Babbage embarked on an ambitious venture to design and build mechanical
calculating engines to eliminate the risk of human error in the production of
printed tables. The 'unerring certainty of machinery' would solve the problem of
human fallibility. His work on the engines led him from mechanized arithmetic to
the entirely new realm of automatic computation. Tabular errors provided a
practical stimulus. But this was not his only motive. He also saw his engines as
a new technology of mathematics.
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