They feared for their jobs and felt machines were taking them away. .
Soon after the invention of the Arithmometer, Charles Babbage designed an automatic mechanical calculating machine called the difference engine. The difference engine was a great advance for technology. It was steam powered and fully automatic. It not only created tables but it printed them out. A fixed instruction program commanded the difference engine. This invention saved banks and businesses a lot of time and money. They could hire fewer people and pay them less money because the difference engine did all the mathematical work. The availability of steam power caused manufacturing of boilers, transportation (steam engines and boats), and much more. The steam engine, Babbage's difference engine also led to the designing of railroads, steamships, textile mills and bridges. The bridges required the differential calculus to determine things like: center of gravity, center of buoyancy, moment of inertia and stress .
distributions. Without the help of these calculations it would not have been possible to build bridges, railroads, steamships or textile mills. .
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) was produced at the start of World War II. The military required a large need for computer capacity. ENIAC was a high-speed electronic computer. The size of ENIAC's numerical "word" was 10 .
decimal digits, it could multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was about 1,000 times faster then the earlier generation of relay computers. ENIAC used about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. The executable commands making up a program were embodied in the separate "units" of ENIAC. They were plugged together to form a "route" for the stream of information.
