Charles Babbage, the son of a wealthy English banker, was born in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. As that revolution progressed, he became one of its foremost--and most controversial--spokesmen. Because of his views on what the scientific method could do for industry and commerce (and a few other eccentricities), most of his contemporaries regarded his as a crank. Today, he is remembered as the brilliant mathematician who invented the prototype of the digital computer .

Babbage entered Cambridge University at the age of 19, and it was there that he thought of a computer first crossed his mind. One evening in 1812, as he sat gazing at a table of mathematical data, it occurred to him that a machine could calculate such data faster than humans and without human error. In the increasingly complex world in which he lived, errors in mathematical tables were becoming a matter of real...