Allan Bromley (historian) - Charles Babbage's Computing Engines

Charles Babbage's Computing Engines

Most discussions of the history of computing start with Charles Babbage, and what we know about Charles Babbage's Difference and Analytical engines really starts with the scholarship of Allan Bromley. —Tim Berguin, Editor-in-chief, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 22, number 4, October-December 2000, p.2

Allan Bromley's most important and lasting achievement was his study, at the Science Museum library in London, of the original drawings for the Difference and Analytical Engines designed by Charles Babbage more than a century earlier. This led to the reconstruction of two Difference Engines No. 2 under the direction of Doron Swade:

During several visits to London beginning in 1979, Allan G. Bromley of the University of Sidney in Australia examined Babbage's drawings and notebooks in the Science Museum Library and became convinced that Difference Engine No. 2 could be built and would work. I had independently read of Babbage's hapless fate and become deeply puzzled as to why no one had tried to resolve the issue of Babbage's failures by actually building his engine.
In 1985, shortly after my appointment as curator of computing, Bromley appeared at the science museum carrying a two-page proposal to do just that. He suggested that the museum attempt to complete the machine by 1991, the bicentenary of Babbage's birth. Bromley's proposal marked the start of a six years project that became something of a personal crusade for me. —Doron D. Swade, Scientific American, February 1993, p.89