Charles Babbage is something of a hero to me. He is credited to be the first person ever to design a computer but having lived between 1791 and 1871 it was designed as a mechanical device not an electrical one. In fact, he designed three computation engines, one was called the Difference Engine, the Difference Engine 2 and the other, the much more fiendishly complex Analytical Engine.

Only the first Difference Engine was ever built during his life time and then only partially. Even so it had something like 25,000 parts weighed fifteen tons a stood 8ft high and performed the functions of one of today’s cheap pocket calculators.

Interestingly, the London Science Museum did build two Babbage Engines using Babbage’s Difference Engine 2 designs and they work exactly according to his predications which isn’t bad when you think all of Babbage’s work was on paper.

The Analytical Engine would have been something to behold if the design had ever been completed. As it stands the design describes a series of machines that perform various types of computations such as sequential control, branching and looping and would have been, in fact, the first complete (if mechanical) Turing device. All of the mechanics would have been steam powered which leads me to wonder whether, if the engine was ever built, the power of the processing unit would have been measured in Watts after James Watt the steam engine engineer!

The Analytical Engine could be programmed using punch cards much like a Jacquard loom and in one of those odd historical quirks a program does exist for the Analytical Engine as the Mathematician Ada Lovelace created it to compute the Bernoulli Number Sequence which must make her the first ever Computer Programmer though it was not a career to earn one much money back in the early 1800s.

So Babbage was the first computer designer and maker but his influence didn’t end there. Mechanical Engines may be considered a historical oddity now we have computation engines made from pumping electricity through wafers of silicon but nanotechnology research is once again looking at mechanical solutions with a team at Boston University creating a mechanical logic gate that is all of 300 nanometres wide.

For more details Google “mohanty logic gate”