Letter from Charles Babbage, progenitor of the modern computer, to engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, August 6th, 1824
My Dearest Isambard,
I do hope this letter finds you in good health of both body and mind. I am greatly pleased to hear of your progress on the Thames Tunnel, and I am equally pleased to report to you that my Difference Engine has made great leaps in its path of development. In fact, I have stumbled upon many exciting corollaries that I wish to describe to you in great detail, should you have the time and inclination to read them.
The first such discovery was made quite by accident, when I left a wooden etching of my beloved housecat Frederick quite near indeed to the Engine. Having been tinkering with the Engine’s applicability to the task of writing, there happened to lie several short notes, notably imperfect in both grammar and spelling, on the table among my idle musings. One, quite by accident, fell on the etching, below the face of my beloved Freddie, as if intended by Our Divine Father to be a caption of sorts for this delightful rendering of the feline. Due to some blemish or other in the Engine’s programming, the note, which meant to have read “I beseech you, kind Sir, for a spot of blood pudding until suppertime,” read instead the quite absurd “I MAY HAZ BLUD PUDIN.” Though at first mention I thought the happening both mundane and rather daft, after a number of hours it began to strike me as droll indeed; O, the folly and farce of a cat which might speak in the manner of the Simple Child! Since then I have produced a number of such pairings, and I intend to present them as a possible Application of the magnificent Engine at the next meeting of the Royal Society. Perhaps in time, the great minds of that grouping shall take it upon themselves to create their own inanities in the selfsame style. I predict a splendid future in which the finest Scientists and Artisans alike may, as Father Martin Luther did so many generations ago, tack their own handiworks for all to see and marvel upon. My Engine, it appears, shall not merely serve to aid in the manipulation of Maths, but to stimulate minds the civilized world over!
I shall inform you in the near future of the other corollaries that have come into the light of my progress. I am working now on a device which, while maintaining the guise of an important news declaration, within mere seconds transforms itself into a diorama of a smitten bard promising his lady love that he shan’t give her up, nor let her down, nor turn around and leave her, even in all the heated glory and blaze of her womanly Emotions.
May you share in my vision for this Utopia of the genius!
In Christ,
Charles
~ As Recovered by Solomon Klein
