Person

Babbage, Benjamin Herschel (1815 - 1878)

Born
6 August 1815
London, Middlesex, England
Died
20 October 1878
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Occupation
Engineer and Explorer

Summary

Benjamin Babbage held various public appointments in South Australia. In 1858 he was leader of a northern expedition but because he was so thorough he was considered too slow and was replaced by P. E. Warburton in November. After an ensuing parliamentary inquiry he withdrew from public life.

Details

Born London, 1815. Died Adelaide, 20 October 1878. Pupil of William Chadwell Mylne, engineer of the New River Co., London 1834-36, planning and building railways under Isambard Brunel in Italy and England 1842-48; engineering inspector, Board of Health, England 1848-51; geological and mineralogical survey of South Australia 1851-52; commissioner of gold licences 1852-53, government assayer from 1853, built the Adelaide city to port railway, the first with steam in the colony; explored the Flinders Ranges looking for gold 1856; member of the first House of Assembly 1857; leader of a northern expedition to explore the country between Lakes Torrens and Gairdner and further to the north and west (replaced by P.E. Warburton in November); South Australia's representative at the Intercolonial Exhibition, Melbourne 1866; assistant to Charles Todd (q.v.) in planning and plotting the Overland Telegraph Line and supervisor of contractors 1870-72; ran a large vineyard on his estate at St Mary's.

Mount Babbage in the Flinders Ranges is named after him.

Chronology

1855
Career Position - President, Adelaide Philosophical Society

Related Corporate Bodies

Related Events

Archival resources

Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science

  • Australian Botanists - Biographies, MS 064; Adolph Basser Library, Australian Academy of Science. Details

Published resources

Books

  • Cumming, D. A.; Moxham, G. C., They built South Australia : engineers, technicians, manufacturers, contractors and their work (Adelaide: D.A. Cumming and G.C Moxham, 1986), 241 pp. pp.19-20. Details
  • Tucker, Rod, On Hermit Hill: Benjamin Herschel Babbage and the Lake Torrens myth (North Melbourne: Australian scholarly Publishing, 2021), 387 pp. Details

Book Sections

  • Symes, G. W., 'Babbbage, Benjamin Herschel (1815-1878), engineer, scientist and explorer' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 3: 1851 - 1890 A-C, Douglas Pike, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), pp. 65-66. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A030066b.htm. Details

Edited Books

  • Bailey, M. R.; Chrimes, M. M.; Cox, R. C.; Cross-Rudkin, P. S. M.; Hurst, B. L.; McWilliam, R. C.; Rennison, R. W.; Ruddock, E. C.; Sutherland, R. J. M.; Swailes, T. ed., Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 2: 1830-1890 (London, United Kingdom: Thomas Telford Publishing, 2008), 907 pp. 'Babbage, Benjamin Herschel', pp.32-33. Details

Journal Articles

  • Tucker, Rod, 'Exploding the Lake Torrens horseshoe myth: Benjamin Herschel Babbage's map of Lake Gregory and Hermit Hill', University of Melbourne collections, 25 (2019), 13-7. Details

Parliamentary papers

  • South Australia. Parliament, Northern exploration: reports, etc., of explorations into the interior by Messrs. Babbage, Warburton, Geharty and Parry (Adelaide: Government Printer, 1858), 51 pp. Details

Resources

McCarthy, G.J.

EOAS ID: biogs/P000074b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000074b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260