A closer look
Charles Babbage is the patron saint of vaporware. In 1822, he conceptualized the Difference Engine, a massive, steam-powered mechanical calculator with thousands of gears meant to compute polynomial functions. Despite receiving a small fortune from the British government, Babbage was a perfectionist who constantly changed the design and feuded with his chief engineer. Funding eventually evaporated, and the machine wasn't fully built until 1991 by a museum—proving his math was flawless, even if his project management wasn't.
