Babbage, Charles 1791-1871
English mathematician

Born in Teignmouth, Devon, and educated at Trinity and Peterhouse colleges, Cambridge, he spent most of his life attempting to build two calculating machines. The first, the 'difference engine', was designed to calculate tables of logarithms and similar functions by repeated addition performed by trains of gear wheels. A small prototype model described to the Astronomical Society in 1822 won the Society's first gold medal, and Babbage received government funding to build a full-sized machine. However, by 1842 he had spent large amounts of money without any substantial result, and government support was withdrawn. Meanwhile he had conceived the plan for a much more ambitious machine, the 'analytical engine', which could be programmed by punched cards to perform many different computations. The cards were to store not only the numbers but also the sequence of operations to be performed, an idea too ambitious to be realized by the mechanical devices available at the time. The idea can now be seen to be the essential germ of today's electronic computer, with Babbage regarded as the pioneer of modern computers. He held the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839.

Bibliography: Daniel Halacy, Charles Babbage: Father of the Computer (1970)