![]() The sector gears on the left show the double-high teeth very clearly. HistoryĬloseup of the London Science Museum’s difference engine showing some of the number wheels and the sector gears between columns. ![]() The historical difficulty in producing error-free tables by teams of mathematicians and human “computers” spurred Charles Babbage’s desire to build a mechanism to automate the process. Most mathematical functions commonly used by engineers, scientists and navigators, including logarithmic and trigonometric functions, can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful tables of numbers. The name derives from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial coefficients. ![]() The design has the same precision on all columns, but when calculating polynomials, the precision on the higher-order columns could be lower.Ī difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. The London Science Museum’s difference engine, the first one actually built from Babbage’s design.
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