Difference Engine

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Difference Engine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers. J. H. Müller, an engineer in the Hessian army conceived the idea in a book published in 1786, but failed to find funding to progress this further. In 1822, Charles Babbage proposed the use of such a machine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society on 14 June entitled Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.