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difference engine

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difference engine

Mechanical calculating machine designed (and partly built in 1822) by the English mathematician Charles Babbage to produce reliable tables of life expectancy. A precursor of the analytical engine, it was to calculate mathematical functions by solving the differences between values given to variables within equations. Babbage designed the calculator so that once the initial values for the variables were set it would produce the next few thousand values without error.



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? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
When 19th-century mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage worked on his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, he probably didn't envisage his work as a precursor of 21st-century computer systems that would transform how families, businesses, and governments work.
Undignified science: well-intentioned research often takes unseemly ... by Bower, Bruce / Science News
But when he attributes the idea for something like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a mechanical ancestor of the modern computer, to the Turk's influence on young Babbage's mind, it smacks of ill-considered authorial postulate rather than credible research.
The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess ... by Peters, Justin / Washington Monthly
Composed with references to all sorts of machines (Charles Babbage's difference engine, for one), it operates via a system of slide valves that open and close, transferring steam to an arrangement of eighty-six brass 1935 Buick car horns, each tuned to a different note.
CITY LIGHT by SIEGEL, KATY / Artforum International
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