Dorset Street
1871 · The Workshop at his Death · Work 495 of 1,871
A workshop of 1871 left as its occupant last used it, drawings rolled and stacked in wooden racks to the ceiling, wooden boxes of finished brass parts with plain paper labels shelved along one wall, a long bench swept clean, a lathe beneath a cloth, a hand vice and a few files set in a row at the bench end, the floorboards bare, the room in desaturated greys with the brass warm against them, even flat light from directly overhead.
- What it was used for
- 1 Dorset Street in Marylebone was Babbage's house: he moved in in 1828 and it remained his address until his death on 18 October 1871. The drawings and notations of the engines were made here. Collier and MacLachlan write that a two-storey fireproof workshop 60 feet long by 25 feet wide was built on the new property - workshop dimensions at a private house. The Computer History Museum calls Babbage a lion of the London social scene in the 1830s; his Saturday soirées were fixtures in the calendar, and the guest list, according to Collier and MacLachlan, often exceeded 200.
- What was new
- What was new at this address was the combination of workshop, drawing office and drawing room: for some years, Collier and MacLachlan write, Babbage displayed the working section of his Difference Engine in one of his drawing rooms, before society guests and not only before examiners. The barb stands in Babbage's own book. In the chapter on street nuisances in "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" (1864) he writes that one-fourth part of his working power had been destroyed by the nuisance; that in about eighty days he registered one hundred and sixty-five instances; that in one twelvemonth his expenses in trying to stop the nuisance came to one hundred and four pounds; and that he prosecuted fewer than one case in a thousand interruptions. The same house, two sets of counts.