Beginning of Essay
may have spent his life in vain, trying to make a machine considered by most of his friends to be ridiculous. 150 years ago, Babbage drew hundreds of drawings projecting the fundamentals on which today's computers are founded. But the technology was not there t ....

Middle of Essay
.... and to interest people in translating the works of several foreign mathematicians into English. His studies also led him to a critical study of logarithmic tables and was constantly reporting errors in them. During this analysis, it occurred to him that all these tables could be calculated by machinery. He was convinced that it was possible to construct a machine that would be able to compute by successive differences and to even print out the results. (He conceived of this 50 years before type-setting machines or typewriters were invented.) In 1814, the age of 23, Charles married 22-year-old Georgina Whitmore. Georgina would have eight children in t ....