Being a keen statistician and compiler of mortality tables, Babbage was irritated by the lines “Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born,” which are the last lines of the plaintext above. Consequently, he offered a correction to Tennyson’s “otherwise beautiful” poem: It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill … I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read—“Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 is born.” … The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 will be
...more
