The invention of the computer is credited primarily to Charles Babbage, an English mathematician and inventor. He conceived the first automatic digital computer in the early 19th century. Babbage designed the Difference Engine starting in 1822, a mechanical device intended to compute polynomial functions, and later the more advanced Analytical Engine around 1834, which was programmable and had many features of a modern computer such as an arithmetic logic unit, control flow with loops and conditionals, and integrated memory. Although Babbage never completed building these machines due to technical, financial, and political difficulties, his designs laid the conceptual groundwork for modern computers
. Babbage is often called the "father of the computer" because his Analytical Engine was the first design for a general-purpose programmable computer, using punched cards inspired by the Jacquard loom for input and output. His ideas were about a century ahead of their time, and the full machines were never built during his lifetime. However, a working Difference Engine was constructed in 1991 based on his original plans, proving the feasibility of his design
. Later developments in the 20th century led to the first electronic computers, such as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer in the early 1940s, but the conceptual origin of the computer is attributed to Charles Babbage
