In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the history and original meaning of a now ubiquitous word
Here’s a pub quiz question for you: in which century were the words ‘computer’ and ‘electricity’ first used in English writing? The twentieth? ‘Computer’ may lead us to that answer, but then we reflect on Michael Faraday’s important work on electricity in the previous century. And didn’t Charles Babbage devise a forerunner to the modern computer in his Difference Engine, some time in the nineteenth century? Perhaps that’s the answer.