Who Invented the Computer?

Who Invented the Computer? — page 5 — A revolution Industry arrives The Commercial Revolution was followed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by the Industrial Revolution one of the most important periods in human history It began in Britain around 1730 and it was a time when there was a shift from a largely rural economy where everything was made by hand to one with large cities and factories producing goods in huge quantities The Jacquard loom Textile manufacture was one of the principal industries of the Industrial Revolution and this was one of the ﬁrst things to be mechanized In 1804 Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a textile-weaving loom It was one of the most ingenious devices of its time and introduced a technology that was still in use 150 years later including in early computers punched cards Punched cards Like other looms the Jacquard had a series of threads running lengthways the warp threads and a shuttle that carried another thread back and forth the weft thread weaving in and out of these to make the cloth Patterns were created by raising and lowering individual warp threads so that the weft was sometimes in front of the warp thread and sometimes behind it The Industrial Revolution brought a massive increase in manufacturing and trade There was an urgent need for fast easy to use accurate calculating machines to keep track of the goods being produced and the money changing hands Jacquard’s loom used hooks to raise and lower the warp threads These were controlled by a series of cards with rows of holes punched in them Where a hook met

Who Invented the Computer? — page 6 — a hole in a card it could pass through and raise the thread Where there was no hole the hook was stopped and the thread stayed down One row of holes on the card corresponded to a single pass of the shuttle across the warp threads A whole deck of these punched cards could be inserted into a device that automatically dropped cards into place one at a time making it possible to weave very complicated patterns In effect the cards programmed the loom to weave patterns automatically It was the ﬁrst machine ever to be operated in this way The arithmometer With the changes in manufacturing brought about by mechanization and the boom in national and international trade that followed the need for better faster and more reliable calculating devices grew ever stronger This was because merchants had to keep track of so many goods and materials and so much money was changing hands Frenchman Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar invented the ﬁrst commercial calculator in 1820 The arithmometer as it was called used a system of sliders to A Jacquard loom in use in Poland Punched cards carry the instructions that control the way the cloth is woven Patterns are automatically produced using the different colored threads input the numbers and dials to show the answers It could reliably add subtract and multiply and with a bit of effort from the user it could divide too Production began in 1851 and continued with improvements until 1914 when the company went out of business Breakthroughs Inventors had found ways to program machines to carry out complicated tasks without humans being present Calculating machines became widely available commercially and made the task of buying and selling on a vast scale much easier 11

Who Invented the Computer? — page 7 — Babbage and his engines Babbage’s ﬁrst design was for what he called a Difference Engine Unlike the calculators of Schickard and others this wasn’t intended to be used for arithmetic problems but to generate mathematical tables A full-size Difference Engine would have needed 25,000 parts and every one of them had to be made by hand using customized tools It proved to be too great a challenge for the engineers of the time and in 1833 the Difference Engine was abandoned still incomplete The Analytical Engine Babbage next planned a machine that could be programmed to perform any The problem with tables In the days before calculators became commonplace scientists navigators tax collectors engineers and others all relied on mathematical tables such as logarithms to help solve problems The tables set out the results of various mathematical calculations Human computers compiled these tables and they often made mistakes So did the printers who printed them The Difference Engine The English mathematician Charles Babbage was fascinated by mathematical tables and owned a 300-volume collection of them In 1821 he set out to ﬁnd a reliable way of mechanizing the process of producing accurate tables Between 1991 and 2000 staff at the Science Museum in London UK used Charles Babbage’s designs to build a working Difference Engine They were able to do this because modern technology could produce the parts accurately something that was impossible in Babbage’s time 12

Who Invented the Computer? — page 8 — Ada Countess of Lovelace Ada the Countess of Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron Ada is often called the first programmer because she wrote a series of instructions that would have been used to operate the Analytical Engine Babbage referred to her as the Enchantress of Numbers In her notes she was farsighted enough to predict the possibility of computer generated music The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves ﬂowers and leaves Ada Countess of Lovelace 1843 calculation He called this an Analytical Engine It made even more demands of engineers than the Difference Engine Only test models of small sections of it were ever built The designs for the Analytical Engine included features that would become common in modern computers It could be programmed using punched cards similar to those that operated Jacquard’s loom It had a store where numbers and partial results could be held similar to the memory in a computer today A separate part of the engine called the mill was the place where the actual calculations were performed It was like the central processor of a modern computer Had Babbage actually built an Analytical Engine it would have been the world’s ﬁrst computer as we understand it Breakthrough Charles Babbage’s great breakthrough was the idea that a machine could be programmed to carry out calculations 13

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