A closer look
An Irish accountant completely missed the memo about Charles Babbage and independently invented a Victorian mechanical computer. In 1909, Percy Ludgate designed an Analytical Engine that worked completely differently from Babbage's famous gears. Instead of massive cogs, Ludgate’s machine used an elegant system of sliding rods to perform multiplication through logarithms. It was designed to run on perforated paper tape and would have been portable enough to fit on a desk. Sadly, he died young, and his blueprints vanished, leaving him as one of computing's greatest 'what ifs'.
