Babbage Gears

Gears part of the Difference Engine 2 on display in Mountain View's Computer History Museum.

Designed by Charles Babbage between 1847 and 1849, but never built, the machine would have worked almost perfectly as designed and calculated and prepared for printing books of mathematical tables entirely though the use of clockwork.

Long considered to have been impractical or impossible to build using techniques of the day the machine has been proven to work with only minor changes. Two Difference Engine No. 2 machines have been built by the London Science Museum.

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