The night stands in stroboscopic stillness broken only by a cacophonous breed of organ grinders, infesting the streets of Cambridge. It seems impossible to estimate the enormous misery they inflict upon the multitude of English intelligentsia. But today they offer nothing more than a passing distraction as royal ink intoxicates my study. Cast in partial shadow of the moonlight; lies the blueprint and my ambition. Unbeknownst of the outcome I shall submit my relentless effort to its realization, for I know –the geometry of chance yields only to the chisel of an untiring spirit.
It’s all very simple if you come to see, so much that its beauty hurts the eye like the vast complexity of this universe never could. The mere existence of this idea, implicates order in the final secrets that nature has not unraveled to us, but has nudged and pushed us with its clues, and given us the letters in which it writes our story. It’s meaning we may never know. However, that’s irrelevant.
I imagine this, boiled down to its essence to be a bend in our road to the sky, just that we can’t see it yet. You can never say, what might come of it. We see elaborate proofs around us, and in abundance; of how terrible our imaginations are. Consider the snowflake, and the intricate designs it can sometimes take. The basic principle behind its fascinating shape however is the fact that when water freezes into snow, it releases latent heat which creates a bump adjacent to it, so on and so forth ad infinitum. It’s a process applied to itself that gives the snowflake its glorious structure. I am willing to bet a hundred pound sterling that such simplicity in design would never occur to an artist if he hasn’t seen a snowflake, which of-course is unlikely. Even chess which is based on a concise set of precise rules makes it impossible to determine a definite win.
The blueprint is nothing but stacks, and stacks; not of things but numbers. If only I know how to fit them together, we would have created a mind outside of blood, bones and skin. It would think for us, work for us, and reduce ginormous amounts of human effort and drudgery. It’s just exhilarating to imagine what we might do with this accidental gift of time to our race. Computers will be out of work, and I suspect if they would be gay about it, neither would be Marx. I plan to call it an engine, because it will drive computation just as Bulton and Watts design of 1775 power our rails.
It would take more than me, from me to create this spectacle of a machine. For the abstract, I have a natural gift. I can tell with a fair degree of accuracy the fraction of broken windows in Carfax tower as a function of time. But when it comes to cogs, gears, springs, pulleys and spools, the odds just accumulate against us. I need to understand the language of these entities, and appreciate the limitations of what is possible with our present paraphernalia to manufacture. I shall persist and I shall prevail.
Super-condensed summary: Hypothetical diary entry by the father of computing when he stumbled on a once in a generation idea: The Difference Engine
