difference engine

The London Science Museum's difference engine, the first one built from Babbage's design. It has the same precision on all columns, except in calculating polynomials, the precision on the higher-order columns could be lower.

A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. It was designed in the 1820s, and was created by Charles Babbage. The name difference engine is derived from the method of finite differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial co-efficients. Some of the most common mathematical functions used in engineering, science and navigation are built from logarithmic and trigonometric functions, which can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful tables.