Babbage, Charles, 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).
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