• The Babbage Difference Engine
• Links to other information
• Bibliography

Recommended: The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade (2001).

The Babbage Difference Engine No. 1

The Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage (1792-1871)
in the Science Museum, London.

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Early programming!

Jane and Jonathan Bowen using the Babbage Difference Engine
in the Computing Then and Now gallery
Science Museum, London.

• Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota. See brief biography of Charles Babbage.

• Charles Babbage brief biography by J.A.N. Lee.

• Charles Babbage entry in the SJSU Virtual Museum, San Jose State University, California, on the history of science, mathematics and technology, feauturing individual scientists and mathematicians.

• Babbage and Lovelace entries in Biography.com.

• Augusta Ada Lovelace.

• Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers books by Betty Alexandra Toole. See brief biography including a timeline.

• Charles Babbage was a member of the Royal Society, London.

• 1822, 1833, 1842, 1847-49 in Events in the History of Computing from the IEEE Computer Society. Includes a photograph of Doron Swade with the reproduction Difference Engine No. 2 in the Science Museum, London.

• The Analytical Engine: The First Computer.

1. C. Babbage (M. Campbell-Kelly, ed.), Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Gregg International, 1969.
2. J.P. Bowen, A Brief History of Algebra and Computing: An Eclectic Oxonian View, IMA Bulletin, pp 6-9, January/February 1995. Longer version in OUCL Technical Report PRG-TR-9-94, July 1994.
3. A. Bromley et al., Special issue on Charles Babbage, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 22, No. 4, October-December 2000.
4. R.A. Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer, Oxford University Press, 1982.
5. R.A. Hyman (ed.), Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage Cambridge University Press, 1989.
6. M. Campbell-Kelly, I.B. Cohen, M. Berg, A.G. Bromley and J.M. Dubbey (eds.), The Works of Charles Babbage, Pickering & Chatto, 1989.
7. J. Palfreman and D. Swade, The Dream Machine, BBC Books, London, 1991.
8. D. Swade, Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, Science Museum, London, 1991.
9. D. Swade, Redeeming Charles Babbage's Mechanical Computer, Scientific American, p 62, February 1993.
10. D. Swade, The Cogwheel Brain, Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
    Also in paperback, Abacus, 2001.
11. N. Champion, Groundbreakers: Charles Babbage, Heinemann Library, 2000.
    Also in paperback, Heinemann Library, 2001.
12. D. Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, Viking Books, 2001.

See also Babbage exhiblet including references from the Science Museum.

Allan Bromley, who researched Charles Babbage's drawings of the Difference Engine extensively in the Science Museum archive, died in August 2002. This work led to the building of the Difference Engine No. 2, now on display in the Science Museum Computing Gallery in London. See some photographs of a demonstration in September 2002.

Search for Charles Babbage web pages and see Google Web Directory.