Editing Charles Babbage (section)

===Background on mathematical tables===
In Babbage's time, printed [[mathematical table]]s were calculated by [[human computer]]s; in other words, by hand. They were central to navigation, science and engineering, as well as mathematics. Mistakes were known to occur in transcription as well as calculation.<ref name="Th35"/>

At Cambridge, Babbage saw the fallibility of this process, and the opportunity of adding mechanisation into its management. His own account of his path towards mechanical computation references a particular occasion: {{blockquote|In 1812 he was sitting in his rooms in the Analytical Society looking at a table of logarithms, which he knew to be full of mistakes, when the idea occurred to him of computing all tabular functions by machinery. The French government had produced several tables by a new method. Three or four of their mathematicians decided how to compute the tables, half a dozen more broke down the operations into simple stages, and the work itself, which was restricted to addition and subtraction, was done by eighty computers who knew only these two arithmetical processes. Here, for the first time, mass production was applied to arithmetic, and Babbage was seized by the idea that the labours of the unskilled computers [people] could be taken over completely by machinery which would be quicker and more reliable.<ref>[[B. V. Bowden]], ''Faster than Thought'', Pitman (1953), p. 8.</ref>}}

There was another period, seven years later, when his interest was aroused by the issues around computation of mathematical tables. The French official initiative by [[Gaspard de Prony]], and its problems of implementation, were familiar to him. After the [[Napoleonic Wars]] came to a close, scientific contacts were renewed on the level of personal contact: in 1819 [[Charles Blagden]] was in Paris looking into the printing of the stalled de Prony project, and lobbying for the support of the Royal Society. In works of the 1820s and 1830s, Babbage referred in detail to de Prony's project.<ref>{{cite book|author=Martin Campbell-Kelly|title=The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=O170gWPZ7M8C&pg=PA110|year=2003|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-850841-0|page=110}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|author=Charles Coulston Gillispie|title=Science and Polity in France: The End of the Old Regime|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EPgIpRIvaSAC&pg=PA485|year=2009|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-1-4008-2461-8|page=485}}</ref>