Unfortunately the full trasncript of this week's New Scientist article is not available at their website but.....

"Charles Babbage failed to finish any of his calculating machines. Were London's street musicians really to blame? p.42"

Babbage claims, and possibly rightly so, that buskers and street musicians outside his house prevented him from concentrating on his work. He waged a campaign to get the laws changed so that buskers could be asked to move along, especially from residential areas. After his death (luckily not before) an autopsy was done and revealed that he had a specific condition (forget which, but I'll look it up) which has a side effect of making the small hairs in the ear canal fall out and that means that noises become unbearably annoying. As he lay dying some of the musicians vindictively stepped up their retaliation campaign to make his last days unbearable.

Helen