Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871)
- Difference Engine
- Argued for conventions in algebra
- Fought for the banning of street musicians
- Some of his "colleagues" then paid street musicians to play outside Babbage's house!
- He was also the inventor of the cow-catcher that went on the front end of the locomotives of early steam trains.
- Apart from the "Difference Engine" he is most famous for having the cracked the Vigenere Cipher that had lain unbroken for two centuries prior to this but he was second to the Russian Kasiski in doing this. Kasiski had broken it independently some ten years earlier.
- There is a Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota
One of the famous people on this site.