In 1821, a young Cambridge student named Charles Babbage was poring over some trigonometric and logarithmic tables that had been recently computed by hand. When he realized how many errors they had, he exclaimed, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam." He was suggesting that the tables could have been computed automatically by some mechanism that would be powered by a steam engine.

Babbage was a mathematician by avocation, holding the same Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University that Isaac Newton had held 150 years earlier and that Stephen Hawking would hold 150 years later. However, he spent a large part of his life working on automatic computing. Having invented the idea of a programmable computer, he is generally regarded as the first computer scientist. His assistant, Lady Ada Lovelace, has been recognized as the first computer programmer.

Babbage's goal was to build a machine that could analyze data to obtain useful information, the central step of data analysis. By automating that step, it could be carried out on much larger datasets and much more rapidly. His interest in trigonometric and logarithmic tables was related to his objective of improving methods of navigation, which was critical to the expanding British Empire.