Determination—Letter from the Chancellor of the Exchequer—Mr. Babbage’s Answer—Government resolve not to proceed with the Engine—Mr. Babbage has an interview with Sir R. Peel—Difference-Engine placed in the Museum of King’s College—Present State of the Analytical-Engine. --------------- 1820-25. On the 1st April, 1823, a letter was received from the Treasury, requesting the Council to take into consideration a plan which had been submitted to Government by Mr. Babbage, for “applying machinery to the purposes of calculating and printing mathematical tables;” and the Lords of the Treasury further desired “to be favoured with the opinion of the Royal Society on the merits and utility of this invention[28].” This is the earliest allusion to the celebrated Calculating Engine of Mr. Babbage, in the records of the Society[29]. But the invention had been brought before them in the previous year by a letter from Mr. Babbage to Sir H. Davy, dated July 3, 1822, in which he gives some account of a small model of his engine for calculating differences, which “produced figures at the rate of 44 a minute, and performed with rapidity and precision all those calculations for which it was designed[30].” He then proceeds to enumerate various tables which the machine was adapted to calculate, and concludes: “I am aware that these statements may perhaps be viewed as something more than Utopian, and that the philosophers of Laputa may be called up to dispute my claim to originality. Should such be the case, I hope the resemblance will be found to adhere to the nature of the subject, rather than to the manner in which it has been treated. Conscious from my own experience of the difficulty of convincing those who are but little skilled in mathematical knowledge, of the possibility of making a machine which shall perform calculations, I was naturally anxious, in introducing it to the public, to appeal to the testimony of one so distinguished in the records of British science[31]. Induced by a conviction of the great utility of such engines, to withdraw for some time my attention from a subject on which it has been engaged during several years, and which possesses charms of a higher order, I have now arrived at a point where success is no longer doubtful. It must, however, be attained at a very considerable expense, which would not probably be replaced by the works it might produce for a long period of time, and which is an undertaking I should feel unwilling to commence, as altogether foreign to my habits and pursuits.”