Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage is an English mathematician, mechanical engineer, inventor, writer, and philosopher. He was considered as the Father of the Computer because of his invention and concept of the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine and the first general-purpose programmable computing machine the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine’s features resemble the principles found in the modern digital computer we are using today.
Charles Babbage was born on December 26, 1791, in London. He was the first child of Benjamin Babbage and Elizabeth Plumeigh Teape. Babbage’s received his earliest education at home, he suffered from chronic illness and hoping that living in the country will improve his
Charles completed his design of the Different Engine and the British government funded his project. Unfortunately, the agreement did not meet and the work has ended in 1832. After his attempt to finish the Difference Engine, Charles came up with a new design, named the Analytical Engine. The Analytical engine was the first mechanical general-purpose computer; it was also programmable like modern computers today. In 1833, Charles Babbage met a 17-year-old girl Lady Ada Lovelace. Charles demonstrated the portion of the Difference Engine to Lovelace and she became interested in the concept of the machine. When Charles started to create the Analytical Engine, Lovelace assisted Babbage in the development of the machine by designing some of its internal characteristics. She created the first computer program that used Bernoulli numbers for the Analytical Engine to operate. Although Charles Babbage wrote the first computer code, Lovelace did the first complex code for the Analytical Engine. Charles Babbage devoted his life building the Analytical Engine, though the British government ended their support for the machine in 1842. Babbage created an improved design for his Difference Engine between 1847 and 1849. Babbage did not construct the Difference Engine No.2 because of lack of fund from the government. Even
The Analytical Engine was the first general-purpose programmable computing device. It has the essential features found in the modern digital computer. It can be programmed by using punched cards, an idea came from the Jacquard loom introduced by Joseph Jacquard. The Analytical Engine uses an analog printer for output, it had a CPU called Mill where the arithmetic processing was performed and a Store (as known as Memory) where numbers and intermediate results are held. The machine is powered by steam and it contained hundreds of vertical axles and thousands of wheels or gears. The Analytical Engine can add or subtract a two forty-digit numbers within three seconds and can multiply and divide in two to four minutes. The machine has three types of cards named the operation cards, variable cards, and number cards. The operation card determined the mathematical functions to use, variable card assigned for the symbols of the variables in an equation, and the number card contains entries from mathematical tables. The Analytical Engine can calculate more complex numbers than the difference engine. Ada Lovelace described an algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers on the Analytical Engine. Babbage believed that the Analytical Engine could calculate any possible arithmetic
Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 near Baltimore. His Grandmother, an Englishwoman, taught him to read and write. For several winters he attended a small school open to blacks and whites. There he developed a keen interest in mathematics and science. Later, while farming, Banneker pursued his mathematical studies and taught himself astronomy. In 1753, he completed a remarkable clock. He built it entirely of wood, carving each gear by hand. His only models were a pocket watch and an old picture of a clock. The clock kept almost perfect time for more than fifty years.
In his many careers as a printer, moralist, essayist, civic leader, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, and philosopher, for later generations of Americans he became both a spokesman and a model for the national character. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts on Jan. 17, 1706, into a religious Puritan household. His father, Josiah, was a candlemaker and a skillful mechanic. His mother, Abiah Ben’s parents raised thirteen children--the survivors of Josiah’s seventeen children by two wives (#1).
...m simple tasks. Then Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, led by Vannevar Bush, fabricated the first analog computer, which could perform more complicated tasks than the previous computer. The analog computer was improved upon even further by Howard Aiken, who created the first computer with memory (Brinkley 643).
Benjamin Banneker was an astronomer, scientist, mathematician, surveyor, clock-maker, author, and social critic. Most notable about his accomplishments was that despite racial constraints and little formal education, he was a self-taught man. By the end of his life, his achievements were well-known around the world.
“…With the advent of everyday use of elaborate calculations, speed has become paramount to such a high degree that there is no machine on the market today capable of satisfying the full demand of modern computational methods. The most advanced machines have greatly reduced the time required for arriving at solutions to problems which might have required months or days by older procedures. This advance, however, is not adequate for many problems encountered in modern scientific work and the present invention is intended to reduce to seconds such lengthy computations…” From the ENIAC patent (No. 3,120,606), filed 26 June 1947.
Computer engineering started about 5,000 years ago in China when they invented the abacus. The abacus is a manual calculator in which you move beads back and forth on rods to add or subtract. Other inventors of simple computers include Blaise Pascal who came up with the arithmetic machine for his father’s work. Also Charles Babbage produced the Analytical Engine, which combined math calculations from one problem and applied it to solve other complex problems. The Analytical Engine is similar to today’s computers.
We have the microprocessor to thank for all of our consumer electronic devices, because without them, our devices would be much larger. Microprocessors are the feat of generations of research and development. Microprocessors were invented in 1972 by Intel Corporation and have made it so that computers could shrink to the sizes we know today. Before, computers took a room because the transistors or vacuum tubes were individual components. Microprocessors unified the technology on one chip while reducing the costs. Microprocessor technology has been the most important revolution in the computer industry in the past forty years, as microprocessors have allowed our consumer electronics to exist.
The First Generation of Computers The first generation of computers, beginning around the end of World War 2, and continuing until around the year 1957, included computers that used vacuum tubes, drum memories, and programming in machine code. Computers at that time where mammoth machines that did not have the power our present day desktop microcomputers. In 1950, the first real-time, interactive computer was completed by a design team at MIT. The "Whirlwind Computer," as it was called, was a revamped U.S. Navy project for developing an aircraft simulator.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of famous poet at the time, Lord George Gordon Byron, and mother Anne Isabelle Milbanke, known as “the princess of parallelograms,” a mathematician. A few weeks after Ada Lovelace was born, her parents split. Her father left England and never returned. Women received inferior education that that of a man, but Isabelle Milbanke was more than able to give her daughter a superior education where she focused more on mathematics and science (Bellis). When Ada was 17, she was introduced to Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician who’s party she heard Charles Babbage’s idea of the Analytic Engine, a new calculating engine (Toole). Charles Babbage, known as the father of computer invented the different calculators. Babbage became a mentor to Ada and helped her study advance math along with Augustus de Morgan, who was a professor at the University of London (Ada Lovelace Biography Mathematician, Computer Programmer (1815–1852)). In 1842, Charles Babbage presented in a seminar in Turin, his new developments on a new engine. Menabrea, an Italian, wrote a summary article of Babbage’s developments and published the article i...
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
In a world of men, for men, and made by men, there were a lucky few women who could stand up and be noticed. In the early nineteenth century, Lovelace Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, made her mark among the world of men that has influenced even today’s world. She was the “Enchantress of Numbers” and the “Mother of Computer Programming.” The world of computers began with the futuristic knowledge of one Charles Babbage and one Lady Lovelace, who appeared to know more about Babbage’s Analytical Engine than he himself knew. At the time of Lovelace’s discoveries, women were only just beginning to take part in the scientific world, and her love of mathematics drove her straight into the world of men. Her upbringing, her search for more knowledge, her love of mathematics, and her inherited writing abilities brought to life what we know today as computer programming or computer science.
The history of computers is an amazing story filled with interesting statistics. “The first computer was invented by a man named Konrad Zuse. He was a German construction engineer, and he used the machine mainly for mathematic calculations and repetition” (Bellis, Inventors of Modern Computer). The invention shocked the world; it inspired people to start the development of computers. Soon after,
Technology continued to prosper in the computer world into the nineteenth century. A major figure during this time is Charles Babbage, designed the idea of the Difference Engine in the year 1820. It was a calculating machine designed to tabulate the results of mathematical functions (Evans, 38). Babbage, however, never completed this invention because he came up with a newer creation in which he named the Analytical Engine. This computer was expected to solve “any mathematical problem” (Triumph, 2). It relied on the punch card input. The machine was never actually finished by Babbage, and today Herman Hollerith has been credited with the fabrication of the punch card tabulating machine.
the actions of the analytical engine were to be done through the use of punched
Charles Babbage was a mathematician, theorist, creator, and mechanical engineer, who is best recalled for originating the concept of a programmable computer. Considered a, “father of the computer”, for his labor in evolving a difference machine and drafting ideas for an analytic machine that would pave the way for more intricate models that would come to be acknowledged as the modern computer. Babbage invented the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more intricate designs. His diverse work in additional fields has led him to be labeled as “pre-eminent” among the many polymaths of his time.