Considered to be the “father of the computer”, Charles Babbage was responsible not only for creating the first automatic digital computer but for many advancements in mathematics and everyday life in his home country, England. Let’s take a look at the life and inventions of this talented polymath.
Babbage’s Passion for Math
Babbage was born in London on December 26, 1791. Throughout his early life, he bounced between attending schools and having private tutors due to life threatening fevers and health issues. While studying at a small academy in Enfield, he found a love for math and regularly utilized the academy’s library to further his studies on his own. In 1810, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he continued studying math and joined various extracurricular clubs.
A portrait of Charles Babbage from 1820. Licensed for use in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Following his time at Cambridge, he worked on various papers and treatises, eventually publishing six full length works and around 90 papers on mathematics. He also helped to found the Royal Astronomical Society in London, which aimed to standardize astronomical calculations, engage in public outreach on astronomy, and publish regular astronomical journals.
Establishing the First Modern Postal System in England
Following the tragic deaths of multiple family members in 1827, including his wife, two of his sons, and his father, Babbage threw himself into his work, which he was able to do thanks to an inheritance from his father that made him independently wealthy. During this period of innovation, Babbage was responsible for establishing the first modern postal system in England, creating the first reliable actuary tables, and much more. One of his notable ideas was the locomotive “cowcatcher”, also known as a pilot; this fender-like device is attached to the front of a train to deflect obstacles on the tracks that could damage or even derail the train.
A photograph of the John Bull steam locomotive with a cowcatcher on the front. This photo is licensed for use under public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
His inventions didn’t stop there; Babbage also developed a black box device to track speed and conditions before railway crashes. He even made advancements in the field of cryptography: Thanks to a discovery he made about ciphers based on Vigenère tables, he was able to crack codes used during the Crimean War of the 1850s. However, he did not receive credit for his discovery until 1985, as it was kept a military secret at the time, with credit initially given to a Prussian military officer who figured out the same procedure a few years later.
The Father of the Computer
Babbage’s most notable inventions, however, were computers. He made intricate designs for some of the world’s first mechanical computers. The first of these machines was known as the Difference Engine. It was designed to compute polynomial functions and used a decimal number system and the method of finite differences to avoid the need for multiplication and division. Babbage worked with Joseph Clement to create a prototype, but due to the extreme complexity and costs involved in producing the machine, it would never live beyond this phase.
After the difference engine failed to reach production, Babbage used the knowledge he gained to design an even more complex device known as the Analytical Engine. This device was designed with integrated memory and complex logic units that would have allowed it to be programmable and, theoretically, solve infinitely complex problems. This capability would have made it the first device to be considered “Turing-complete”, meaning that it could solve any algorithmic computation if it had enough time and memory. However, much like the original difference engine, the Analytical Engine proved far too complex and costly to have been produced during Babbage’s lifetime.
While none of the designs for his computers could have been completed during his lifetime, Babbage nonetheless went on to design a successor to the Analytical Engine known as the Difference Engine No. 2. This device combined all of the complexities of the previous two and would have had all of the hallmarks of a modern computer, but in a mechanical form. In the 1980s, around a hundred years after Babbage’s death, scientists began using modern techniques to construct a functional version of the complex Difference Engine No. 2, which was on display at the Computer History Museum in California from 2008 to 2016.
A photo of the Difference Engine No. 2. constructed by the Science Museum in London. This photo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, via Wikimedia Commons.
Further Reading
Want to learn more about important pioneers of the computing world? Check out these COMSOL Blog posts:
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