Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

Part memoir and part scientific reckoning, this late book gathers the recollections of the mathematician who first conceived a programmable computing machine. Babbage recounts his boyhood curiosity, his Cambridge years, his feuds with rivals and with London’s street musicians, and above all his decades of struggle to build the Difference Engine and its more ambitious successor, the Analytical Engine. The tone swings between wry anecdote and open frustration at a country that would not fund his work. Written near the end of his life, it is the fullest personal statement we have from a man whose ideas anticipated the modern computer by roughly a century. Free PDF and EPUB editions are offered here.