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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: Charles Babbage and broadcasting the sea
Description: The noisy Victorian world annoyed the mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage, who came up with the idea of a programmable computer. He wrote letters complaining about it and a pamphlet which explored ideas about whether the sea could record its own sound, had a memory and could broadcast sound. New Generation Thinker Joan Passey, from the University of Bristol, sets these ideas alongside the work done by engineers cabling the sea-bed to allow communication via telegraph and Rudyard Kipling's images of these "sea monsters."Producer: Torquil MacLeodNew Generation Thinkers is a scheme run...