In autumn of 1840, Charles Babbage arrived in Turin for a meeting of Italian scientists, where he gave the only public explanation of the workings of his “Analytical Engine.” This machine was the ...

Created by Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine was a general-purpose, completely program-controlled, mechanical digital computer with no human intervention. It was designed to be programmed using ...

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

Charles Babbage was born in London on December 26, 1791. He studied and received his master’s in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, before being elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1816.

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 ...

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 ...

As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...

A re-construction of Charles Babbage’s difference engine, an early mechanical computer, has been captured in precise detail using gigapixel imagery. Babbage, who essentially invented the mechanical ...