*So, if you've got an unbuilt vaporware computer that's not really a real computer yet, you've got to have some science fiction writer horn in – a pop-science guy who's not really a real science fiction writer yet.
"But before he deals with the innards of the automaton, Poe writes on its history, and touches on some very deep understanding of the Babbage Difference Engine, “computers”, and thinking machines. This is especially interesting because the Babbage machines hadn’t yet been given wide public conversation—that would come in 1843 with Babbage’s somewhat unlikely bulldog, Lady Ada Lovelace, who published an account of his work in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs. Poe’s work predates this by seven years, though."
*Edgar Allen Poe:
"But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will, perhaps, be said, in reply, that a machine such as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel...."
(((One might wonder how Poe heard about the work of Babbage, but it's likely more interesting to wonder how a guy like Poe could NOT have heard about Babbage. One may note that Poe makes no effort to explain who Babbage was or what Babbage was trying to do – he seems to assume that readers of the SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER were entirely au courant in such things.)))
http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm
(((At the University of Texas at Austin, they've got the desk Poe used at his day-job at the SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER. I've seen that desk. Poe very likely wrote this Babbage essay on that very desk. It is one miserable, flimsy, wobbly, veneered little workspace – Bob Cratchit likely had a better desk.)))
http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/poedc/details.cfm?id=7&img=1
