Charles Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in London, England.

Charles Babbage studied in schools but for some periods he had private tutors, partly because of health problems. He studied at Trinity College and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1814. After finishing school, he married Georgiana Whitmore, with whom he had eight children though only three survived to become adults. His wife died in 1827.

In 1812, along with other mathematician friends, Babbage founded the Analytical Society with the aim of promoting Leibnizian analytical calculus instead of Newtonian infinitesimal calculus, which was more complicated.

At the time, computers were people who carried out calculations by hand and seeing the many errors they made Charles Babbage had since his days as a student the idea of ​​building a machine capable of making calculations automatically.

On June 14, 1823, Charles Babbage presented to the Royal Astronomical Society a model of his difference engine, which was intended to calculate tables of polynomial functions using the method of divided differences. Babbage was financed by the British government to build the machine and the Royal Astronomical Society awarded him a gold medal in 1824.

Due to various problems in the construction and ongoing changes to the project, the difference engine was never built and after ten years the government cut its funding.

In 1828 Charles Babbage became Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge and kept that position until 1839.

Since 1833, Charles Babbage decided to start a new project even more ambitious to create a machine that could be programmed to perform any kind of calculation, the Analytical Engine. He designed it adapting the system used in Joseph Marie Jacquard’s looms, where punch cards were used to determine the textile patterns. Babbage used punch cards to program the mathematical operations to be performed.

For several years Charles Babbage tried to build the Analytical Engine but again he had several problems and was unable to get financing. Support came from Lady Ada Lovelace, a mathematician considered the mother of modern programming for the work done on Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Charles Babbage was able to build only a simplified version of his Analytical Engine before his death on October 18, 1871.

In 1910, Henry Prevost Babbage, Charles Babbage’s youngest son, announced the creation of a part of the Analytical Engine. He also built some difference engines based on his father’s projects.

In 1991 the London Science Museum built a complete difference engine following the project refined by Charles Babbage during the development of the Analytical Engine. This difference engine was built using materials and tolerances of the type available in the XIX century and they verified that it actually worked.

In 2010 an initiative started to build a complete working Analytical Engine following Charles Babbage’s project. Of course today we have electronic computers that can perform in very small fractions of seconds calculations that Babbage’s Analytical Engine would take a few minutes to complete. That project, however, was remarkably sophisticated for its time, unfortunately Charles Babbage’s work fell into oblivion and the mechanical and electromechanical computers built in the first half of the XX century were less advanced of the Analytical Engine even if they were faster.

Today, the work of Charles Babbage was rediscovered and he’s rightly considered one of the fathers of computer science.