Percy Ludgate

Percy Edwin Ludgate (* August 2, 1883, † October 16, 1922 ) was an Irish designer of a computing machine. His main job was an accountant in Dublin.

About his life little is known, but he worked alone and part-time at his computer design. In World War I he was involved in the organization of animal feed in Ireland.

Ludgate developed around 1908 in Dublin, a mechanical calculating machine, without first from its predecessor Charles Babbage to know ( 1914, he wrote about Babbage, however, an article ). It was based on a multiplication algorithm ( Irish CV Boys multiplication called ) and not, as in addition to Babbage. The exact mechanism is not known and it is also get no drawing or machine. After Brian Randell (who snatched the Ludgate 's contribution to computer history from oblivion around 1970 ) it existed only on paper, but showed a high degree of originality and ingenuity.

After Randell is a programmable mechanical computer, who performed all four arithmetic operations and up to 192 numbers stored for each twenty decimal places, with the help of boxes with pins arranged on rotating cylindrical disks. It was programmable via punched tape and very compact, much smaller than the machine of Babbage.

He died in 1922 of pneumonia with only 39 years. No estate or records of his calculating machine are known.