It is an annual I Programmer tradition to celebrate the birth of Charles Babbage, the man who invented and designed a programmable computer at the start of the Industrial Age, and who is now recognized as the Father of the Computer. 

Charles Babbage 
(December 26, 1791- October 18, 1871)

The son of a prosperous banker, Charles Babbage was born in London. Due to ill health he spent part of his childhood in Devon and some of his education was by private tutor. He was already self-taught in math prior to going to Cambridge to study it at age 18 and was not impressed by the standard of mathematical instruction there and received a degree without examination in 1814 although he returned there from 1828 to 1839 to occupy the Lucasian chair of mathematics, the post recently held by Stephen Hawking, 

To characterise Babbage as a mathematician is misleading because his interests were much more wide ranging - a polymath is closer. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816 and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical Society in 1820.

Babbage conceived the idea of his Difference Engine in order to compute the values of polynomial functions without the need for multiplication and division. He built a small demonstration model, Difference Engine 0, in 1822 and on the strength of this was awarded the money to design and build Difference Engine No 1. This he attempted to do with the help of Joseph Clement, a skilled toolmaker and draughtsman, but to be successful he had to push the precision of the metal working of the time to its limits. Babbage was a good mechanical engineer in his own right. He used a lathe, built many test pieces on his own and studied the manufacturing methods then available to see if any could be used to mass produce the accurate parts he needed.

Difference Engine No 1 would have been 8 feet high by 7 long and 3 deep and would have weighed tons. It was never completed due to an argument over compensation to Joseph Clement due for moving his workshop to be near to Babbage stopped the project in 1833. In reality it was probably that ten years was too long to sustain such a project without results and Babbage was already thinking about his next project.

It was in 1833 that Ada Lovelace first met Charles Babbage at a party attended by scientists and other luminaries. Babbage himself was famous for the soirees he held at his home and on June 17 Ada and her mother Annabella Lady Byron went to one at which Babbage gave a demonstration of the Difference Engine. Augustus De Morgan, (of 

The Difference Engine was by no means the pinnacle of Babbage's designs. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution and, inspired by the Jacquard loom that he travelled to Lyons to see in action,  had plans to harness the power of steam for many different devices, the most ambitious of which was the Analytical Engine, now thought of as the greatest machine never built.

Charles Babbage was an amazing visionary and, as Mike James writes in I Programmer's history article:

[his] curse was that he was a man born before the technology needed to make his ideas a reality.

Mike also speculates in What if Babbage..?,  on how contemporary technology might have been different, or at least accelerated, had he managed to complete his ambitious plans in his lifetime.

 Charles Babbage, c. 1850

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