Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

Charles Babbage, the mathematician who designed the first programmable computing machines, wrote this memoir in 1864, near the end of his life. He tells how his Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine came to be designed, describes his experiments, travels and famous friends, and wages a long, comic war against the street musicians who disturbed his work.

The book is a lively, eccentric self-portrait of a Victorian inventor a century ahead of his time. Babbage's engines were never completed in his lifetime, but their design anticipated the modern computer. For his ideas on industry, read On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) was a Cambridge mathematician, Lucasian professor like Newton before him, who grew frustrated with the errors in printed mathematical tables and set out to build a machine to calculate them. His Difference Engine, and then his more ambitious Analytical Engine, programmed with punched cards, anticipated the computer by a century.

Neither was finished in his lifetime, but Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, wrote notes on the Analytical Engine that included the first published computer program. He also wrote on industry in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures and told his own story in Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.