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Photos: Charles Babbage's masterpiece reincarnated
And takes a trip across the sea

By Daniel Terdiman

Published: Thursday 10 April 2008

Tech millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned London's Science Museum to make him a version of Charles Babbage's famous Difference engine, a machine designed to mechanically calculate polynomial functions. (The Science Museum has the only other full-scale Difference engine in the world; Babbage himself never actually made one).

The commissioned machine was delivered to the Computer History Museum in California, US and is scheduled to be exhibited there for six months starting 1 May.

Here, Tim Robinson (right), who makes specialised computing machinery, shows his version of a Babbage Difference engine to Richard Horton (foreground), the lead engineer on the Myhrvold/Science Museum. Robinson brought his scaled-down model to the Computer History Museum.

Photo credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com