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3 The computer pioneer Charles
Babbage (1791-1871) in 1860.
studying the postal system, the railways, and especially in his On
the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures , 7 Babbage examined
ways of making manufacturing efficient, economic and rational.
Following the work of Smith he promulgated the economic advan-
tages of the division of labour, as well as the increased use of
machinery in manufacturing. This directly inspired the work for
which he is now most famous, his development of early computing
machines. From
Babbage was
engaged in building, or trying to build, machines, the 'Difference'
and 'Analytical' engines (illus.
1822
right up to his death in
1871
), that are recognizably prototypical
computers. His initial reasons for building the 'Difference Engine'
concerned the efficient production of mathematical tables, used
both at sea and in industrial production. Babbage had come across
the table-making project of Baron Gaspard de Prony in France,
which had employed the division of labour advocated by Smith in
The Wealth of Nations . Prony had divided the work of generating
such tables into a number of small simple tasks distributed among
many human 'computers'. Babbage realized that this technique could
be automated and persuaded the government to fund the Difference
4
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