Leonardo da Vinci was not only a painter, architect, and scholar, but a man who designed machines. His notebooks show drawings of mechanical wings that would let a mortal fly like a bird. A machine is an assembly of various parts, both moving and stationary, that are used to perform a specialized task. Using a machine, a small force may be applied in order to move a great resistance, or load. For example, the machine may be capable of greater precision, endurance, or strength.
Some machines are more useful, or successful at their tasks, than others.
Lady Augusta Lovelace, the world's first programmer, attempted to make Babbage's Analytical Engine work. Neither machine could ever be perfected and, in the final analysis, did too little for the amount of effort the machine required. There have been many attempts to create a mechanical calculating machine both before and after Babbage. In 1890, Herman Hollerith introduced a tabulating machine used in counting the U.S. Census that used punched cards . In the 1930s, Vannevar Bush , a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tried to recreate the Babbage machine using electricity, but calculating machines were changing from mechanical to electronic.