Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage (1791 – 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. Some historians regard him as the father of the computer, since in the nineteenth century he conceived both a mechanical calculating machine and a programmable machine capable of general purposes. The exact year of his birth is disputed. His obituary in The Times gave 1792, but a nephew later claimed he had been born a year earlier, and a parish record of baptism in January 1792 supports that earlier date.

He was one of four children of Benjamin Babbage, a banker who helped found Praed's & Co. in London. His childhood was marked by poor health and an uneven education, with several schools and private tutors. A library at an academy in Enfield awakened his taste for mathematics. In 1810 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but he was frustrated by the way mathematics was taught there, having already taught himself from continental authors such as Lagrange and Agnesi. In 1812 he co-founded the Analytical Society with John Herschel, George Peacock and others, a group that aimed to modernise British mathematics. He received his degree in 1814 without sitting an examination. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816 and helped to found what became the Royal Astronomical Society in 1820. His academic career was uneven. He failed to win several professorships before finally obtaining a Cambridge chair in 1828, by which time his father's inheritance had made him financially independent.

His central preoccupation grew out of the errors that crept into mathematical tables, which were calculated and copied by hand. Babbage concluded that the process could be mechanised. His difference engine was designed to produce tables of functions by the method of differences, which turns the calculation of polynomials into a series of repeated additions. He never finished it, largely because of funding difficulties and the limits of precision engineering. Yet in 1991 the Science Museum in London built a working difference engine from his original plans, using tolerances achievable in the nineteenth century, and the result suggested that the design would indeed have worked.

His more ambitious project was the analytical engine, which he worked on between roughly 1833 and 1842. It was a programmable device for any kind of calculation, using punched cards inspired by the Jacquard loom. It had a store for numbers, a control unit, and an arithmetic unit that he called the mill. He never built it. In 1842 he approached Prime Minister Robert Peel for support, without success. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, took an interest in the machine, translated a text by Menabrea about it and added notes, including a method for computing Bernoulli numbers that is often cited as one of the first published algorithms.

Babbage also wrote on other subjects. Economy of Manufactures and Machinery (1832) examines industrial production and the role of machinery, while Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830) criticised the organisation of British science. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864) gathers his reminiscences. He was also a fixture of London's social life, where his well-attended Saturday evening soirées were modelled on the scientific salons he had seen in France.

His influence is most visible in the history of computing. His machines remained unfinished, but many of his ideas, such as programming by punched cards and the separation of memory from calculation, anticipated the architecture of later computers. Parts of his unfinished mechanisms are on display at the Science Museum, and for a long time he was regarded as one of the most versatile minds of his century. He died in 1871.