Computers Crashing (into Poetry)

Charles Babbage, a 19^th Century British genius,  is credited with inspiring, if not inventing a blueprint for the modern-day computer with his work on what he called a ”difference engine.”  The difference engine was, essentially, the first attempt at a mechanical calculator—this one powered by cranking a handle.  Similar to many men of genius, Babbage was keenly interested in a wide range of scientific endeavor, including the study of cryptanalysis.  He enjoyed working through ciphers and code-breaking problems.  Challenged in 1854 to break a cipher invented by one of his contemporaries, he did so with startling ease, discovering the document presented to him to be a poem entitled The Vision of Sin, by Alfred Tennyson, yet another contemporary.

Babbage, in his typical eccentric fashion, not only broke the code (cipher)—he also took issue with the logic of the poem.  As a statistician and compiler of mortality tables, Babbage winced at the last lines:

 Every moment dies a man,

 Every moment one is born.

Babbage wrote a letter in reply in which he offered a correction for the great poet:

“It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill…I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read—‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1-1/16 is born.’ …The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1-1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.”

--Mitchell Hegman