Babbage, Charles (băb'ij) [key], 1792–1871, English mathematician and inventor. He devoted most of his life and expended much of his private fortune and a government subsidy in an attempt to perfect a mechanical calculating machine that foreshadowed present-day machines. He was a founder of the Royal Astronomical Society. He wrote Tables of Logarithms (1827) and an autobiography (1864).
See biographies by M. Moseley (1970) and D. Halacy (1970).
