Towering achievement Charles Babbage (1791-1871) designed the first automatic computer, but never fully built it. The first complete Babbage Engine was finished in 2002, 153 years after its design. It has 8,000 parts, weighs 10,000 pounds, and is 11 feet long and 7 feet high. Best of all, it works just like Babbage imagined.
You read it first in this week’s The Factory in Guide magazine.
Computers are amazing! They help you do all kinds of things, from adding up numbers as with a calculator, to designing houses - provided you have the correct software to do those things. But really, the sky is the limit. Especially today with technology increasing as rapidly as it does, it's fun to imagine what will come out next!
But the first to pioneer and put specs together to create such a device according to historical record was Charles Babbage from London, England. He lived from 1791 - 1871. He is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in his Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard Loom. Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his 1832 book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery.
Charles Babbage was known as a polymath, a person described as being very knowledgeable about many different subjects and interests. He was very intelligent and very much a genius. Although, he never got around to putting all his designs together in one machine. This wasn't done until after his death. His son,
Scripture taken from the New King James Version, Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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