The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer

Front Cover
Penguin Books, 2002 - Calculators - 342 pages
In 1821 an inventor and mathematician named Charles Babbage was reviewing a set of mathematical tables. After finding an excess of errors in the results, he exclaimed, I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. Thus began Babbage's lifelong enterprise to design and build a mechanical calculating engine-the world's first computer. Drawing on Babbage's original notes and designs, Doron Swade recounts both Babbage's nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating machine-the Difference Engine-and Swade's own successful attempt to build a replica for the bicentennial of Babbage's birth. Set against the tantalizing background of Victorian science and politics with a colorful cast of characters, The Difference Engine is a saga of ingenuity and will-and the dawning of a new age.

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Contents

Chapter 2
32
Chapter 3
49
Chapter 4
72
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Doron Swade, an engineer, technology historian, & leading authority on Charles Babbage, is assistant director & head of collections at London's Science Museum. He is also the mastermind of a six-year project to construct a Babbage calculating engine from original nineteenth-century designs. He lives in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, England.

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