Today is Charles Babbage's Birthday!
|
Happy Birthday
Charles Babbage!
Born: December 26, 1891
in London, England
Died: October 18, 1871
in London, England
|
Babbage
was a mechanical genius. In the 1820s, at the onset of the
industrial revolution, he designed (and built a working model of) a difference
engine, a device that could automatically generate tables of
logarithms and other mathematical functions. Then, in the 1830s, he
designed and partially built his analytical engine, a
forerunner of the modern computer that used gears and rods to perform
its computations. Unfortunately, Babbage was too far ahead of his time;
due in part to the limitations of early nineteenth-century technology,
he never finished building either of these machines.
|
