Computer

Before Babbage, computers were humans. This was the name given to people who specialised in making numerical calculations —those who spent long hours performing arithmetic operations, repeating the processes over and over again and leaving the results of their calculations written in tables, which were compiled in valuable books. These tables made life much easier for other specialists, whose job it was to use these results to perform all sorts of tasks: from the artillery officers who decided how to aim the cannons, to the tax collectors who calculated taxes, to the scientists who predicted the tides or the movement of the stars in the heavens.

Thus, at the end of the 17th century, Napoleon commissioned Gaspard de Prony (22 July 1755 – 29 July 1839) with the revolutionary task of producing the most precise logarithmic and trigonometric tables (with between 14 and 29 decimal places) ever made, in order to refine and facilitate the astronomical calculations of the Paris Observatory, and to be able to unify all the measurements made by the French administration. For this colossal task, de Prony had the brilliant idea of dividing the most complex calculations into simpler mathematical operations that could be performed by less qualified human computers. This way of speeding up the work and avoiding errors was one of the things that inspired English polymath Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) to take the next step: replacing human computers with machines.

Babbage is considered by many to be the father of computing because of that vision, which never really came true by his efforts. His first attempt was the Difference Engine, which he began to build in 1822, based on the principle of finite differences, in order to perform complex mathematical calculations by means of a simple series of additions and subtractions, avoiding multiplications and divisions. He even created a small calculator that proved that his method worked, but he was not able to build a differential engine to fill in those coveted logarithmic and trigonometric tables with accurate data. Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace’s mother, claimed to have seen a functional prototype in 1833 —albeit one limited in both complexity and precision— but by that time Babbage had already exhausted the funding provided by the British government.