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Spring 2020 Update The Babbage technical archive held by the Science Museum has been reviewed sheet by sheet so the reference sources of AE-related content are now known. After a short hiatus Tim Robinson is carrying out the same exercise on the Babbage material in the Buxton papers held in Oxford. This material is of particular interest not least because there are several essays Babbage wrote on the Analytical Engine while in Italy immediately after his visit to Turin in 1840 where he gave his first and only seminar-lecture on the Analytical Engine at a convention of mathematicians, surveyors and scientists. This rare engagement with others was a significant stimulus to Babbage so his writings immediately following this are of special interest. We have done two substantial photo shoots (2015, 2016 and 2018) of this manuscript material, so digitised images are to hand. Read more...

Autumn 2019 Update In a visit from the US in March Tim Robinson reviewed a collection of ‘mystery’ material consisting of content that had eluded listing or cataloguing in earlier programmes by the Science Museum, and by Allan Bromley who produced, in 1991, the first near-comprehensive listing of the Babbage technical archive. Logging this last cache of material is now complete and it appears that only about a third of the original material survives. This estimate is based on references in the Sketchbooks to material that should be in this cache but were not found there, or elsewhere. Findings have been shared with Science Museum archivists accompanied by suggestions of how this material might fit into the structure of the new Babbage catalogue, available now online, created by the Science Museum. There is material in the Buxton archive in Oxford that ... Read more...

March 2019 Update The sheet-by sheet inspection of Babbage’s vast technical archive is now in the end game after some three years. The last progress update reported that Tim Robinson, in the US, working from the digitised images of the manuscripts, was close to completing a review of the known catalogued material in the Science Museum archive and that one of the final tasks was a scrape of a relatively small but potentially critical set of drawings that had not been catalogued or scanned the contents of which are largely unknown. Tim is currently in London spending a week going through this material. This material evaded the Science Museum’s scanning operation in 2011 largely because it was not listed in the catalogue prepared by the late Allan Bromley who compiled the first near-comprehensive record, published in 1991. There have already been significant finds. Read more...

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