The hurdy-gurdy was just one of the instruments that drove Londoners mad in the 1860s (Image: Mary Evans)

To celebrate the launch of New Scientist‘s latest book, Farmer Buckley’s Exploding Trousers, we’ve asked its editor, Stephanie Pain, to select four of her favourite blasts from the past, together with a brand new one

Read more: “Histories: Blasts from the past“

On 25 July 1864, London’s most celebrates curmudgeon unpursed his lips for a few seconds and allowed himself a little smile. Parliament had finally given Charles Babbage what he wanted. It was more than 40 years since Babbage had begun to work on a vast mechanical calculator, and still it existed only on paper and in a few experimental parts. His “analytical engine”, the precursor of the programmable computer, was even further from completion. Had the government finally recognised the potential of Babbage’s mathematical machines and stumped up the cash that would allow him to complete them? No. But it had passed a law that might enable him to finish the job in peace.


For Years, Babbage had waged war on the street musicians who played outside his house. The loud, discordant strains of barrel organs, bagpipes, hurdy gurdies and brass bands, he claimed, had robbed him of a quarter of his working life. The new law meant he could insist they go elsewhere or face arrest. Without such distractions, he would finish his engines in on time.

CHARLES BABBAGE was incandescent. For five hours a brass band had been torturing perfectly good tunes outside his house. It was intolerable. Why should a man engaged in work that required every ounce of concentration have to put up with this excruciating din for five minutes, let alone five hours? Brass bands were not the only source of the vile noise that interrupted his thoughts – usually when he was in the middle of the most complex calculations. There were boys with accordions and ha’penny whistles, fiddlers, trumpeters and troupes of men masquerading as Scottish pipers. There were even gangs of “Ethiopians” who drummed incessantly on their tom-toms. But worst of all, there were the Italian organ-grinders, who cranked the handles of their barrel organs at all hours of the day and night.

Victorian London was notoriously noisy. In busy streets the air rang with the clatter of iron-rimmed carriage wheels on cobbles, the cries of hawkers selling their wares and the competing strains of street musicians. As the number of buskers proliferated, they began to invade the quietest streets and most elegant squares, certain that if the well-to-do inhabitants didn’t want to pay to hear them they would pay them to go away. By the 1860s there were said to be a thousand organ-grinders tormenting Londoners at all hours.

When Babbage moved to Dorset Street in Marylebone in 1829, it was a relatively quiet backwater. There was space for workshops in which to make the parts for his vast mechanical calculator, the “difference engine”, a machine that would banish the errors made by human calculators. The work went well for a while and Babbage soon came up with the idea for an even more revolutionary machine, the “analytical engine”. This was to be a mechanical brain programmed by punch cards, with a separate memory and central processor.

Then things started to go wrong. Babbage fell out with his engineer. The government pulled the plug on his funding. He carried on, using his own money, but grew increasingly resentful. He picked fights with anyone he thought might be blocking his progress. He launched scathing attacks on rivals, insulted politicians and even had a go at the prime minister. But his bitterest attack was on the buskers who made his life a misery.

The 1850s had seen a huge increase in the number of street musicians. Dorset Street became a popular pitch for every type of third-rate musician. They drove Babbage mad. He tried asking them to leave. They didn’t. He tried paying them to go away, but others always came to take their place. He threatened to call a policeman and have them arrested: according to the law, a householder could send street musicians away if there was illness in the house “or for other reasonable cause”. If the musicians failed to move on, they could be fined or thrown in jail for a few days. But what was a reasonable cause? Few policemen were keen on arresting someone for disturbing a man at his sums. Babbage did have a few buskers locked up, but generally the courts were unsympathetic.

Babbage took his complaints to higher authorities. He tried the Metropolitan Police commissioner. He tried the home secretary, who studiously ignored him. His campaign was taking up valuable time when he should be have been working on his engines. It was costing him money, too: in one year he spent as much on summonses and solicitors as it would have cost to employ a skilled workman for 12 months. The musicians kept on coming. So did other provocations: anonymous letters threatening to burn down his house, dead cats and worse left on his doorstep, and stones through his windows. Whenever he left the house he attracted a mob who taunted and threatened him.

He was not deterred. If he couldn’t get rid of the buskers because the wording of the law was too vague, then the law must be changed. In 1864 he published a pamphlet calling for a ban on street music. “It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon…multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances,” he wrote. He tried anyway, calculating that over the previous 12 years “one-fourth of my working power has been destroyed by the nuisance against which I have protested.” In one 80-day period, he recorded 165 instances of disturbance. “In several of these cases my whole day’s work was destroyed, for they frequently occurred at times when I was giving instruction to my workmen relative to some of the most difficult parts of the Analytical Engine.”

Babbage’s complaints were not just the ramblings of a frustrated old man. Plenty of other Londoners were equally distressed. There were regular flurries of letters to The Times. Doctors protested that their patients were deprived of sleep, slowing their recovery. Lawyers stared at their legal tomes unable to concentrate. Even the dying weren’t allowed to die in peace. Something had to change. In the House of Commons, Michael Bass, brewery heir and Liberal MP, proposed a bill to regulate street musicians. He spelled out the scale of the problem to his fellow MPs. “From early morning till late at night the inhabitants of the metropolis were annoyed by incessant discords,” he said. “Men engaged in severe mental occupation like Mr Babbage and others, were actually unable during the greater part of the day to continue their studies.” The law as it stood was useless. The Metropolitan Police commissioner had told him as much. And thousands of people had written in support of his bill – including half the London literati, several hundred leading musicians, artists, professors and learned men – and even ladies.

Not everyone was swayed. Some MPs, including the chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone, thought it a mean-spirited attempt to deprive the poor of entertainment. But George Grey, the home secretary who had snubbed Babbage earlier, was in favour. Robert Peel, the man who had refused Babbage’s requests for funds when he was prime minister, came down on his side this time. The house voted in favour and in July 1864, Bass’s bill – or Babbage’s bill as it was often known – became law.

The new law didn’t ban street music completely, as Babbage had wanted. But it did allow the police to arrest buskers who annoyed people going about their “ordinary occupation or pursuits”. It was a small triumph, but it didn’t do Babbage much good. He never finished any of his engines. And as he lay dying in 1871, the street musicians took their revenge. A constant stream of organ-grinders turned up outside his house and played long into the night.

But was Babbage just a killjoy who blamed the buskers for his own failure to finish his machines? Perhaps not. After he died, a post-mortem revealed something that might explain his hatred of street music. The pathologist found that “the large arteries of the brain were extremely diseased, the carotids being converted to calcareous tubes”. Restricted flow of blood to the head probably led to the loss of the tiny hair cells lining the inner ear. The death of these cells, which turn sound vibrations into nerve impulses, causes deafness, starting with the loss of the quietest sounds.

Some people with this type of deafness suffer from another phenomenon: their perception of sound is altered so that loud sounds seem much louder than they would to someone with perfect ears. In some cases, loud noises also seem distorted. To Babbage, the sound of a barrel organ was probably as “vile and discordant” as he claimed.