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The British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) is generally credited with designing the world's first computer. Unlike lhe electronic computers of today, however, Babbage's machine was mechanical. It was made of gears and levers, the predominant technology of the 1820s and 1830s.
Babbage actually designed two different machines. The first, called the Difference Engine, was to be used in computing mathematical tables. For example, the Difference Engine could produce a table of squares:

It was essentially a complex calculator that could not be programmed. Babbage's Difference Engine was designed to improve the accuracy of the computation of tables, not the speed. At that time, all tables were produced by hand, a tedious and errorprone job. Because much of science and engineering depended on the use of accurate tables, an error could have serious consequences. Even though the Difference Engine could perform the calculations only a little faster than a human could, it did so without error. In fact, one of its most important features was that it would stamp its output directly onto copper plates that could then be placed into a printing press, thereby avoiding even typographical errors.
By 1833 the project to build the Difference Engine had run into finanical trouble, The 
engineer whom Babbage had hired to do the construction was dishonest and had 
drawn the project out as long as possible so as to extract more money from Babbage's sponsors in the British government. Eventually they became tired of waiting for the machine and withdrew their support. Babbage lost interest in it at about the same time because he had developed the idea for a much more powerful machine, which he called the Analytical Engine—a truly programmable computer.
The idea for the Analytical Engine came to Babbage as he toured Europe to survey the best technology of the time in preparation for constructing the Difference Engine. One of the technologies that he saw was the Jacquard automatic loom, in which a series of paper cards with punched holes was fed through the machine to produce a woven cloth pattern. The pattern of holes constituted a program for the loom and made it possible to weave patterns of arbitrary complexity automatically. In fact, its inventor even had a detailed portrait of himself woven by one of his machines.
Babbage realized that this sort of device could be used to control the operation of a computing machine. Instead of calculating just one type of formula, such a machine could be programmed to perform arbitrarily complex computations, including the manipulation of algebraic symbols. As his associate, Ada Lovelace (the world's first computer programmer), elegantly put it, "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns." It is clear that Babbage and Lovelace fully understood the power of a programmable computer and even contemplated the not ion that someday such machines could achieve artificial thought.
Unfortunately, Babbage never completed construction of either of his machines. Some historians believe that he never finished them because the technology of the period could not support such complex machinery. But most feel that Babbage's failure was his own doing. He was both brilliant and somewhat eccentric (it is known that he was afraid of Italian organ grinders, for example). 
Thus when he died, Babbage had numerous pieces of computing machines and partial drawings of  designs, but none of the plans were sufficiently complete to produce a single working computer. 
After his death, his ideas were dismissed and his inventions ignored. Only after modern computers were developed did historians recognize the true importance of his contributions. Babbage recognized the potential of the computer a full century before one was fully developed. Today we can only imagine how different the world would be if he had succeeded in constructing his Analytical Engine.