It weighs over three tons. Contains more than 8,000 precision-engineered parts. And it doesn’t plug in, it clicks, cranks, and thinks in brass. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, conceived in the 1820s and only fully built in the late 20th century, is often called the first automatic computing machine. It didn’t run software, but it could run sequences, calculations, and logic long before silicon chips made that process invisible. It was never finished. But it launched the
