On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

In 1832, after touring the workshops and factories of England and Europe while working on his calculating engines, Charles Babbage wrote this study of how machines and factories work: how tools add to human strength and save time, how machines can count and record their own work, how the division of labour lowers costs, and how prices, wages and the size of factories are set. He describes how the French engineer Gaspard de Prony divided the calculation of mathematical tables among teams of ordinary workers, an idea that helped inspire Babbage's own engines.

Babbage, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, wrote the book as a practical guide for manufacturers; it became an early work of industrial economics, and Mill and Marx both drew on it. It extends the famous pin factory of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. His lively memoir is Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.

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.