Granny's Page                                        History

Born on December 26, 1791 in London, Babbage's only formal schooling as a child as opposed to tutors was in a small school of thirty other children in Enfield, a small town north of London.  He went to Cambridge in October of 1810.  He challenged his superiors with his questions of mathematics.  He was involved with many activities in Cambridge, some of which were chess and sailing.  He was very interested in the maths and sciences.  In 1811 Babbage founded the Analytical society for promoting continental mathematics along with Herschel, Peacock and some others.

On July 2, 1814, he married Georgiana Whitmore.  His father didn't approve because Babbage wasn't yet financially secure.

After Cambridge, Babbage worked as a mathematician involved mostly with calculus.  He was a member of the Astronomical society in 1820.  At this time Babbage became interested in a calculating machine.  This new interest became his passion for the rest of his life.

In the early 1820's, after considering several possibilities for a calculating machine, Babbage decided on the Difference Engine.  This machine was designed mainly for making more accurate mathematical tables.  This would help the navigation field.  At this time navigational tables were full of errors which led to ships being wrecked.  Because of the thought that Babbage's machine could correct this, government funding was secured.

At the time of Babbage, calculating machines before him were quite primitive.  The first calculators made for sale were constructed in the 1640's by Pascal.  The problem with these machines was always the carry system.  Carrying numbers from the tens to hundreds and so on.    All the calculators before Babbage's Difference Engine required intervention throughout by the user, making calculation neither fast or accurate.  The Difference engine was more complex than any other calculator.  It was designed to calculate exponential problems by means of the Difference theory.

Babbage's  plans of the Difference Engine were never completed, but his vision went beyond that  of the Difference Engine.  He envisioned a machine capable of performing any mathematical instructions given to it.  The Analytical engine was to be composed of a device to receive the list of instructions (on punch cards similar to the idea of Joseph Jacquard and his design of  looms), another device to perform the instructions, and a device to print out the results on paper to all be controlled by a steam engine.  The idea of the Analytical Engine is very similar to the idea of modern computers.  He worked in depth with Ada Lovelace, who proposed a way to calculate Bernoulli numbers which is today considered the first computer program.  But this machine was never to be completed.  After spending more of the government's money, Babbage ran out of funds and his plans were halted.

Charles Babbage died in 1871 and his work became forgotten.  Mechanical calculators were improving but the idea of Babbage's computer died.  Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were a century ahead of their time.  Babbage is considered to be the pioneer of the first computer while Ada Lovelace wrote his programs.