X-Nico

20 unusual facts about Charles Babbage


Abuse of notation

In his article on notation in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia Charles Babbage complains at length of this abuse of notation and suggests two alternatives for the notation f^n(x)

Alphington, Devon

Charles Babbage (1791–1871), "father of computing" educated in Alphington

Cuming Museum

On this site, Charles Babbage, the Victorian mechanical computer pioneer, was born in 1791, although the original house has been demolished.

Édouard Biot

Biot translated Charles Babbage's On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacture into French and was the author of one of the earliest works on the railways, the Manuel du constructeur des chemins de fer (Manual of Railway Construction), published in 1834.

Family Fortunes

The computer screen name "Mr Babbage" was in recognition to the English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer, Charles Babbage.

Federico Luigi Menabrea

Among his notable publications: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. with notes by translator Ada Lovelace (1842), which described many aspects of computer architecture and programming.

Homebuilt computer

Computers have been built at home for a long time, starting with the Victorian era pioneer Charles Babbage in the 1820s.

Homebuilt machines

Homebuilt computers have been built at home for a long time, starting with the Victorian era pioneer Charles Babbage in the 1820s.

Joseph Marie Jacquard

Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits; it inspired him in using perforated cards in his analytical engine.

King George III Museum

It counted among its collections the unfinished prototype of the Difference Engine No. 1, designed by Charles Babbage, considered a "father of the computer".

The King George III Museum was a museum within King's College London, England between 1843 and 1927 which held the collections of scientific instruments of George III as well as eminent nineteenth-century scientists including Sir Charles Wheatstone and Charles Babbage.

Kirkby Mallory

Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and colleague of Charles Babbage, lived in the now demolished Kirkby Hall during her childhood with her mother, Annabella Milbanke.

Percy Ludgate

Working alone, Ludgate designed an Analytical Engine while unaware of Charles Babbage's designs, although he later went on to write about Babbage's machine.

Ludgate also helped advance calculators by expanding Charles Babbage's design for the first programmable computer.

Speedometer

Charles Babbage is credited with creating an early type of a speedometer, which were usually fitted to locomotives.

Street organ

Charles Babbage was a particularly virulent enemy of the organ grinders.

Sylvestre François Lacroix

In 1812 Babbage set up The Analytical Society for the translation of Differential and Integral Calculus and the book was translated into English in 1816 by George Peacock.

The Chaos Engine

A time traveller on a reconnaissance mission from the distant future became stranded in England of the late 1800s, and his technology came into the hands of the Royal Society led by Baron Fortesque (based upon Charles Babbage), a grand inventor.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Starting with the development of symbolic written language (and the eventual perceived need for a dictionary), Gleick examines the history of intellectual insights central to information theory, detailing the key figures responsible such as Claude Shannon, Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and John Archibald Wheeler.

Yale Patt

2005 IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award "for fundamental contributions to high performance processor design"


Bit

The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1804), and later adopted by Semen Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

It follows the history of "information machines" from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine through Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machines to the invention of the modern electronic digital computer.

Samuel Laurence

Thomas Erskine, 1838; Thomas Carlyle, 1841; Sir Frederick Pollock, bart., 1842 and 1847; Charles Babbage, 1845; Dr. William Whewell, 1847; James Spedding, 1860; the Rev. William Hepworth Thompson, master of Trinity, and Robert Browning, 1869; Sir Thomas Watson, bart., M.D., 1870; and the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, 1871.

William Henry Fitton

Around 1825, according to Charles Babbage's autobiography, he invented the thaumatrope, which was later commercially publicised by Dr. John Ayrton Paris (to whom the invention is more usually attributed).