Charles Babbage :: essays research papers

Charles Babb hop onCharles Babbage may have spent his keep in vain, trying to make a motorcarconsidered by roughly of his friends to be ridiculous. 150 years ago, Babbage drewhundreds of drawings projecting the fundamentals on which todays computers arefounded. But the technology was not there to meet his dreams. He was born onDecember 26, 1791, in Totnes, Devonshire, England. As a baby bird he was alwaysinterested about the mechanics of everything and in the supernatural. Hereportedly once tried to prove the existence of the devil by making a circle inhis own blood on the floor and reciting the Lords Prayer backward. In college,he formed a tracing club dedicated to verifying the existence of the supernatural.When in Trinity College in Cambridge, Charles carried out childish pranks andrebelled because of the boredom he felt from knowing much than his instructors.Despite this, however, he was on his way to understanding the advanced theoriesof maths and even formed an Analytic al Society to present and discuss pilot burner papers on mathematics and to interest people in translating the kit and boodleof several foreign mathematicians into English. His studies also led him to acritical conduct of logarithmic tables and was constantly reporting errors in them.During this analysis, it occurred to him that all these tables could be reckon by machinery. He was convinced that it was possible to construct amachine that would be able to compute by successive differences and to even marker out the results. (He conceived of this 50 years before type-settingmachines or typewriters were invented.)In 1814, the age of 23, Charles married 22-year-old Georgina Whitmore. Georginawould have eight children in thirteen years, of which only troika sons wouldsurvive to maturity. Babbage really took no interest in raising his children. later Georgina died at the age of 35, his mother took over the upbringing. In1816, Babbage had his first savoring of failure when his applica tion for theprofessorship of mathematics at East India College in Haileybury was rejecteddue to political reasons, as was his application, three years later, for the run of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Fortunately, his elderbrother supported his family while Babbage keep his work on calculatingmachines.At the age of 30, Babbage was ready to forebode to the Royal AstronomicalSociety that he had embarked on the construction of a table-calculating machine.His paper, "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation ofMathematical Tables" was widely acclaimed and consequently, Babbage waspresented with the first specious medal awarded by the Astronomical Society.