The calculating engine

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.