*One of the many Gothic aspects of the Difference Engine was that the device, which was never successfully built, was never quite entirely dead, either. Babbage's youngest son, a career military ...

A programmable calculator designed by British scientist Charles Babbage. After his Difference Engine failed its test in 1833, Babbage started the design of the Analytical Engine in 1834. Developed in ...

A numerical table is a tool designed to save the time and labor of those engaged in computing work. The oldest tables which are preserved, were compiled in Babylon in the period 1800-1500 B.C. They ...

Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Annabella Milbanke, became the world's first programmer in 1843 with her algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Learning to ...

In autumn of 1840, Charles Babbage arrived in Turin for a meeting of Italian scientists, where he gave the only public explanation of the workings of his “Analytical Engine.” This machine was the ...

In 1847, at the age of just twenty-seven, Ada Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer—more than a century before the first computer was even built. This almost sounds like a myth, or the ...

The second Tuesday in October is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and encourage the accomplishments of women in science, technology, and engineering. But who was Ada Lovelace? She wrote the first ...

To most people, the phrase “electronic computer” conjures up a baffling maze of wires, transistors, magnetic tapes, punch cards, and the like, which can somehow or other be used to solve problems of ...

THE April number of the Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society contains an interesting and very original paper by Mr. Percy E. Ludgate on a proposed analytical machine. Of all calculating ...

The Gilded Age President led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. There’s a reason Trump is so drawn to his legacy—and so determined to bring the liberal international order to an end. New ...