Charles Babbage

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Term Paper Title	Charles Babbage
# of Words	680
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	2.72

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage may have spent his life in vain, trying to make a machine
considered by most of his friends to be ridiculous.  150 years ago, Babbage drew
hundreds of drawings projecting the fundamentals on which today's computers are
founded.  But the technology was not there to meet his dreams. He was born on
December 26, 1791, in Totnes, Devonshire, England.  As a child he was always
interested about the mechanics of everything and in the supernatural. He
reportedly once tried to prove the existence of the devil by making a circle in
his own blood on the floor and reciting the Lord's Prayer backward.  In college,
he formed a ghost club dedicated to verifying the existence of the supernatural.
When in Trinity College in Cambridge, Charles carried out childish pranks and
rebelled because of the boredom he felt from knowing more than his instructors.
Despite this, however, he was on his way to understanding the advanced theories
of mathematics and even formed an Analytical Society to present and discuss
original papers on mathematics and to interest people in translating the works
of several foreign mathematicians into English. His studies also led him to a
critical study of logarithmic tables and was constantly reporting errors in them.
During this analysis, it occurred to him that all these tables could be
calculated by machinery. He was convinced that it was possible to construct a
machine that would be able to compute by successive differences and to even
print out the results. (He conceived of this 50 years before type-setting
machines or typewriters were invented.)

In 1814, the age of 23, Charles married 22-year-old Georgina Whitmore. Georgina
would have eight children in thirteen years, of which only three sons would
survive to maturity. Babbage really took no interest in raising his children.
After Georgina died at the age of 35, his mother took over the upbringing.  In
1816, Babbage had his first taste of failure when his application for the
professorship of mathematics at East India College in Haileybury was rejected
due to political reasons, as was his application, three years later, for the
chair of mathematics at the Universit...

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