High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Difference Engine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers. J. H. Muller, an engineer in the Hessian army conceived the idea in a book published in 1786, but failed to find funding to progress this further. In 1822, Charles Babbage proposed the use of such a machine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society on 14 June entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables".

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