The man who invented the computer – an invention that amazed everyone.

Not because he was badly behaved, though he could be, but because he asked questions that nobody wanted to answer and then went and found the answers himself. As a boy, he would take apart every toy he was given to see how it worked. His mother, reportedly at her wit’s end, would find him in the kitchen at odd hours having disassembled clocks, music boxes, mechanical dolls.

 He wasn’t being destructive. He was being Babbage. Understanding a thing meant taking it apart. This instinct, the compulsion to look behind the curtain at the mechanism, would define his entire life. By the time he arrived at Cambridge University in 1810, he had already taught himself advanced mathematics from books that most undergraduates hadn’t heard of.

  And Cambridge, which was supposed to be the greatest intellectual institution in England, immediately disappointed him. The mathematics being taught there was decades out of date. The rest of Europe, particularly France, had moved on to far more powerful techniques, but Cambridge was still clinging to old methods out of loyalty to tradition and perhaps more than a little national pride.

  But Babbage did not handle this well. He co-founded the Analytical Society specifically to drag British mathematics into the modern age. He was 19 years old. The faculty was not pleased. But Babbage was never particularly interested in being liked. He was interested in being right. The precise origin story of the Difference Engine is one of those moments that feels almost too neat to be true, but it is well documented.

  Around 1821, Babbage was sitting with his friend and fellow mathematician John Herschel going through a set of mathematical tables, the kind used by astronomers, engineers, navigators, and anyone else who needed to make precise calculations. But these tables were produced by human computers, people who sat and calculated figures by hand, and they were absolutely riddled with errors.

 Errors that, if you were navigating a ship in the dark, could kill you. Babbage looked at the tables, looked at the errors, and said, according to his own account, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” It was a throwaway line, but it wasn’t because Babbage never threw anything away.

  But that thought lodged itself in his mind and began to grow. What if you could build a machine that did mathematics? Not approximately, not roughly, but perfectly every single time by mechanical necessity. A machine that could not make errors because errors required a human element, and the machine would have no human element. This was the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator of extraordinary ambition, designed to compute and automatically print mathematical tables accurate to 20 decimal places.

  In 1823, the British government agreed to fund it. They gave Babbage 1,700 pounds to get started. It was the first government grant for a computing project in history. Nobody quite knew what they had just paid for. What followed was one of the great tragedies and scandals of 19th century science.

  Babbage threw himself into the difference engine with total consuming obsession. He hired a master engineer named Joseph Clement to do the precision tool making and Clement was genuinely brilliant. The parts they were producing were machine to tolerances that had never been achieved before. This wasn’t just a computing project.

  It was advancing the entire field of precision engineering. New tools had to be invented just to make the tools that would make the engine and the costs climbed and climbed and climbed and climbed. Over the following decade, the government poured what would eventually total around 17,000 pounds into the project.

  A staggering sum, roughly equivalent to building two Royal Navy warships and they had nothing to show for it. No working engine, just drawings, components and the increasingly erratic reports of a genius who kept changing his mind because here is what happened. While Babbage was building the difference engine, he had a better idea.

 He always had a better idea. Around 1833, he conceived of something he called the analytical engine. A machine not just for computing specific types of equations but a general purpose programmable mechanical computer. It would have a memory, he called it the store. It would have a processor, he called it the mill.

  It would accept instructions on punched cards. It was in every conceptual sense a modern computer designed in the 1830s. Babbage abandoned the difference engine to work on the analytical engine. The government, which had been growing increasingly frustrated, finally lost patience entirely. In 1842, the Prime Minister Robert Peel, himself no stranger to difficult personalities, effectively pulled the plug on all funding.

 The Difference Engine was canceled. The Analytical Engine received no support whatsoever. Babbage was furious. He remained furious for the rest of his life. It was during this period the frenzied brilliant doomed years of the Analytical Engine that Babbage met someone who understood what he was building, possibly better than he did himself.

  Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of Lord Byron, the poet, and she’d inherited her father’s romantic intensity and her mother’s rigorous mathematical discipline. She was introduced to Babbage at a dinner party in 1833, when she was 17 and he was demonstrating a small prototype of the Difference Engine. While other guests admired the machine as a curiosity, Ada saw something else entirely.

  She saw the idea inside the machine. Their collaboration became legendary. In 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an article about the Analytical Engine written by an Italian mathematician, and Babbage encouraged her to add her own notes. Those notes ended up being nearly three times longer than the original article. They contain what many historians consider the first algorithm ever designed to be carried out by a machine, a method for computing Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine.

  Ada Lovelace is now widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Babbage called her the enchantress of numbers. He clearly adored her, and she him. But even this relationship was not without its tensions. There’s a persistent scholarly debate about how much of the conceptual work was truly Ada’s versus Babbage’s.

  Some historians argue that Babbage guided the most technically sophisticated sections heavily. Others defend Ada’s independent genius fiercely. Babbage himself, late in life, made remarks that some interpreted as attempts to diminish her contribution. The truth is probably complicated as it always is when two exceptional minds work closely together under pressure.

  Ada died in 1852 at just 36 years old from cancer. Babbage outlived her by nearly two decades. He never really finished grieving. If the engine was Babbage’s great tragedy, his various feuds were his great entertainment. The man was constitutionally incapable of ignoring an injustice, a foolishness, or an inefficiency, and he found all three everywhere he looked.

 His war against street musicians is perhaps the most famous. In his later years, living in Marylebone, Babbage became consumed with rage at the organ grinders and street bands that played outside his window. He believed with complete sincerity that they were destroying a quarter of his working capacity. He lobbied Parliament.

  He had individuals arrested. He tracked statistics. He wrote furiously about it. The street musicians in turn took to gathering specifically outside his house to annoy him, which, if you think about it, is a completely understandable response to being harassed by a grumpy genius. He fought with the British railway system about the optimal gauge for tracks.

  He fought with the Royal Academy of Sciences about the decline of scientific culture in Britain, publishing a vicious and widely read pamphlet in 1830 titled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, in which he named names, assigned blame, and generally made himself persona non grata among the scientific establishment for years.

  He ran for Parliament twice and lost both times, which surprised no one who had ever spent an afternoon with him. He proposed a black box for railway carriages, a device that would record speed and other data in the event of a crash, more than a century before the flight recorder became standard in aviation.

  He proposed a standardized system for clearing checks through banks. He mapped the Admiralty’s tidal data. He invented the ophthalmoscope, though he failed to develop it and the credit went to someone else. He designed a cow catcher for the front of locomotives. He wrote a book on code breaking. He wrote a book on the economics of manufacturing.

  He wrote about everything, thought about everything, wrote about everything, and was right about most of it. Babbage spent the last decades of his life trying to secure support for the analytical engine and receiving almost none. He watched as the industrial world he had helped to theorize roared forward without him.

  He grew old in a house full of drawings and components and bitterness. He died on the 18th of October, 1871, at 79 years old. His obituary in The Times was, to put it generously, unenthusiastic. The machine was never built in his lifetime. But here is what matters. In 1991, the Science Museum in London built the Difference Engine number two, one of Babbage’s later designs, using only the tools and materials that would have been available to him in the 19th century.

 It worked. It worked perfectly. Every calculation it performed was correct, which means that the only thing that stopped Babbage from completing his engine was money, politics, and the fundamental human tendency to distrust people who are so far ahead of their time that they seem simply unhinged. He was not unhinged. He was right.

  He was just right in 1833 in a world that wouldn’t be ready for his ideas until 1943 when the first fully electronic computer was built and even then it was built on principles that Babbage had laid down more than a century earlier. The store and the mill, the memory and the processor, input and output, programming through sequential instruction, all of it, Babbage.

 He was infuriating, combative, obsessive, and almost certainly exhausting to know. He picked fights he couldn’t win, abandoned projects before they were finished, and spent decades raging at a world that wouldn’t listen. But the world was wrong. And he was right. And every time you open your laptop, or unlock your phone, or watch a video on the internet, you are, in a very real sense, operating the engine that Charles Babbage never got to build.