JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2227   

The polymathic Charles Babbage’s (1791-1871) name is well known as the father of the computer–creating a non-steam steampunky sense of modern computing with metal gears–though some of his other nitty and detailed research is not nearly so well known.  One fantastic example of this is his interest in public nuissance problems of Dickens’-strollable London at high-Victorian mid-century, and particularly in one case in the breaking of plate glass windows. 

He published the results of his study in an 1857 article, “Table of the Relative Frequency of Occurrence of the Causes of Breaking of Plate Glass Windows” in the  Mechanics Magazine volume 66, the highlights of which were summarized in this appearance in The Insurance Cyclopedia‘s (1878)  chapter on “Glass Insurance”, as follows:

I just find this fabulous!  He no doubt found the whole thing appalling, as he did the other unruly stuff of life in the streets, with a withering view of the street-side life of the working and lower classes, but mostly for street hawkers and musicians and above all else it seems the organ grinder.  Babbage had a lot on his mind but there seemed to have been plenty of micro-room for concerns like these.  

It should be mentioned that Babbage wrote a best-selling work in the not-yet-established field of operations research, writing a great and influential work on industrial production called On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832, with a fourth edition by 1836), so the fact that he took an unusually fine interest in window breakage and how that all worked out is not so unusual, for him.

And just because the numbers are there and the results so interesting, I’ll include the previous entry from the article above: