Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was born on 26 December 1791, most likely at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, and died on 18 October 1871. He held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair Isaac Newton had once held, from 1828 to 1839. In 1822 he began work on the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that would compute the values of polynomial functions automatically by the method of finite differences, removing the need for multiplication or division by hand; government funding supported the project for years, but no complete machine was built in his lifetime. From 1837 he designed a far more ambitious machine, the Analytical Engine, controlled by punched cards adapted from the Jacquard loom, with a separate store for holding numbers and a mill for acting on them, and capable of conditional branching and looping, a design theoretically able to compute anything a modern general purpose computer can. The Analytical Engine was also never built in his lifetime, though a working Difference Engine built to his original designs was completed between 1989 and 1991. Ada Lovelace corresponded with him while translating an account of his 1840 lectures on the Analytical Engine and added her own extensive notes to it in 1843, developed in close collaboration with him.