Charles Babbage

Joseph Marie Jacquard died on 7 August 1834, decades after a Lyon mob smashed his automated loom and sold it for scrap. The punched cards that survived became the ancestor of every computer running today.

On 14 June 1822, Charles Babbage told the Royal Astronomical Society he could build a machine to calculate mathematical tables without human error. He was right about the problem and right about the solution. He never finished building it.