Last Updated on May 30, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
Charles Babbage was born in London December 26, 1791, 233 years ago. Among other things, he invented the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine. He then went on to invent the Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that contained all of the essential ideas of a modern computer.
The Difference Engine
Babbage’s Difference Engine was a mechanical calculator, designed to compute tables from logarithmic and trigonometric functions, useful in engineering, science, and navigation.
Charles Babbage built Difference Engine No.0 between 1819 and 1822. The British government then commissioned a second design, Difference Engine No.1, paying Babbage £1700. Nine years later, Babbage had managed to produce 1/7 of the plan. The government abandoned the project in 1842 after spending £17,000.
Babbage designed Difference Engine No.2 between 1846 and 1849. He incorporated ideas from his Analytical Engine to make this final design faster and need fewer parts.
The Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine was a general purpose mechanical computer, complete with an arithmetic logic unit, conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory. It was Turing Complete. He started its design in 1837. It was to use punched cards to hold programs, and include a printer, a curve plotter, and bell. The Analytical Engine’s programming language resembled modern assembly languages, with opcodes and operands. Babbage was only able to build a small part of it before he died in 1871 at the age of 80. Babbage’s son Henry assembled a partially working unit between 1880 and 1910.
What went wrong with Charles Babbage’s computers
In 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete and working example of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, his final design. They used materials and engineering tolerances available to Babbage during his lifetime. This disproved the conventional wisdom that Babbage’s designs could not have been produced using the manufacturing technology of his time. Babbage pushed the technology of his day to its absolute limit. But given adequate funding, we now know his designs would have been successful.
Babbage is considered the father of computing. The computer software chain store Babbage’s, a predecessor of Gamestop, was named for him.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.