The saga of the ‘Analytical Engine’: How Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace invented digital computers
Charles Babbage, was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer, born in Devonshire, in 1792. The son of Benjamin Babbage, a banker, he was privately educated because of poor health as a child, until he went to college at Cambridge in 1810. He loved mathematics which he had taught to himself and was discouraged to find that he knew more than his teacher.
In college, his closest friends were John Herschel and George Peacock, both interested in mathematics and astronomy. Together with Edward Bromhead, they founded the Analytical Society, with the aim to modernize the study of mathematics and encourage the use of continental methods in calculus.
In his twenties Babbage worked as a mathematician and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816, playing an important part in the foundation of the Astronomical Society (later called the Royal Astronomical Society) in 1820.
Babbage worked with John Herschel to correct mathematical tables for the Astronomical Society. These tables had been calculated by ‘computers’. ‘Computers’ at that time were people who performed calculations by hand, following a fixed arithmetical procedure. The two friends were comparing tables with the results of the same set of…
