Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, inventor, and polymath, born in 1791 and died in 1871. He is best known for designing mechanical computing machines decades before the technology existed to build them reliably. His first major design was the Difference Engine, intended to calculate and print mathematical tables automatically, eliminating the human errors that plagued tables of the time.
His more ambitious design was the Analytical Engine, a general purpose mechanical computer. Unlike the Difference Engine, it was meant to be programmable, taking instructions from punched cards in the manner of the Jacquard loom, and it included the essential parts of a modern computer: a unit to perform arithmetic, which Babbage called the mill, and a separate store for holding numbers. It was never completed in his lifetime, but its architecture anticipated the stored program computers that arrived a century later.
Babbage described his life and work, including his calculating engines and his many other interests, in his autobiography “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher,” published in 1864. His ideas reached a wider audience partly through Ada Lovelace, whose 1843 Notes on the Analytical Engine explained its workings and its potential. Babbage stands at the head of the line of computing pioneers, and later thinkers such as Vannevar Bush invoked his engines as early proof that machines could mechanize thought. The primary source used here is the Internet Archive scan of his 1864 autobiography.