What would you do with a spare $640,000? John Graham-Cunning would build a steam-powered computer invented in the 1830s. And instead of waiting around for this mysterious spare money to show up, he's ...

In 1822 the English Mathematician Charles Babbage had an idea for a machine that would perform mathematical calculations rapidly and infallibly. This was long before the age of electrical circuitry, ...

In an alternate reality Charles Babbage’s difference engine and Ada Lovelace’s computer programming led us into a world filled with brass-keyed laptops with phonograph speaker systems. Several artists ...

Novelists William Gibson and Bruce Sterling invented the genre of “steampunk” with their 1990 collaborative novel, “The Difference Engine.” The novel featured as a main character Charles Babbage, ...

In real life, Charles Babbage was a relatively unknown inventor who pioneered early computers. In modern alternate reality fiction, Babbage is a mad genius and steampunk icon. Here are some authors ...