The team’s question, as posed by the New York Times: “Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?”
You know, Charles Babbage? Born in 1791, died in 1871? Who attempted to build something called a “Difference Engine” during the first half of the nineteenth-century, a kind of mechanical calculator designed to compute various sets of numbers? Some argue that he, not Turing or Zuse, is the true father of the modern computer.
Babbage never built his Difference Engine—a mechanical calculator with thousands of parts—because of cost overruns and political disagreements, but the inventor passed on plans for its completion, and in 1991, the Science Museum in London actually built it (the printing component was finished in 2000). As suspected, it actually works.
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