Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London on December 26, 1791.

Babbage's father, Benjamin Babbage, was a London banker who owned the Bitton Estate in Teignmouth. His mother was Betsy Plumleigh Babbage.

Babbage was sent aged 8 to a country school in Alphington near Exeter to recover from a life-threatening fever. For a short time he attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, but he was taken out of school and taught by private tutors because of his frail health.

Babbage attended at the University of Cambridge arriving at Trinity College in October 1810. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1816 and was active in the founding of the Analytical, the Royal Astronomical, and the Statistical societies. 

Charles Babbage c1850

Charles Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon on July 25, 1814.

They made a home in Marylebone in London, and had eight children, but only four survived childhood. 

Georgiana died in Worcester on September 1, 1827, the same year as his father, their second son (also named Charles) and their newborn son Alexander.

On his father's death in 1827, Babbage inherited a large estate (value around £100,000, equivalent to £8.72 million or $11.1 million today), making him independently wealthy

Knowing that there were many errors in the calculation of mathematical tables, Babbage wanted to find a way to calculate them mechanically, removing errors made by humans. He first talked about the principles of a calculating engine in a letter to Sir Humphrey Davy in 1822

Charles Babbage proposed a difference engine, an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The proposal was made in a paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1822, titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". His proposed machine used the decimal number system and was powered by cranking a handle.

An operational difference engine at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. By Canticle

Babbage's Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by him as the successor to his difference engine . It was supposed to be able to perform complex calculations using punched cards.

His book Economy of Machines and Manufactures (1832) initiated the field of study known today as operational research. 

In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea published a description of the engine based on a lecture by Babbage in French. The following year, the description was translated into English and extensively annotated by Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke. In recognition of her additions to Menabrea's paper, which included a way to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the machine (widely considered to be the first complete computer program), she has been described as the first computer programmer.

Charles Babbage lost two games of chess to the Mechanical Turk, an automaton with a chess player hidden inside that fooled people that a machine could play chess. He knew it was a hoax but it inspired his work on the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.

Neither Babbage's difference engine or his Analytical Engine were ever constructed in his lifetime, as the technology of their time was not capable of translating his sound concepts into practice; but the ideas formed the basis of modern computing.

Babbage also came up with a system of ‘speaking-tubes’ linking London and Liverpool

Babbage, once baked himself in an oven at 265⁰F for 4 minutes just to see what would happen. He followed this up by asking to be lowered in to Mount Vesuvius.

Charles Babbage hated all forms of street music, especially organ-grinders and in the 1860s ran a campaign to ban them.

Babbage lived and worked for over 40 years at 1 Dorset Street, Marylebone, where he died, at the age of 79, on October 18, 1871; he was buried in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.