If only, he wondered, there was a way to produce such tables faster, with less manpower and fewer mistakes.
In 1819, Babbage visited the City of Light and viewed the unpublished manuscript with page after page of tables. Bonaparte was never able to publish the tables, however, and they sat collecting dust in the Académie des sciences in Paris. For 10 years, scores of human computers made the necessary conversions and completed the tables. Napoleon Bonaparte initiated the project in 1790, when he ordered a switch from the old imperial system of measurements to the new metric system. It was, in fact, a mammoth number-crunching project that inspired Babbage in the first place. The tables then appeared in books, so other people could use them to complete tasks, such as launching artillery shells accurately or calculating taxes.
Before Babbage came along, a "computer" was a person, someone who literally sat around all day, adding and subtracting numbers and entering the results into tables. But the first computer resembling today's modern machines was the Analytical Engine, a device conceived and designed by British mathematician Charles Babbage between 18. We could argue that the first computer was the abacus or its descendant, the slide rule, invented by William Oughtred in 1622. National Library of Wales/Wikimedia Commons Charles Babbage created the concept of a programmable computer.
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