Charles Babbage Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Considered by some to be a "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's analytical engine. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century. Parts of Babbage's incomplete
Automatic Digital Computer M-1 trophies from Germany, the machine had the lowest lamp count of contemporary designs, at 730. The memory was based on an original invention of an electrostatic memory using the ordinary oscilloscope cathod ray tube. Each tube was capable of holding 32 words, 25 bit each. The computer had 8 such tubes for a total fast memory of 256 machine words. The computer turned out to work rather reliably and was immediately put to practical use, for numerical calculations in nuclear physics. For a period of about a year this was the first and the only working digital computer in Russia,