No, Babbage's earlier design requires the crank to be turned all the time. Basically human-powered instead of fossil-fuel powered. As long as the human only needs to turn the crank without thinking, the human could always be replaced by a steam engine.
The purpose of Turing completeness is to describe whether a system is capable of performing arbitrary computation. That once a machine is Turing-complete, Church-Turing thesis stipulates it can do any computation that another Turing-complete machine can do, subject to resource and time constraints.
In the early days of computing, where designing and building a general-purpose computer was still a major practical challenge, one could imagine whether the crank is turned by a human wasn't important, because any idea that involves a physical crank can be supplemented by a steam engine, a solved problem. It's very easy to swap out the human for a steam engine - the actual novel problem was to verify that the internal logic of the machine is general-purpose enough.
In that context, one can see what the true spirit of the Church-Turing thesis is. It abstracts away the things that don't need to be part of the picture, so that people can focus on understanding the mathematical notion of computation - what is computable and what isn't, and what kind of designs are capable of computing everything that's computable.
To illustrate, you'd say it's imprecise to say a language is Turing complete - you technically still need a CPU and RAM. But those are just assumed to be available when the true focus is to design a language. Similarly, when designing a mechanical computation machine, whether we have built in the monotonic power source / hardware clock is just not a very important distinction given the context of the design. Everything that holds for Turing-complete machine would still hold, just except the machine needs a power source.
It's true that requiring constant clicks makes the result less interesting (and maybe very much so), but for the spirit of Turing completeness the power source is just a trivial matter.
The purpose of Turing completeness is to describe whether a system is capable of performing arbitrary computation. That once a machine is Turing-complete, Church-Turing thesis stipulates it can do any computation that another Turing-complete machine can do, subject to resource and time constraints.
In the early days of computing, where designing and building a general-purpose computer was still a major practical challenge, one could imagine whether the crank is turned by a human wasn't important, because any idea that involves a physical crank can be supplemented by a steam engine, a solved problem. It's very easy to swap out the human for a steam engine - the actual novel problem was to verify that the internal logic of the machine is general-purpose enough.
In that context, one can see what the true spirit of the Church-Turing thesis is. It abstracts away the things that don't need to be part of the picture, so that people can focus on understanding the mathematical notion of computation - what is computable and what isn't, and what kind of designs are capable of computing everything that's computable.
To illustrate, you'd say it's imprecise to say a language is Turing complete - you technically still need a CPU and RAM. But those are just assumed to be available when the true focus is to design a language. Similarly, when designing a mechanical computation machine, whether we have built in the monotonic power source / hardware clock is just not a very important distinction given the context of the design. Everything that holds for Turing-complete machine would still hold, just except the machine needs a power source.
It's true that requiring constant clicks makes the result less interesting (and maybe very much so), but for the spirit of Turing completeness the power source is just a trivial matter.