Overview - The Babbage Engine | Computer History Museum - 0 views
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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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It was not only the grindingly tedious labor of verifying a sea of figures that exasperated Babbage, but their daunting unreliability. Engineering, astronomy, construction, finance, banking and insurance depended on printed tables for calculation. Ships navigating by the stars relied on printed tables to find their position at sea. The stakes were high. Capital and life were thought to be at risk.