The Man Who Counted the Hurdy-Gurdies

Charles Babbage designed the first computer. The Analytical Engine, drafted in 1837, had a memory, a processor, punched cards, and conditional branching. It would have worked. The British government, having already sunk seventeen thousand pounds into his earlier machine, declined to find out.

So he sat in his study at 1 Dorset Street, Marylebone, and counted hurdy-gurdies.

He kept a tally. Over eighty days he logged one hundred and sixty-five separate interruptions by street musicians, and calculated that a full quarter of his working life had been ground away by organ-grinders, brass bands, halfpenny whistles, tom-toms, and what his list flatly names as "the human voice." He went out himself to stop most of them. In one twelve-month stretch his legal bills came to within a few shillings of one hundred and four pounds. A neighbour blew a tin whistle at his window for half an hour a day for several months. Recovering from surgery one December, he was woken at one in the morning by a brass band that kept playing while he could not move.

What do you do with a mind like that. You publish the tally.

In 1864, in the memoir where he looked back on the general-purpose computer, he devoted a full chapter to the count. He titled it, without irony, "Street Nuisances."