[LARDNER, Dionysius & Charles BABBAGE]. Babbage's Calculating Engine [in vol CXX of The Edinburgh Review ].

£900 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

[LARDNER, Dionysius Charles BABBAGE]. Babbage's Calculating Engine [in vol CXX of The Edinburgh Review ]. Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Company for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman... 1834. 8vo. 2 vols bound in one, nos. CXIX and CXX of The Edinburgh Review , April - July 1834. Half brown calf, marbled boards, gilt rules and lettering to spine, marbled; pp. ii,1-262; ii, 263-545 (Babbage on pp.263 - 327), diagrams to text; spine with vertical crack and recently repaired to front hinge, occasional foxing especially to first and last few leaves First edition of Volume 59 of The Edinburgh Review . Scarce. Dionysius Lardner's long article on the calculating machine, written with the guidance of Babbage, came after a series of successful lectures that he gave in Edinburgh. It takes the form of a review of seven articles on the machine, including Babbage's own papers of 1822 and the Royal Society's report of 1829. Lardner, editor of the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopedia , was a well-known speaker and populariser of science, and his adoption of Babbage's cause seemed advantageous to the great mathematician. However, Lardner made a tactical error that meant that the machine did not receive the public funding Babbage sought. In order to make the subject palatable to a general audience, he concentrated on the machine's ability to correct errors in printed mathematical tables. While this was a valid view, and echoed Babbage's own 1822 papers which he wrote just as his p

• Binding: Hardcover

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