About the Maker: Dick Rubinstein - "I built this prop when Artisan’s was in Somerville. The play was Ada and The Engine at Central Square Theater in Cambridge. The prop is a visual replica of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1. The play centers on the collaboration between Charles Babbage (a polymath, genius, mathematician, inventor, and jerk) and Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s legitimate daughter, one of very few female mathematicians in 19th century Britain).

Babbage designed the Difference Engine to calculate numerical tables. Contemporary books of tables were notoriously inaccurate. Only a small part of the machine was ever built. The model (non-functional) reproduces that demonstration machine."