Charles Babbage 1791-1871
Introduction
The calculating engines of English mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) are among the most celebrated icons in the prehistory of computing. Babbage’s Difference Engine No.1 was the first successful automatic calculator and remains one of the finest examples of precision engineering of the time. Babbage is sometimes referred to as "father of computing." The Charles Babbage Foundation took his name to honor his intellectual contributions and their relation to modern computers
1. Born December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK, Died 1871, London; known to some as the “Father of Computing” for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. His previous Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of tables.
2. Charles Babbage developed the Analytical Engine project after an earlier computing project the difference engine that Babbage started in 1822.
3. The Difference Engine could solve polynomial equations using a numerical method called the “Method of Differences”. However the analytical engine was the first general computational device, with the ability to solve different types of equations.
4. In 1823, He was started work on the Difference Engine through finding from the British Government. It was the significant event in his life.
5. The parts of the Difference Engine that had seemed possible of completion in 1830 gathered dust in the Museum of King’s College. He was an amazing intelligence.
6. The inventions of Charles Babbage were the cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph ophthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking, but abhorred street musicians.
7. Babbage investigated biblical miracles. ”In the course of his analysis”, wrote B.V.Bowden in Faster than Thought , “he made the assumption that the chance of a man rising from the dead is one in 10^12”. Miracles are not, as he wrote in Passages From the Life of a philosopher, “the breach of established laws, but…. Indicate the existence of far higher laws”.
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