His place in history came when his frustration grew at the many errors that he found when he examined the calculations for the Royal Astronomical Society. These errors sometimes proved fatal as these errors also appeared in navigation tables and caused the loss of ships. He decided to do something about it. By 1812, Babbage noticed a natural harmony between machines and mathematics. Machines are very good at performing repeated without mistakes while mathematics especially the production of mathematics tables often required a series of repeated steps. Babbage's first attempt at solving this problem was made in 1822 when he made a machine to calculate differential equations called a Difference Engine. Powered by steam and as large as a locomotive the machine could store a program, preform calculations and print the results automatically. After 10 years working on the Difference Engine he lost interest and started working on another machine. The loss of interest came about when he realised that the Difference Engine was a special-purpose machine capable of a single operation. The new machine was the first general-purpose computer, which he named the Analytical Engine. He designed the Analytical Engine that had the basic components of a modern computer and has led to Babbage being described as the "Father of the Computer". He was never to see this machine built. He died at the age of 80. Babbage's assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815 - 1842) however kept on with Babbage's ideas. She was instrumental in the machine's design. She was one of the few people at that time understood the Engine's design. She was known to be the first female computer programmer as she created the instruction routines to be fed in to the computer. She also helped revise the plans, secure funding from the British government and explained to the public on the specifics of the machine to the public.