Charles Babbage

From 1821 Babbage designed a Difference Engine to calculate and print mathematical tables by the method of differences, with Treasury funding and the toolmaker Joseph Clement building the parts. Work stopped in 1833 and the machine was never completed, but a demonstration section assembled in 1832 still works. Between 1847 and 1849 he designed a simpler Difference Engine No. 2.

From 1834 he designed the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose calculating machine controlled by punched cards, with a 'Store' for numbers kept separate from a 'Mill' that did the arithmetic. It was never built. Luigi Menabrea described it in 1842 from Babbage's explanations in Turin, and Ada Lovelace's 1843 English translation added extensive notes of her own.

As a Cambridge student around 1812 he helped found the Analytical Society, which promoted Continental calculus notation. In 1820 he, John Herschel and George Peacock published an English translation of Lacroix's calculus textbook, and he later held the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839.

The 1834 Edinburgh Review reported that Babbage could not keep track of every simultaneous motion in the Difference Engine by memory alone. He devised a 'mechanical notation', described in an 1826 paper, that traced each motion back to its source and charted what every part was doing at each moment. Clashes between parts could then be found on paper before anything was built.

Building a symbolic map of the whole mechanism before cutting metal is consistent with this profile's high systems-thinking score. Systems Thinking

In 1830 Babbage published Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, a book-length public criticism of how the Royal Society was run, including comments on its named officers. George Airy's autobiography, written by a rival, records that around the same time Babbage belonged to a 'reforming party' that pushed changes to the Greenwich Observatory's Board of Visitors.

Challenging the scientific establishment openly and by name offers one example of the high tolerance for conflict recorded in this profile. The Computer History Museum's account suggests the same habit cost him support he later needed. Conflict Tolerance

In 1833 Clement stopped work on the Difference Engine and dismissed the workmen after a dispute over payments and his charges for moving the works. A statement drawn up from Babbage's papers in 1843 and Samuel Smiles's life of Clement tell it from opposite sides. After years of requests for a decision, the government withdrew in November 1842, and Babbage went on designing the Analytical Engine with draftsmen he paid himself.

Carrying on at his own expense after public funding ended sits alongside the persistence scored in this profile. The same period shows that persistence did not bring an engine to completion in his lifetime. Persistence