author
Charles Babbage
1791–1871
Best known for imagining machines that could calculate automatically, this 19th-century mathematician helped lay the groundwork for modern computing long before electronic computers existed. His plans for the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine still make him one of the most fascinating figures in the history of science and technology.
5 Audiobooks
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
by Charles Babbage
The calculating engine
by Charles Babbage
Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes
by Charles Babbage
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
by Charles Babbage
About the author
Born in London on December 26, 1791, Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, inventor, and mechanical thinker whose ideas were far ahead of his time. He studied at Cambridge and became known for attacking errors in printed mathematical tables, a problem that pushed him toward designing machines that could carry out calculations more reliably.
Babbage is most famous for the Difference Engine, built to compute and print tables automatically, and for the later Analytical Engine, an even more ambitious design that included many features associated with general-purpose computers. Although these machines were not completed in his lifetime, the Analytical Engine showed an extraordinary leap of imagination and is why Babbage is often remembered as a pioneer of computing.
His interests reached well beyond mathematics. He wrote about industry and manufacturing, worked on practical problems, and remained an energetic public intellectual throughout his life. He died in London on October 18, 1871, but his reputation only grew as later generations recognized how remarkably close his ideas came to the computer age.