Charles Babbage is credited with inventing the Difference Engine, an early mechanical computer design.
Babbage proposed the Difference Engine in the 1820s to automate the calculation and printing of mathematical tables. The machine was designed to use repeated addition, a method suited to calculating polynomial functions without needing multiplication or division. A full version was never completed during his lifetime because of engineering difficulties, cost, and disputes with the project’s chief engineer.
Babbage later designed the more ambitious Analytical Engine, which included concepts resembling a programmable computer: a store for numbers, a mill for processing, punched-card instructions, and conditional operations. It too was not completed as a working machine in the nineteenth century.
Ada Lovelace wrote extensive notes about the Analytical Engine and described a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers. Her work is often regarded as an early example of computer programming, while Babbage is remembered for the machine designs and mechanical computing concepts.