. 33 Babbage, Passages, 452. 34 The account here is from Swade, “A Modern Sequel,” Part 3 in Difference Engine. 35 Swade, Difference Engine, 292. 36 Ibid., 305. Note that Swade and his team did not attempt to make Babbage’s printer, which was of the same size and complexity of the DE2 itself. 37 Ibid., 201. 38 Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing (London: John Murray, 1846). 39 Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 8. 40 Ibid., 150. 41 The most detailed available history and analyses are Carolyn C. Cooper, “The Portsmouth System of Manufacture,” Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (April 1984): 182–225, and Carolyn C.

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Newton, Isaac Niagara Niagara campaign Niagara River Suspension Bridge Niles, Hezekiel Niles Weekly Register Nobel brothers Nortel North, Simeon(fig.) contract for pistol making by North Star Northern Pacific Railroad Novelty Works Nugent, “Mountain Jim,” Nutrition, work output and O’Conor, Richard Ohio River hog processing and On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturing (Babbage) Oneida Organization Pacific Pacific Railway Act (1862) Paper handling Papin, Denis Paris Exposition (1857) Parsons, Charles Parts problems with Party Politburo Patent Arms Manufacturing Company Patent law Patent Office Patents claim-jumping intellectual property and litigation over managing Pawtucket Canal Pearson, John Peddlers Pendulums Pennsylvania Railroad Percy, Henry Perkins, Jacob Perry Perry, Oliver Hazard Peterson Institute Philadelphia-Germantown Railroad Phonographs Pigou, trade restriction and Pike Pike, Zebulon Pillsbury Pistols contract for making Politics Pollution Pomeroy, Lemuel Popplewell, Frank Population growth(table) Porkopolis Portage Railroad Porter, Edward Porter, Levi Portsmouth block-making factory Postcards Potemkin, Grigory Alexandrovich Precision Prescott, Benjamin Prevost, George Chauncey and on St.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

And even then, what by the standards of the day could be considered very large factories—mills employing over a thousand employees—were the exception, not the rule, in both urban and rural settings.25 But the very large mills received a disproportionate amount of attention, both at the time and since, because they were seen as the cutting edge of not only industry and technology but also of social arrangements.26 Why did the owners of these facilities choose to go big, to adopt the large, centralized factory model? Charles Babbage, the great English mathematician and inventor, devoted a whole chapter “On the Causes and Consequences of Large Factories” in his influential 1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. Babbage began with the obvious, that the introduction of machinery tended to lead to greater production volume, resulting in “the establishment of large factories.” A leading student of the division of labor, he contended that efficient production units had to be multiples of the number of workers needed for the most efficient division of labor in a particular production process.

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Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, new series, vol. 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1977), 96, 98, 112; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv. 26.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 208–11; Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–4. 27.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 211–23. 28.Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 108; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI. 29.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 184–85. 30.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 41; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 71–74; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xiii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24, 190, 246; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial Capital, 70–71.

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See names of specific locations New York Times (newspaper), 194, 200 New York Times Sunday Magazine, 217 New York World’s Fair (1939), 215, 363n Newcastle, England, 96 Newhouse, Edward, 161 Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, 186 New-York Daily Tribune (newspaper), 58–59, 66 Niagara Falls Power Company, 150 Nike, 273, 292–94, 296, 304, 307, 396n Nishimura, Koichi, 293 Nissan, 248 Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union, 171, 190–93, 199 Nizhny Tagil, Soviet Union, 201, 212, 374n, 379n Nkrumah, Kwame, xii, 256 NKVD (formerly GPU), 203–4 nonfactory production, 4–6, 9, 32 North American Aviation, 238 North River (steamboat), 82–83 Nottingham, England, 7–8, 328n Nottinghamshire, England, 36 Nová Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, 249 Nowa Huta, Poland, 249, 251–65, 253, 255, 314, 387n Oastler, Richard, 26 O’Hare, Kate Richards, 145–46 Ohio. See names of specific locations oil industry, 277–78, 290 Olds Motor Works, 123 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 104–5 Omaha, Nebraska, 85 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers (Babbage), 10–11 O’Neill, Eugene, 150 organzine industry, 2–3 Orjonikidje, Sergo, 198, 200, 220 Otis Elevator, 239 Otis Steel, 149–50 Ottoman Empire, 5, 329n outsourcing, 291–96 Overman, Frederick, 89 Owen, Robert, 24, 26 Ozersk, Soviet Union, 246 Packard Motor Company, 133, 137, 362n painting, 86, 148, 151–59, 157, 366n Palace of the Soviets (Moscow, Soviet Union), 230 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), 144–45 panopticon, 17 paper industry, 72 “Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, The” (Melville), 72 Paris, France, 85–88, 100 Parsons, Talcott, 227 Partisan Review (magazine), 161 patents and patent royalties, 3, 7, 9, 54, 190, 343n, 346n Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 45, 66 Pawtucket Falls, 51 PBM Mariner flying boats, 232 Pearl River Delta, China, 282–83 Pegatron Corporation, 273, 296, 310, 322 Pellerin, Cora, 76 Pelton, O., 55 Pemberton Mill, 76–77, 79, 349n Pennsylvania, 46.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

.… [N]owhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.”29 Overall, machinery critics of the Victorian Age raised more questions than they answered. Yet they prompted defenders of mechanization—including Charles Babbage, Andrew Ure, and Edward Baines—to make a case for it. Babbage’s On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures presents machines as a helpful complement to the worker’s labor, suggesting that “various operations occur in the arts in which an assistance of an additional hand would be a great convenience to the workman, and in these cases tools or machines of the simplest structure come to our aid.… The discovery of the expansive power of steam [has] already added to the population of this small island, millions of hands.”30 And in addition to making workers more productive, Ure declared that it was only with the spread of machines that new and better-paying jobs could be created, allowing ordinary people to climb the economic ladder: Instead of repining as they have done at the prosperity of their employers … good workmen would have advanced their condition to that of overlookers, managers, and partners in new mills, and have increased at the same time the demand for their companions’ labour in the market.

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Gaskell, 1833, The Manufacturing Population of England, Its Moral, Social, and Physical Conditions (London: Baldwin and Cradock), 16. 27. Landes, 1969, The Unbound Prometheus, 2. 28. P. Gaskell, 1833, The Manufacturing Population of England, 12 and 341. 29. Marx, [1867] 1999, Das Kapital , chapter 15, section 5. 30. C. Babbage, 1832, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight), 266–67. 31. A. Ure, 1835, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight), 220. 32. E. Baines, 1835, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson), 452. 33. Ibid., 460. 34. Ibid., 435. 35.

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The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure.” Working Paper 22637, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. Autor, D. H., F. Levy, and R. J. Murnane. 2003. “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (4): 1279–333. Babbage, C. 1832. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London: Charles Knight. Bacci, M. L. 2017. A Concise History of World Population. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons. Baines, E. 1835. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson. Bairoch, P. 1991. Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Charles Babbage, the inventor of the schema for one of the first modern computers, would declare that his difference engine could be used to computerize the entire factory system. (In an ironic twist, Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, Ada Lovelace, would write history’s first software programs by expanding on Babbage’s work.) In 1832, Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, which argued that factories and machinery were the great drivers of prosperity. It helped launch a trend of books known as factory guides, tomes intended to drum up public support for the institution at a time of gathering doubts, and to extol the virtues of the machinery that made them possible.

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Garden City, NY: Doubleday; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Armstrong, Isobel, and Virginia Blain, eds. Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–1820. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Axon, William Edward Armytage. Lancashire Gleanings. London, 1883. Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London: Charles Knight, 1832. Bailey, Brian. The Luddite Rebellion. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Ball, Charles. Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave, Under Various Masters, and Was One Year in the Navy with Commodore Barney, During the Late War.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run—or Ruin—an Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014). 20. Dayong Wang et al., “Deep Learning for Identifying Metastatic Breast Cancer,” Camelyon Grand Challenge, June 18, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.05718.pdf. 21. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight Pall Mall East, 1832), 162. 22. Daniel Paravisini and Antoinette Schoar, “The Incentive Effect of IT: Randomized Evidence from Credit Committees,” working paper 19303, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2013. 23. Such “first pass” division of labor is being seen in many prediction machine deployments.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

In this account of circulation, mobility, and inertia, I have been influenced by N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E 157 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 158 the work of Will Straw (see, for example, “Embedded Memories,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007], 3–31). Conversations with Michael Winship helped clarify this account of repetition. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 191; see Martin Campbell-­Kelly, “Informational Technology and Organizational Change in the British Census, 1801–1911,” Information Systems Research 7 (March 1996): 22–36. In chapter 2 of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone, 2012), Ben Kafka explains how Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès worked this principle out in advance of Babbage as a theory of government.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Notes CHAPTER ONE: A COMPUTER WANTED “A Computer Wanted,” it says: “A Computer Wanted,” New York Times, May 2, 1892. original cottage industry: James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 84. offices of his time did “mental labor”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, Pall Mall East, 1832), 153. mathematicians would guesstimate their horsepower: David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 276. “the visible pattern” of any cloth: Sadie Plant, Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 66.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

This breaks down into: £31bn strategy consulting; $71bn operational consulting; $70bn financial consulting; $31bn HR consulting; $48bn technology consulting. 2. Cited in Trevor Boyns, John R. Edwards and Marc Nitiken, The Birth of Industrial Accounting in Britain and France, Routledge, 2013. 3. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832, cited in Chatfield and Vangermeersch. 4. MacDonald, The Firm. 5. Higgins, The First Sixty Years. 6. Ibid. 7. Brewster. 8. Ibid. 9. MacDonald. The term ‘contractor state’ was coined by Christopher McKenna in The World’s Newest Profession, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006. 10.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Babbage realized that all industrial machines have a similar structure: they require designers and operators at one end, making sure that the machine is set up to perform the required tasks; in the middle they displaced artisanal jobs by executing simple, repetitive operations; and at the end they turn out products at a rate that had never been seen before. Babbage captured his division of labour and work-flow theories in his popular 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. It is arguable that this book, rather than his un-completed computer engines, contains his most impactful legacy. In it, he transformed Smith’s theory of the division of labour from a mere observation to a design tool for the economic future of the world. He did so by articulating the mathematical advantages for production afforded by specialization of tasks, and the related design of systems of human work in factory flows.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

His Demonstrator was a device capable of solving mechanically traditional syllogisms, numerical syllogisms and elementary probability problems. 3Morris, I. (2010), Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 4These are the four measures that Ian Morris uses to construct his ‘Human Social Development Index’: energy capture, organisation, war-making capacity and information technology. 5Babbage, C. (1835), On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (4th edition). London: Charles Knight. 6What is also significant about recursive functions such as difference functions is that they describe complex, chaotic behaviours when the relation between the two variables computed is non-linear. When finite differences between the parameters of a difference equation become infinitesimal, then the equations are called ‘differential’ and are fundamental to calculus. 7Difference Engine No. 2 was reconstructed under Doron Swade, the then Curator of Computing at the London Science Museum.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to them; their History, and Construction (London: E. and F. Spon, 1889), 25. Facsimile reprint, Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). 25.Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 97. 26.Ibid., vii. 27.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed., enlarged (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 273–276. 28.Babbage, Passages, 128. 29.George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the mathematical theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Macmillan, 1854), 1. 30.Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 153. 31.John von Neumann, “Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components,” in Claude E.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

Heinrich Bürgers, Ernst Dronke, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Georg Weerth, Ferdinand Wolff, Wilhelm Wolff), Glashütten im Taunus, Verlag Detlev Auvermann KG, 1973) PRIMARY SOURCES Annenkov, Pavel V., The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs, ed. Arthur P. Mendel, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1968 [1881] Babbage, Charles, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, London, Charles Knight, 1832 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, Krais and Hoffman, 1861 Bakunin, Michael, Statism and Anarchy¸ trans. and ed. Marshall S. Shatz, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990 [1873] Bauer, Bruno, Briefwechsel zwischen Bruno Bauer und Edgar Bauer während der Jahre 1839–1842 aus Bonn und Berlin, Charlottenburg, Egbert Bauer, 1844 ———, The Trumpet of the Last Judgement against Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ: An Ultimatum, trans.

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Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58 (Grundrisse), MECW, vol. 28, p. 523. 16. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, London, Charles Knight, 1835; Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, London, Charles Knight, 1832. 17. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58, p. 131. 18. Ibid., p. 133. 19. Ibid., p. 134 (capitals in original text). 20. Ibid., vol. 28, p. 230. 21. Ibid., p. 334. 22. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski

business climate, Charles Babbage, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

., Raniero Corbelletti, and Vincent R. Fiore. Pencil Techniques in Modern Design. New York, 1953. Austen, Jane. Emma. Edited with an introduction by David Lodge. London, 1971. Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company. “From Kindergarten Thru College.” [Folder.] Chicago, [1941]. Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. 4th edition enlarged (1835). New York, 1963. Back, Robert. “The Manufacture of Leads for the Mechanical Pencil,” American Ceramic Society Bulletin, 4 (November 1925): Baker, Joseph B. “The Inventor in the Office,” Scientific American, October 29, 1910: 344–45. Banister, Judith.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

This was perhaps the first industrial-era information factory, but it was a harbinger of subsequent developments to come.36 Several decades after de Prony, the English mathematician and astronomer Charles Babbage, faced with a similar need to quickly and efficiently generate large numbers of mathematical tables, also turned to contemporary industrial manufacturing practices. After making an extended tour of European industrial centers, he published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the most comprehensive study of industrialization to date. By that point, the focus of industrial development had turned from the division of labor to water-driven mechanization. Babbage adapted de Prony’s method of differences to this new industrial regime and in the latter half of the 1820s designed his Difference Engine, which was explicitly modeled after a contemporary industrial granary.

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Dieppe: Tragedy to Triumph. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992. Zuehlke, Mark. Tragedy at Dieppe: Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2012. CRYPTOGRAPHY AND BLETCHLEY PARK Aldrich, J. Richard. GCHQ. London: HarperCollins, 2010. Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. 1832. Babbage, Charles. Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. 1830. ——. The Writings of Charles Babbage. Houston, TX: Halcyon Press, 2009. Kindle edition. Carter, Frank. Breaking Naval Enigma: An Account of the Additional Problems Encountered and the Methods Used to Solve Them.