Calculator

The great English mathematician Charles Babbage tried to build a machine which would calculate mathematical tables to 26 significant figures; he called it the Difference Engine. However, in the early 1820s his plans were stalled when the British government pulled its funding. His second attempt, in the 1830s, failed because some of the tools he needed had yet to be invented. Despite this, Babbage did complete part of this second machine, called the Analytical Engine, in the early 1840s. It is considered to be the first modern calculating machine. The difference between the Difference and Analytical Engines is that the first only performed a certain number of functions, which were built into the machine, while the second could be programmed to solve almost any algebraic equation.

By 1840 the first difference engine was finally built by the Swedish father and son team of George and Edvard Scheutz. They based their machine on Babbage's 1834 publication about his experiments. The Scheutz's three machines produced the first automatically created calculation tables. In one 80 hour experiment, the Scheutz's machine produced the logarithms of 1 to 10,000; this included time to reset the machine for the 20 polynomials needed to do the calculations.