<person> The british inventor 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 mathematical tables.
While he did produce prototypes of portions of the Difference Engine, it was left to Georg and Edvard Schuetz to construct the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications.
Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1814 and graduated from Peterhouse. In 1817 he received an MA from Cambridge and in 1823 started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government. In 1827 he published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000. In 1828 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (though he never presented a lecture). In 1831 he founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1832 he published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery". In 1833 he began work on the Analytical Engine. In 1834 he founded the Statistical Society of London. He died in 1871 in London.
Babbage also invented the cowcatcher, the dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, and the heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking.
[Adapted from the text by J. A. N. Lee, Copyright September 1994].
(22 Feb 1996)