Charles Babbage is credited for designing and giving birth to the idea of the first automatic digital computer. During the mid-1830s, Charles developed plans for an Analytical Engine. Although it wasn ...

ON THE 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Babbage, we retrace the footsteps of the brilliant but irascible British inventor, mathematician and engineer. Host Kenneth Cukier investigates why ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

A numerical table is a tool designed to save the time and labor of those engaged in computing work. The oldest tables which are preserved, were compiled in Babylon in the period 1800-1500 B.C. They ...

As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

Timelines of computer history usually take us back to the early 20th century and no further. But believe it or not, a tinkerer named Charles Babbage got close enough to creating the world's first ...

Charles Babbage was born in London on December 26, 1791. He studied and received his master’s in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, before being elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1816.

Charles Babbage is widely recognized as a pioneer of the programable computer due to his ingenious designs for steam-driven calculating machines in the 19th century. But Babbage drew inspiration from ...

The first programmable computer—if it were built—would have been a gigantic, mechanical thing clunking along with gears and levers and punch cards. That was the vision for Analytical Engine devised by ...

Acclaimed as a mathematical genius, Ada Lovelace is said to have understood the potential of the first computer blueprints better than their inventor. A serendipitous friendship with the mathematician ...