Calculating Machines). From 1828 to 1839 Babbage was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He contributed largely to several scientific periodicals, and was instrumental in founding the Astronomical (1820) and Statistical (1834) Societies. He only once endeavoured to enter public life, when, in 1832, he stood unsuccessfully for the borough of Finsbury. During the later years of his life he resided in London, devoting himself to the construction of machines capable of performing arithmetical and even algebraical calculations. He died at London on the 8th of October 1871.
He gives a few biographical details in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), a work which throws considerable light upon his somewhat peculiar character.
His works, pamphlets and papers were very numerous; in the Passages he enumerates eighty separate writings. Of these the most important, besides the few already mentioned, are Tables of Logarithms (1826); Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives (1826); Decline of Science in England (1830); Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837); The Exposition of 1851 (1851).
See Monthly Notices, Royal'Astronomical Society, vol. 32.