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Babbage, Charles

Babbage, Charles băbˈĭj [key], 1792–1871, English mathematician and inventor. He devoted most of his life and expended much of his private fortune and a government subsidy in an attempt to perfect a mechanical calculating machine that foreshadowed present-day machines. He was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He wrote Tables of Logarithms (1827) and an autobiography (1864).

See biographies by M. Moseley (1970) and D. Halacy (1970).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2025, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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