[This is the twenty-fifth of
a series of articles giving a brief description of each of the 26 ancient
Anglican cathedrals coupled with a sketch of a person, activity or institution connected
to the area]
Exeter Cathedral in Exeter, Devon is one of England’s finest cathedrals. Its
long uninterrupted Nave with its lovely Decorated Gothic vault is made possible
because, unusually in England,
there is no central tower and the North and South towers are built over their
respective transepts.
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| Exeter Cathedral |
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| The West Front at Exeter |
Nevertheless, after this
rather unpromising exterior, stepping into the interior of the Cathedral is to
be transported to the unforgettable vista of the great Decorated vault, some
say the finest of its style in the world.
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| The Nave and Vault |
The best parts of Exeter are in the
Decorated style with the boldly projecting Nave ribs, like an avenue of stately
trees, alternating transverse, tierceron, diagonal to great effect with lovely
sculpted bosses masking the joins on the central axis. The original cathedral
was Norman (Romanesque) starting around 1112,
but in 1260 a new bishop decided the building was outmoded and, apart from
keeping the Norman towers, he had the entire edifice rebuilt in the Decorated
manner. The building work stretched into the 14th century but it
enjoys an artistic unity only rivalled by Salisbury.
In the Nave there is a unique
and pretty Minstrel’s Gallery with 12 carved angels playing various medieval
instruments. A treasured astronomical clock dates from1484, though it has been
much restored and the Cathedral library has many historic books, the finest of
which is a 13th century manuscript Psalter.
A visit to Exeter Cathedral
greatly enhances any trip to the West Country.
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Some 14 miles from Exeter is the pleasant
resort of Teignmouth and the celebrated pioneer of computation, Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871) spent his
childhood there. Babbage was a key figure in the early days of The Computer Revolution and I want to
celebrate the British contribution to that Revolution, which was a major one.
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| Charles Babbage |
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| Part of Babbage's Analytical Engine |
Babbage was a brilliant
mathematician and was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. He was an
enthusiast for logarithmic and actuarial tables but was dissatisfied at their
accuracy. He turned over in his mind a method of calculating these tables
mechanically and designed what he called a “difference engine”- by using the
mathematical principle of “finite differences”, he was able to avoid
multiplication and division. The two models of the difference engine were never
completed (although the London
Science Museum
successfully reconstructed one in 1991).
A much more ambitious design,
which Babbage constantly elaborated until he died, was the Analytical Engine,
upon which Babbage’s reputation as The
Father of the Computer rests. The designs for the Analytical Engine
include almost all the essential logical features of a modern electronic
digital computer. The engine was programmable using punched cards. It had a
‘store’ where numbers and intermediate results could be held and a separate
‘mill’ where the arithmetic processing was performed. The separation of the
‘store’ (memory) and ‘mill’ (central processor) is a fundamental feature of the
internal organisation of modern computers. Punched cards had been developed by
the French and in particular by Jacquard,
to programme weaving looms in 1801.
The Analytical Engine was only produced in part and this is
ascribed partly to the difficult character of Babbage and partly to the
limitations of Victorian engineering tolerances. Sadly much of Babbage’s
insight died with him and there was nobody to carry forward the Babbage flame.
One close collaborator was Byron’s daughter Ada
Lovelace who is credited with developing an algorithm for the Analytical
Engine to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli
numbers. Although there is disagreement over how many of these ideas were
Lovelace's own, she is often described as The
First Computer Programmer.
Babbage may have had the misfortune to be ahead of his time.
I suppose it is some kind of tribute that one half of Babbage’s brain is on
display at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and the other
half at the Science Museum, London.
Britain was not able to build on Babbage’s achievements and
the mantle of leadership in the development of computers moved to the US, where
Herman Hollerith developed mechanical
tabulators using sophisticated punched cards (used for the 1890 US census),
later adopted by many financial institutions. He set up his own business and it
merged with two others in 1911 to become known as the famed IBM in 1924. From
1914 to 1955 IBM was led by Thomas J. Watson and grew to be the pre-eminent
global brand in mainframe and personal computers: Over the 20th
century it invented the ATM, the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the UPC and
the magnetic stripe card, among many other innovations.
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| Herman Hollerith |
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| Thomas J Watson Sr |
This is to anticipate many years ahead. Britain made an immense contribution to the creation of the first computers. In Germany, Konrad Zuse had produced the first fully operational electro-mechanical computer, working in intellectual isolation in the early 1940s. In Britain, under the stress of war, the finest brains were assembled at Bletchley to break the Nazi military codes. Among the cryptographers was Alan Turing (1912-54), a brilliant mathematician (Cambridge and Princeton) and computer scientist who had published a seminal paper in 1935 on the theory of computability and on algorithms.
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| Alan Turing |
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| Manchester prototype computer |
He was the acknowledged computing leader at Bletchley, whose successful code-breaking was critical to the war effort, and he later headed the department at Manchester University responsible with Tom Kilburn for producing the First Stored-Programme Computer. Turing conceptualised what a computer should be capable of doing and the term Turing-Complete is used as a standard in the industry. Sadly, Turing’s full potential was not realised as he was prosecuted for a then illegal homosexual act in 1952, lost his security clearance and committed suicide in 1954. He has been greatly honoured posthumously and shares the laurels as the greatest computer scientist ever with the Hungarian-American polymath John von Neumann.
The actual building of computers was more problematical. At
Bletchley The First Electronic Computer known as Colossus was built by Post Office
research engineer Tommy Flowers,
under Max Newman (rather than Turing) an amazing and under-praised
achievement for 1944. It was years
ahead of its rivals but its very existence was an Official Secret and was not
divulged until the 1970s.
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| Tommy Flowers |
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| The Colossus computer in 1944 |
Britain
made various attempts to produce computers in the post-war years. The Manchester University computers were the basis of
Ferranti’s Mark 1, The World's First
commercially available General-purpose Computer in 1949. The UK
company ICL was formed to compete with the US, but it did not succeed. In due
course even IBM stopped manufacturing mainframe and personal computers as cost
pressures handed over this outsourced industry to Japan,
then Taiwan and South Korea and now mainland China.
The Computer Revolution has no doubt much further to run as
we live in the new era of robotics, sat-nav and smart phones. Britain has historically made a
large contribution, not least that of Oxford-educated Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World-Wide-Web in 1990 while working at CERN with his French collaborator
Robert Cailliau.
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| Tim Berners-Lee |
We are all on-line now; information is accessible and
communication is easy. Thanks to the Web, I write this in Greece for my
British friends and Blog it throughout the world.
SMD
15.12.12
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2012
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