Georg Scheutz
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The first difference engine ever sold
- Nationality
- Swedish
The Stockholm lawyer who built the difference engine Babbage never finished, and sold it to an observatory in New York.
Per Georg Scheutz was a lawyer, newspaper publisher and translator — Shakespeare and Boccaccio into Swedish — who in 1834 read a review of Babbage's machine in the Edinburgh Review. He had no workshop training and no funding, but he did have a son. With Edvard Scheutz he built a working prototype of wood, brass and pasteboard, finished in 1843. Parliament granted money in 1851, and the finished machine was completed in 1853.
It took a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1855 and was sold the following year to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, for $5,000. A copy built in London by Bryan Donkin went to the General Register Office, where William Farr used it for the English life table of 1864. It therefore did what Babbage had promised and, after £17,000 of British public money, never delivered: computed a table and struck the printing plate itself. Two amateurs managed it in a rented room in Stockholm.