# Simon Schaffer **Entity class:** Person / historian of science **Domain:** History of science / history of computation **Doc Type:** Developed Person Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Simon Schaffer** is a historian of science whose 1994 essay “Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System” situated [[wiki/Charles Babbage|Charles Babbage]]'s engines inside nineteenth-century theories of labor, discipline, manufacture, and political economy. ## Project X Context Schaffer's analysis matters to [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]] because it documents mechanized intelligence as an industrial and political project rather than a detached sequence of inventions. Babbage's engines expressed a theory of how skilled intellectual labor could be decomposed, organized, and transferred into machinery. ## Evidence Ledger - **Established:** Schaffer's published essay connects the engines to division of labor and factory organization through Babbage's own institutional world. - **Strongly indicated:** The engine served simultaneously as calculating artifact and model of rationalized production. - **Plausible:** Later computational management inherited more of this factory-system objective than explicit citation trails presently show. - **Unresolved:** The exact transmission path from Babbage's labor theory into twentieth-century computing institutions; correspondence, curricula, and institutional reading records would promote or demote the claim. ## Sources / Provenance - Simon Schaffer, [“Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System” (1994)](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/448746). - [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]]. ## Relationships - **Interprets:** [[wiki/Charles Babbage|Charles Babbage]] and the Analytical Engine. - **Informs:** [[wiki/Transmitted Objective|Transmitted Objective]] and [[wiki/Technical Archaeology|Technical Archaeology]]. - **Scholarly context:** [[wiki/Histories of Artificial Intelligence - A Genealogy of Power|Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power]].