Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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Charles Babbage's house, 1 Dorset Street

Where the Difference Engine was designed and the Analytical Engine dreamed up, over forty years of soirees, and where Babbage fought the organ-grinders.

Statues & plaquesFree

Babbage lived here from 1829 until his death in 1871, holding Saturday evening parties at which a working portion of the Difference Engine No. 1 was shown to Darwin, Dickens, Brunel and the young Ada Lovelace, and designing on paper the Analytical Engine that was a programmable computer a century early; the house was also the headquarters of his campaign against street musicians, which made him the most mocked man in Marylebone. The engine fragments and half his brain are in the Science Museum; the plaque is on the corner of Dorset Street and Baker Street.

Where
1 Dorset Street, W1U 6QJ
Nearest station
Baker Street · 4 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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