In 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete and working specimen of Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, a design that incorporated refinements Babbage discovered during the development of the Analytical Engine.

Babbage went on to design his much more general analytical engine, but later produced an improved " Difference Engine No. 2 " design, between 1847 and 1849.

In 1833, Charles Babbage moved on from developing his difference engine ( for navigational calculations ) to a general purpose design, the Analytical Engine, which drew directly on Jacquard's punched cards for its program storage.

With a few trivial changes, it works exactly as Babbage designed it and shows that Babbage's design ideas were correct, merely too far ahead of his time.

* Charles Babbage begins the conceptual design of an " analytical engine ", a mechanical forerunner of the modern computer.

* Neil R. Lincoln with 18 Control Data Corporation ( CDC ) engineers on computer architecture and design, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

* Charles Babbage begins the conceptual design of an " analytical engine ", a mechanical forerunner of the modern computer.

* Neil R. Lincoln with 18 Control Data Corporation ( CDC ) engineers on computer architecture and design, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

* Neil R. Lincoln with 18 Control Data Corporation ( CDC ) engineers on computer architecture and design, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

* Neil R. Lincoln with 18 Control Data Corporation ( CDC ) engineers on computer architecture and design, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

The recognised excellence of Clement's machine tools and his skill in precision engineering led to him being employed by Charles Babbage in 1823 to work on his project to design and build his mechanical calculating device, the difference engine.

However after the obituary appeared, a nephew wrote to say that Charles Babbage was born one year earlier, in 1791.

As a student, Babbage was also a member of other societies such as the Ghost Club, concerned with investigating supernatural phenomena, and the Extractors Club, dedicated to liberating its members from the madhouse, should any be committed to one.

Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits ; it inspired him in using perforated cards in his analytical engine.

For example, in the 19th century, Charles Babbage described the importance of having " a few simply honest men " on a committee who could be temporarily eliminated when " a peculiarly delicate question arises " so that one of them could " declare truly, if necessary, that he never was present at any meeting at which even a questionable course had been proposed.

The first dynamometer car was probably one built in about 1838 by the " Father of Computing " Charles Babbage.

To supervise his collections Darwin had to return to London, and on Lyell's advice he planned to arrive on Friday 3 March 1837, in time for one of Charles Babbage's Saturday parties, talking shops about the latest developments " brilliantly attended by fashionable ladies, as well as literary and scientific gents " and " a good mixture of pretty women ", bankers and politicians, where Babbage promoted such projects as his mechanical computer.

The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage.

Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding.

Construction of this machine was never completed ; Babbage had conflicts with his chief engineer, Joseph Clement, and ultimately the British government withdrew its funding for the project.

In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, whom Babbage had met while travelling in Italy, wrote a description of the engine in French.

Late in his life, Babbage sought ways to build a simplified version of the machine, and assembled a small part of it before his death in 1871.

In 1910, Babbage's son Henry Prevost Babbage reported that a part of the mill and the printing apparatus had been constructed and had been used to calculate a ( faulty ) list of multiples of pi.

This machine was built using materials and engineering tolerances that would have been available to Babbage, quelling the suggestion that Babbage's designs could not have been produced using the manufacturing technology of his time.

Babbage understood that the existence of an automatic computer would kindle interest in the field now known as algorithmic efficiency, writing in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, " As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science.

Despite this, Babbage's work fell into historical obscurity and the Analytical Engine was unknown to builders of electro-mechanical and electronic computing machines in the 1930s and 1940s when they began their work, resulting in the need to re-invent many of the architectural innovations Babbage had proposed.

* In the Michael Flynn novel In the Country of the Blind, a secret society calling itself the Babbage Society secretly financed the building of Babbage Engines in the mid-19th century.

In the novel, the Society uses the Babbage engines along with a statistical science called Cliology to predict and manipulate future history.

* A similar setting is used by Sydney Padua in the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

It features a pocket universe where Ada Lovelace and Babbage have built the Analytical Engine and use it to fight crime at Queen Victoria's request.

The comic is based on thorough research on the biographies and correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace, which is then twisted for humorous effect.

* Georgia on My Mind is a novelette by Charles Sheffield which involves two major themes: being widowed and the quest for a legendary Babbage computer.

* The Orion's Arm online project features the Machina Babbagenseii, fully sentient Babbage inspired mechanical computers.

Ada Lovelace reported in her notes on the Analytical Engine: " Mr. Babbage believes he can, by his engine, form the product of two numbers, each containing twenty figures, in three minutes ".

* Honeywell v. Sperry Rand Records, 1846-1973, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

The encoding of data by discrete bits was used in the punched cards invented by Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon ( 1732 ), developed by Joseph Marie Jacquard ( 1804 ), and later adopted by Semen Korsakov, Charles Babbage, Hermann Hollerith, and early computer manufacturers like IBM.

* Burroughs Corporation Records Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

* Burroughs Corporation Photo Database at the Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota.

However, the possibility of actually constructing a conscious machine was probably first discussed by Ada Lovelace, in a set of notes written in 1842 about the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, a precursor ( never built ) to modern electronic computers.

The document was circulated, and Charles Babbage incorporated extracts in his ninth and unofficial Bridgewater Treatise, which postulated laws set up by a divine programmer.

The Code Book covers a diverse set of historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma Machine, and the decipherment of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.

In 1812 Babbage set up The Analytical Society for the translation of Differential and Integral Calculus and the book was translated into English in 1816 by George Peacock.