Wealth & Money Quote by Charles Babbage

Babbage is selling speed as a moral and economic force, not just a technical parameter. The sentence looks dry, but it’s a manifesto in the language of Victorian measurement: once you stop tinkering with “smaller instruments” and scale up to “larger and more important machines,” efficiency doesn’t merely improve - it announces itself. The key word is “striking.” Velocity, in Babbage’s framing, is persuasive; it produces a visible surplus that quiets skepticism.

The intent is practical and political. Babbage lived inside the early Industrial Revolution, watching production move from craft rhythms to factory tempos, and he wanted a society that would treat calculation, standardization, and mechanization as common sense. His own work on mechanical computation sits in the background: faster operations compound into qualitatively different outcomes. That compounding logic is what he’s smuggling into an apparently neutral observation.

Subtext: scale changes the argument. With small tools, speed gains look incremental and maybe optional - a luxury for the fussy. With big machines, velocity becomes infrastructure: it dictates throughput, reorganizes labor, and reshapes markets. “Economy” here isn’t thrift; it’s a new regime of rationalized production where time becomes a unit to be engineered and extracted.

Context sharpens the edge. In Babbage’s era, “improvement” was a cultural religion, but also a battlefield over workers’ autonomy and the human costs of acceleration. His sentence embodies the era’s confident belief that faster is not only better, but self-evidently better - especially once the machine is too large, too expensive, and too central to question.