I always had a thing about mathematics and ghosts, joining The Ghost Club at Cambridge which was the first of its kind and concerned with investigating supernatural phenomena but with a very select membership which included Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats and eminent scientists among its members.
I founded the Royal Astronomical Society and wondered if i could reduce astronomical calculations which were then done by hand to a more standard form and ran a few trials using a mechanical computation machine and found it corrected some errors in the original calculations.
This led to me being asked to oversee a much larger trial project and the British government, or those officials who stayed awake long enough while i explained the idea, gave me a huge bag of money with a pound sign painted on it and sent me off to work on it.
I called it the Difference Engine and built a prototype but the machine was large, noisy and unwieldy at fifteen tons and 8 ft tall.
If death hadn't come along to interrupt it i would have developed it further but after ten years of receiving government funding and not actually completing the machine, the Treasury lost confidence and withdrew the funding.
I also designed the Analytical Engine with the help from Ada Lovelace who wrote the algorithm to do the calculations which makes her the first computer programmer although less spotty and not a virgin.
The Analytical Engine was a more complex version of the Difference Engine which read programs and data from punch cards and had a memory capable of storing 1,000 numbers with 50 decimal digits each and held a monstrous 675 bytes of memory and run at a dizzying clock speed of 7 Hz.
I died of kidney problems aggravated by cystitis and am in the history bookis for inventing computers (despite what Turing may claim) but i also invented the cow-catcher which goes on the front of trains that clears the tracks of obstacles, just thought i would throw that in as well.
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