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You are sitting at a computer reading these words on a screen. These words were written on a computer in one part of the world and transmitted to another computer thousands of kilometres away where they were stored until you asked your computer to retrieve them. Computers do the job, usually without you really being aware that they are there (unless something goes wrong). How did the computer get invented in the first place? Why was it invented? And who invented it?

The man usually credited with initiating the age of computers is Charles Babbage and there are many good reasons for this. He was the first person to design a machine resembling the modern programmable electronic digital computer. He was the first person to conceive of the idea that a general purpose calculating machine could be built. And her was the first person to realise that the machine could be instructed (programmed) to carry out a variety of tasks. It must be stressed, however, that Charles Babbage can't be regarded as the sole inventor of the computer; many had attempted or imagined schemes to "mechanise computation" before him. But, as his obituary in The Times put it, quoting the Dictionary of Universal Biography:

"The possibility of constructing a piece of mechanism capable of performing operations on numbers is by no means new; it was thought of by Pascal and geometers and more recently by M. Thomas, of Colmar, France, and by Messr. Shultz, of Sweden; but never before or since has any scheme so gigantic as that of Mr. Babbage been anywhere imagined." [TM-OBIT]

So what was this "scheme so gigantic" which Charles Babbage imagined? And how did he come to imagine it?

The story began in 1821 when Babbage - together with John Herschel, the astronomer - were examining some mathematical tables. These tables were important not only to astronomers but also engineers and seamen. Babbage and Herschel were disgusted to find so many errors in the tables; errors which could mean that astronomers couldn't find stars, engineers would design bridges which would fall down and seaman would be unable to calculate their position and end up shipwrecked. The problem was that these tables, the result of complex but repititous arithmetic, were calculated by hand: all the errors were human errors. Babbage is reported to have said at the time: "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam" [SS-CODE; pg. 64]. Remember, this was in the early days of the Industrial Revolution and Britain was finding uses

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