On that meeting that could change the world, but didn't

I'm reading Essinger's biography of Ada Lovelace. Solid book, well researched and written. It had this nugget I wasn't aware of, that I thought was worth sharing, about Babbage.

To me, this is a fascinating period in the history of technology. Ideas from precisioning machining driven by advanced clock works and automata converged with ideas of storing information that came from a series of linked innovations in weaving. There are many critical periods in technology, but it's rare to see such great leaps forward in potential, driven by the works of a relatively few number of thinkers.

(Yes, you could argue Whitney and others had very solo inventions, and Edison had very impactful, while Tesla was in between. Glass making in Murano in the 16th and 17th centuries was concentrated and deeply impacted science of things both great (space), and small (microscopy), and even reading. But in few places are the links to the power of our world of "technology" so individually threaded, as in the first half of the 19th century, in Britain, in part because of the powerful world wide networks that spanned outward from it)

As you may be aware, Babbage is often credited with creating the first computer, and Lovelace with being the first programmer (and she may have better understood its potential as a computer than Babbage).

After years of work, and government funding, Babbage is being cut off from the only source who can afford to build his invention. His supporters gain him one last meeting with Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel on November 11, 1842. By this time, Babbage has completed a working component of his early masterpiece, the Difference Engine (very powerful calculator), and designed an even more impressive Analytic Engine (first computer).

Essinger wrote this line of the meeting:

"Had the meeting been successful, the seeds would have been sown for the start of the information technology revolution in Victorian Britain."

But the meeting did not go well.

I went back to some other Babbage biographical material, and read through Essinger's analysis, much of which comes from a letter Babbage himself wrote minutes after the meeting.

Here's what went wrong with the meeting:

1. Babbage did not read the room. His previous interactions with Peel almost 20 years earlier showed they had different backgrounds, styles and priorities. That early interaction lead to serious mistrust between the two. Peel was in a difficult position in the PM role: most of his country was starving, and he said the day before in a letter to his wife that he was working himself to death. Babbage's funding decision had been made; it was up to Babbage to turn it around, and tie his work to Peel's priorities.
2. Babbage wasn't in the right mood and disposition for a productive meeting. He was, according to his own words - defensive, in a bad mood, self-centered, and self pitying. Never a good way to get what you want. Babbage started the meeting talking mostly about how many people were saying bad things about him and his inventions.
3. When he finally got to the Ask: funding for the Analytic Engine, Babbage said,

I stated my own opinion that in the future scientific history of the present day it would probably form a marked epoch and that much depended upon the result of this interview."

Remarkably prescient. The kind of statement that is occasionally uttered in academia and Sand Hill Road today. Yet it was Babbage himself, who after 20 years of toiling in relative obscurity, finally developed his concepts (along with his craftsmen, Ada, and support from some fellow scientists around Europe), to the point of being worthy of that statement, but he alone tanked the meeting. Today every computer around us is rooted in principles pioneered in Babbage's work, but neither he nor Victorian Britain benefited in the near term from these two engines.

4. He did not express the benefits of the Analytic engine in terms that were important to Peel. How, for example, would the Engine drive industrial productivity, economic success, and help feed the people?

5. It's quite possible that Peel himself did not understand the full potential of his machine, and that's why he didn't articulate it well. Ada may have been one of the few people alive who understood a vision for the invention, and she wasn't in the room. The tinkerer was too enamored with his creation, to step back and see the use cases. When he did describe use cases, it was in the abstract, in the language which he shared with academic mathematicians, and this further distanced himself from building a rapport with Peel

6. He didn't take coaching well. When he returned to the rants about how unfairly he'd been treated, Peel told him he was being too sensitive. Babbage shot back 'aren't most best heads and highest minds most susceptible of annoyance from injustice'?

Anyway - not reading too much into this, but as we listen to gurus tell us how business should be in an age of social media, and we look back to the hoary old lessons of the tech industry in the 1980's, I thought I'd throw out an impactful and relevant business lesson from a meeting in 1842, that could have changed the fate of the British Empire, and the world. But it didn't, because one guy ran a bad meeting.

What do you think?