Babbage Sum Engine

From a history website, whose URL I forgot to write down - “Babbage failed to build a complete machine despite independent wealth, social position, government funding, a decade of design and development, and the best of British engineering. The reasons are still debated and the cocktail of considerations is a rich one.”

I propose a resolution of this famous historical conundrum, and at the same time propose a working solution to Babbage’s problem. The trouble with his design, I assert, is that Babbage, while focusing on the concept of a “Difference Engine,” failed to keep in mind that he also needed a “Sum Engine.” That is, it is hard to solve all and any problem using only differences, especially when the concept of negative numbers was rather murky then to most of that culture (“Very un-British,” they would say.) The clear solution to Babbage’s vexing problem would have been to construct a Sum Engine to work in tandem with his Difference one.