Computer, 4th Edition

3 Babbage's Dream Comes True

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263272-5

IN OCTOBER 1946 the computing pioneer Leslie John Comrie reminded British readers in the science news journal Nature of their government’s failure to support the construction of Babbage’s calculating engine a century earlier:

The black mark earned by the government of the day more than a hundred years ago for its failure to see Charles Babbage’s difference engine brought to a successful conclusion has still to be wiped out. It is not too much to say that it cost Britain the leading place in the art of mechanical computing.¹

The reason for Comrie’s remark was the completion of the first fully automatic computing machine at Harvard University, which he hailed as “Babbage’s Dream Come ...