Charles Babbage
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40 free Charles Babbage trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Charles Babbage spent most of his life on machines that were never finished, and still earned a place at the start of every history of computing. In the first half of the nineteenth century he drew up designs for automatic calculating engines that anticipated ideas engineers would rediscover a hundred years later. This quiz covers the whole of that story: his student days and friendships, the engines and how they were meant to operate, the collaborators and rivals around him, the money that came and went, and the side projects of a restless mind, from railways and secret codes to his feud with the noise of the street. It also follows his afterlife in exhibitions, fiction and the names of things. It is written for anyone curious about where computers came from, for students of the history of science and technology, and for quiz hosts who want questions with a story behind each answer. Every question comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When Charles Babbage started designing calculating engines in the 1820s, what did the word 'computer' mean?
A person who did sums
A person who did sums by hand was called a computer, and the errors such people left in printed tables are what drove Babbage to hand the work to machinery.
Q 02Which part of Charles Babbage's body is kept in two halves at the Hunterian Museum and the Science Museum in London?
His brain
His brain was removed after he died in 1871, and the autopsy report lay undiscovered until 1983, when it turned up and was later published by his great-great-grandson.
Q 03Which retail chain began in Dallas in 1984 as a software store named Babbage's after Charles Babbage?
GameStop
GameStop only took that name in 1999; the first Babbage's opened in a Dallas shopping mall with the businessman Ross Perot as an early investor.
Q 04Charles Babbage waged a long public campaign in Victorian London against which kind of street musician?
Organ grinders
Organ grinders enraged Babbage so much that he logged 165 street nuisances in 80 days, arguing that the noise robbed intellectual workers of their time.
Q 05Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron published detailed notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace wrote notes about three times longer than the paper she was translating, and Babbage called her 'The Enchantress of Number'.
Q 06What did London's Science Museum prove in 1991 by building a Charles Babbage engine to 19th-century tolerances?
It would have worked
It would have worked, and the finished engine returned results to 31 digits, ending a long argument over whether Victorian workshops could have made the parts.
Q 07Charles Babbage openly borrowed the punched cards that would program his Analytical Engine from which textile machine?
Jacquard loom
The Jacquard loom wove patterns into cloth by reading a chain of punched cards laced together, and Babbage planned to feed his engine its instructions the same way.
Q 08Charles Babbage proposed an early version of which attachment for the front of a steam locomotive?
Cowcatcher
The cowcatcher Babbage proposed was never built, and the first practical one is credited to the American engineer Isaac Dripps, who fitted it to the locomotive John Bull.
Q 09Charles Babbage has been called an iconic figure of which science fiction genre?
Steampunk
Steampunk imagines a past in which machines like Babbage's engines were actually built, the premise of the 1990 novel The Difference Engine.
Q 10Which Cambridge professorship, once Isaac Newton's, did Charles Babbage hold through the 1830s without giving a lecture?
Lucasian chair
The Lucasian chair of mathematics later passed to Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking, and Babbage won it at his fourth attempt while travelling in Rome.
Q 11Charles Babbage appears as a character in the two-part story Spyfall in which long-running science fiction series?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who brought its time traveller to Babbage's home in 1834, where a strange figurine offered her a route back to the 21st century.
Q 12On which body in the solar system does an ancient, eroded crater carry the name of Charles Babbage?
Moon
The Moon has carried Babbage's name since the 19th century, on a worn formation joined to the rim of a larger crater named after Pythagoras.
Q 13Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine design was 'complete' in a computing sense named after which later mathematician?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing set out the idea a century later, and the engine's loops and conditional branching would have met it, a first for any mechanical design.
Q 21Which astronomer, the son of the discoverer of Uranus, co-founded the Analytical Society with Charles Babbage in 1812?
John Herschel
John Herschel stayed so close a friend that Babbage left him to manage the engine project while he travelled through Italy in 1828.
Q 22Charles Babbage helped found which learned body in London in 1820, four years before it gave him a Gold Medal?
Royal Astronomical Society
The Royal Astronomical Society honored him for inventing an engine to calculate mathematical tables, a machine he had barely begun to build.
Q 23Which medical instrument did Charles Babbage build in 1847, before Hermann von Helmholtz invented it independently?
Ophthalmoscope
Q 14Which backer gave Charles Babbage about £17,000 for his Difference Engine before abandoning the project in 1842?
The British government
The British government paid for more than a decade of work, yet no full engine was finished and the Treasury finally lost confidence in its inventor.
Q 15Which output device, the first of its kind, did Charles Babbage design for his Difference Engine?
A printer
A printer of Babbage's design pressed type into soft plaster to make plates for a press, so that no copyist or typesetter could slip an error into the tables.
Q 16An image of Charles Babbage was added in 2015 to the cultural icons section of which British document?
The passport
The passport redesign of 2015 gave Babbage a place among Britain's cultural icons, a public honor for a man who had turned down both a knighthood and a baronetcy.
Q 17Charles Babbage's student Extractors Club at Cambridge pledged to rescue one another from what kind of place?
A madhouse
A madhouse was the fate the Extractors Club guarded against, and Babbage also joined the Ghost Club, which looked into supernatural happenings.
Q 18Charles Babbage twice stood as a reform candidate in Finsbury in the 1830s, hoping to win which position?
Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament was a prize he never won: in 1832 he came third of five in a two-seat contest, and in 1834 he finished last of four.
Q 19Charles Babbage hosted famous soirées for London's scientists, authors and aristocrats on which evening of the week?
Saturday
Saturday evenings at Babbage's house ran from 1828 into the 1840s, and he is credited with importing the scientific soirée from France.
Q 20Charles Babbage said the idea of calculating by machinery struck him at Cambridge over an error-filled table of what?
Logarithms
Logarithms filled the table in front of him in 1812, and French teams had already shown the way by splitting such work into simple sums done by dozens of human calculators.
The ophthalmoscope Babbage made for looking into the eye went to a surgeon for testing, who simply ignored it, so the credit waited for Helmholtz.
Q 24Charles Babbage broke which cipher, long called indecipherable, during the Crimean War without publishing his method?
Vigenère
The Vigenère cipher fell to Babbage in the 1850s, but he never published his method, so credit went to the Prussian officer Friedrich Kasiski and Babbage's priority was not established until 1985.
Q 25In which Italian city did Charles Babbage give his only public lectures on the Analytical Engine, in 1840?
Turin
Turin heard the lectures because the astronomer Giovanni Plana invited him, and a young engineer in the audience took the notes that became the first published account.
Q 26Which sequence was the target of the famous algorithm in the 1843 notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine?
Bernoulli numbers
Bernoulli numbers were the goal of the step-by-step method in Note G, often called the first published computer program, which might have run correctly had the engine been built.
Q 27The method of finite differences let Charles Babbage's Difference Engine build whole tables using only which operation?
Addition
Addition was all the wheels had to do, since adding a few starting differences over and over gives each new value of a polynomial without ever having to multiply.
Q 28A father and son from which country built working difference engines from the 1840s, inspired by Charles Babbage?
Sweden
Sweden's Per Georg Scheutz and his son Edvard built a machine about the size of a piano, showed it at the Paris World's Fair and sold it to an observatory in New York.
Q 29Which American university received a demonstration piece of the Difference Engine from Charles Babbage's son Henry?
Harvard
Harvard's piece was later discovered there by Howard Aiken, the pioneer who went on to build the university's Mark I calculator.
Q 30Which author of Neuromancer co-wrote The Difference Engine, a 1990 novel in which Charles Babbage's machines get built?
William Gibson
William Gibson wrote it with Bruce Sterling, imagining the Information Age dawning more than a century ahead of schedule in an alternative Victorian era.