Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage (Teignmouth, 1792 - London, 1871) British mathematician and engineer, inventor
of programmable calculating machines. At the beginning of the 19th century, well into the Industrial
Revolution, errors in mathematical data had serious consequences: for example, a faulty navigation
table was a frequent cause of shipwrecks. Charles Babbage believed that a machine could make
mathematical calculations faster and more accurate than people.

Although he had excelled in the area of the theory of functions and algebraic analysis, Charles
Babbage devoted himself to the attempt to obtain a machine capable of accurately creating
mathematical tables. In 1833 he completed his "difference engine", capable of calculating
logarithms and printing them from 1 to 108,000 with remarkable precision, and formulated the
theoretical foundations of any calculating automaton. By then Babbage already knew the decimal
counting systems, and was familiar with the decomposition of complex mathematical operations
into simple sequences.
After this, Babbage turned to the project of designing an "analytical engine" that was capable of
processing any sequence of arithmetic instructions. For this realization he had funds from the
English government and with the collaboration of what is considered the first programmer in
history, Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

Although he did not achieve his goal, Charles Babbage established the basic principles of modern
computers, such as the concept of a program or basic instructions (which are entered into the
machine independently of data), the use of memory to retain results, and the arithmetic unit.
Babbage's machine, built exclusively with mechanical parts and a multitude of gear wheels, used
punched cards to enter data and programs, and printed the results on paper with techniques very
similar to those used until the mid-1970s.

Babbage dedicated his last years and resources to an infallible machine that would be able to predict
the winners of horse races.