The first modern "computer" was designed, but never built, by the early 19th-century English inventor Charles Babbage in close collaboration with Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace. Historians typically blame Babbage's failure to finish the machine - the Analytical Engine, he called it - on Victorian technology's inability to engineer the mechanical parts.
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But now, scientists at London's Science Museum are using Babbage's blueprints to build a real Analytical Engine, New Scientist says. It just might work, and if so it could shed new light on an old scholarly dispute: Do new technologies emerge at their own speed - or only when society is ready to use them? Is necessity, not mere curiosity, the true mother of invention?