English: George Boole, the mathematician from Lincoln, has as good a claim as any other Victorian to the title of Father of Computer Science In Hindsight.

Boole was a self-educated Lincoln man, a Chartist, a friend of the Mercury liberals, and an anti-capitalist campaigner. Babbage, on the other hand--who never actually got round to realising most of his plans due to his being eaten up by an all-consuming hatred of organ grinders and other low sorts--was the Cambridge educated scion of a banking family, and was best known in his time for devising inhumane labour practices. I suppose the machines he drew make a better story.

Here's a machine made by one of Boole's followers. Jevons has been revived by the lefty peak-oil crowd because of his work in the 1860s on peak coal (it was a big thing by then). This is the sort of piano you could play one of Hofstadter's fugues on.