This book discusses the career of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), British advocate of the systematic use of science in industry and creator of machines that were precursors of the modern computer. Babbage used his immense personal charm and vitality in an attempt to change the thinking of contemporary industrialists who had little use for the higher reaches of science. Shifting his own energies from pure mathematics, he planned engines that would "calculate by steam": the Difference Engines, designed to compute tables according to the method of finite differences, and the more complex Analytical Engines, forerunners of the modern computer. Almost forgotten and then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century, the Analytical Engines are among the great intellectual achievements of humankind. This biography of their polymathic inventor gives a convincing account of his tragic personal life and his important place in the history of science.
- ISBN10 0691023778
- ISBN13 9780691023779
- Publish Date 21 January 1985 (first published 21 July 1982)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 19 March 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 287
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/1203.html