MÜLLER, Johann Helfrich von.

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Beschreibung seiner neu erfundenen Rechenmaschine, nach ihrer Gestalt, ihrem Gebrauch und Nutzen. Herausgegeben und mit einer Vorrde begleitet von Ph. E. Klipstein. First edition of the first published work to describe a difference engine, appearing some 35 years before Babbage independently developed the concept. Hook & Norman place the scarce Beschreibung in their Origins of Cyberspace timeline and describe it as "the first description of the idea for a difference engine" (p. 65). In the final pages of the Beschreibung, Johann Helfrich von Müller (1746-1830), an engineer in the Hessian army, outlines the notion that a machine could mechanically produce sequences of calculations by the method of differences. Although the concept of mechanical calculation itself was not new, Müller was the first to suggest that the method of differences could be mechanized, that whole sequences of numerical tables could thus be produced, and that these results could be delivered automatically by the machine (in this case, via a mechanical printer). All three are fundamental aspects of modern computing, and all three were widely celebrated components of Babbage's work in the 1820s. Babbage himself owned an undated manuscript translation of Müller's tract, and the historian Michael Lindgren has argued that he acquired this at an early (but not formative) stage of the work on his own difference engine. In particular, Lindgren points at considerable similarities between the two men's designs for

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