This SciShow video is supported by Shopify, an ecommerce platform that helps you  start, grow, and manage your business.

Head to shopify.com/scishow to learn  more and for a 14-day free trial. [♪ INTRO] In the 1940s, during World War II,  British and American scientists invented revolutionary new machines that could calculate artillery ranges and decrypt coded messages. These were the world’s first computers, and they paved the way for our modern  computers and the internet age.

But if history had gone differently, the  first general-purpose computer could have been built a century earlier,  all the way back in the 1800s. Back then, scientific information was  often stored in large reference tables, which had lots of important purposes. For instance, they held data about the  positions of the stars and planets, which sailors used to navigate at sea.

Unfortunately, making these tables  was tedious and prone to errors because it relied on people literally  just working out equations by hand. So in 1821, the young British  scientist Charles Babbage thought, there had to be a better way. He started thinking about how a  machine might take over the tedious job of calculations, and in 1823 he received  a government grant to give it a try.

He set out to design a machine that could  calculate these tables automatically, churning out data on things like the  position of the Sun every day of the year. Almost a decade later, he  had a finished prototype. It was stupendously/ complex.

The machine had over 20 thousand parts and was based on gears and cogs  that had to be cranked by hand. He called his invention the  Difference Engine, because it used a mathematical method called finite  differences to calculate the numbers. And it worked remarkably well,  although not quite at the scale Babbage had originally imagined.

In fact, it still works. It now lives in the Science Museum in London. But Babbage never finished  the full Difference Engine because he got sidetracked by  a much more ambitious idea.

During the years that he worked  on the Engine, he realized that by modifying the design, he could  create a machine hugely more powerful. He called this new idea the Analytical Engine, and it was essentially a  steam-powered, Victorian computer. It involved one critical upgrade  from the Difference Engine, which could only do basic arithmetic.

It would do those same  calculations, then take the outputs and feed them into new calculations. Babbage called this “eating its own tail.” This feature would have let the  Analytical Engine do any computation, making it a general-purpose computer,  just like our modern computers. And Babbage is thought to be the first  person to ever come up with this concept.

The Engine would have worked off of  mechanical wheels and steam power. It had four parts: There was a reader to  accept inputs in the form of punch cards, a printer to write the results,  and two parts that were essentially like a CPU and a hard drive. The problem was, by this point, Babbage had strayed from his interest in making tables.

Now he was more interested in  machines kind of for their own sake. So when he asked the British  government for more money to build the Analytical  Engine in 1834, they said no. He self-funded work on the  Engines for the rest of his life, but never finished designing or  making the Analytical Engine.

In fact, the entire concept might have  just vanished into the void of history if it hadn’t been for another  brilliant mind from the same era. In 1842, Babbage needed a French  article about the Analytical Engine translated into English, so he asked  for help from an old acquaintance: the Countess Ada Lovelace. Ada was a talented mathematician,  and by 1842 she had been following Babbage’s work for a decade.

More than anyone, she understood the  incredible potential of the Engine. So when she wrote the translation,  she appended a bunch of extra notes. Notes that ended up being three times  the length of the original article.

Those notes are now famous because they contained a list of instructions  you could put on punch cards to make the Engine compute a  tricky mathematical formula. In a sense, this was the  first ever “computer program.” Today, we know that the Analytical Engine  was an incredible concept for its time, with impressive similarities to the  computers that would arise in the future. It would have been able to do any  computation that a modern computer can do.

Just… a lot slower. It also would have accepted  its programming as punch cards, which is actually how the first  electronic computers worked, too. Sadly, Babbage and Lovelace’s work  went unappreciated in their lifetimes.

But in the 1930s, the Harvard  engineer Howard Aiken stumbled across one of Babbage’s prototypes…  in the attic of his own department! And that inspired him to finish  what Babbage had started. Aiken’s machine, the Harvard Mark I,  was the first fully automatic computer, but it wasn’t fully electronic  and only barely programmable.

Like, it could only store 72  numbers at a time in its memory, and it could only solve three addition  or subtraction problems each second. It wasn’t until the 1940s, when  British and American scientists started developing technology for  the war, that the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose  computers were invented. In the years since, Babbage and  Lovelace’s ideas have been rediscovered.

In 1991, the Science Museum in  London built Babbage’s full, final design for the Difference  Engine, and it worked! So now, many recognize Babbage  as the “father of the computer,” and Lovelace as the “first programmer.” It’s a little hard to envision  a world where they succeeded. A world with a hundred extra  years of computer research.

And a version of the 1800s  with steampunk computers! It’s one of the big “what-ifs” of science history. But the story of Babbage and Lovelace shows how the history of science is messy and bumpy.

Sometimes great ideas get lost  or happen before their time. But also: People everywhere are  always coming up with brilliant, creative solutions to the problems at hand, and that keeps driving science forward  even as some ideas fall through the cracks. One of today’s creative solutions to help  your online business grow is Shopify.

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Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow and thanks to Shopify for supporting it! [♪ OUTRO]