Slow, error-prone calculations by hand were unavoidable in the early 19th century, yet even small mistakes could ruin the ...

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the 1871 death of Charles Babbage, the English mathematician and inventor credited with conceiving plans for the world's first programmable non-digital computer. It ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

Frustrated by human error, mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage designed a machine to perform mathematical functions and automatically print the results. Library of Congress When today’s number ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This is a replica of the portion of a ...

For many of us, the computer is the symbol of our hypermodernity, the image of how vastly we differ--culturally, economically, socially and politically--from past generations. And many of us think of ...

The first computer didn’t show up looking like anything we’d call a computer now. There was no screen, no keyboard, no mouse, ...

The Babbage Engine Exhibit opens May 10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The central artifact of the exhibit, a faithful construction of Englishman Charles Babbage's Difference ...

Steam-punk is alive and well in the UK thanks to a mounting campaign to build a massive steam-powered computer that was first conceived in 1837. The campaign to construct Charles Babbage’s Analytical ...

AT a meeting of the Newcomen Society held at the Science Museum on December 13, Dr. L. H. D. Buxton read a paper on Charles Babbage and his difference engine, during which he gave a sketch of the ...