History

Mooooving Cows, and Computers, Into the Future

I wasn't so great with money, but I was a smartypants with computers. Oh well, no one's perfect!

Many people contributed to the invention of the modern computer, but none so interesting as British inventor Charles Babbage, who lived from 1791 to 1871. He was very smart, indeed, inventing practical things that are still used today, such as cow catchers on the front of trains.

However, two of his biggest “inventions” were the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. We say “inventions” because, unfortunately, Babbage never actually managed to build them. However, the theory behind each was very good, and helped inspire scientists to get computers to where they are today.

The Difference Engine was Babbage’s first idea. Just maybe, he thought, we could stop counting on our fingers and instead let a machine do the work. He argued that humans doing math had the potential for errors to creep in. By making a machine do the work, there would be no errors, Babbage said. He was kind of right. After all, when was the last time your calculator got a sum wrong?

The Difference Engine was amazing for its time. It could “remember” numbers for future equations, similar to your calculator's memory feature. Unfortunately, unlike your calculator, the Difference Engine didn’t fit in your pocket. It took up an entire room!

Babbage wasn’t able to get the Difference Engine fully built because the project needed a lot of money. The UK government tried to help with funding, but Babbage eventually used up all the money they gave him.

Babbage didn’t mind. He already had an idea for an even better machine. After construction work stopped on the Difference Engine in 1833, Babbage got to work on making the improved version, which he called the Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine was an amazing idea because it used components that were very similar to our modern-day computers. It had a mill that would process equations (like our processors), a store to save information to (like hard drives and RAM), a reader for entering data via punch cards (like a keyboard), and a printer for spitting data out (like, well...our printers).

The machine was extremely ambitious for its time and Babbage wanted the entire thing to run on steam power. Yes, this was a computer even before electricity was used to power it.

The machine needed a lot of components and, again, Babbage needed money. However, the UK government was already upset that Babbage had used a lot of money to make the Difference Engine which was never completed, so they didn’t offer him money to make the Analytical Engine.

As such, Babbage’s designs for the Analytical Engine were forgotten... until 1937, 66 years after Babbage’s death, when people had the means to make Babbage’s ideas a reality. And the rest, as they say, is history. b

Left: A cow catcher on a locomotive engines moves cows off the train tracks. Below: The mill and printing portions of the Analytical Engine Bottom: Some gears from Difference Engine No. 2