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Secondary sourceArtifact1859

Scheutz Difference Engine

1859

An 1859 mechanical calculating machine built on Charles Babbage's designs, now in the Science Museum, London.

Shows a mechanical calculating machine built on Babbage's designs, the world of computing Ada Lovelace helped theorize.

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Brass and iron Scheutz difference engine in a glass case at the Science Museum, London. Rows of gears, columns and brass mechanisms are visible, with a crank and gear train at the left end and a printed label on the case base.
Scheutz Difference Engine, 1859. Science Museum, London. Photograph by Daderot.

About this source

What it is

This photograph shows the Scheutz difference engine, built in 1859 and now displayed in the Science Museum, London. It is a brass and iron mechanical calculator made from designs originally developed by Charles Babbage.

Why it matters

Ada Lovelace worked closely with Babbage, translating and expanding on descriptions of his Analytical Engine with her own notes on how such machines could be programmed. This later machine, built on similar principles, helps show the kind of mechanical computing world Lovelace and Babbage imagined and worked within.

Look closer

  • What do the gears, columns and crank suggest about how this machine performed calculations without electricity?
  • Why might museums display machines like this to explain the history of computing?
  • What does this object leave out about Ada Lovelace's own specific contribution?

This artifact is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Ada Lovelace on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Scanned page titled 'Diagram for the computation by the Engine of the Numbers of Bernoulli. See Note G (page 722 et seq.)'. It is a dense table with columns for operation number, nature of operation, variables acted upon and receiving results, data and working variables, and results, filled with rows of symbols, formulas and numbers.Document

Primary source

Note G

Ada Lovelace · 1843

Title page of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a romaunt, by Lord Byron. Black-letter heading, an epigraph in French attributed to Le Cosmopolite, and imprint: London, printed for John Murray, 32 Fleet-Street; William Blackwood, Edinburgh; and John Cumming, Dublin, 1812. Aged cream paper.Book

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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Lord Byron · 1812

Watercolour portrait of a young woman with dark hair in side ringlets and a headdress of dark flowers and a yellow blossom. She wears a black lace shawl over a lilac dress with a gold fan and white gloves, against a grey-brown background.Painting

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Watercolour Portrait of Ada Lovelace

Alfred Edward Chalon · c. 1840

Full-length oil portrait of a young woman in a white satin gown with puffed sleeves and a red velvet fur-trimmed cloak, wearing a jeweled tiara in her dark hair. She stands by a carved wooden staircase and column, looking to the right.Painting

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Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter

Margaret Sarah Carpenter · 1836

Document

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Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage

Luigi Federico Menabrea · 1842

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