Charles Babbage
Indeed, so proud are the British of the work done by eccentric British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, that the Science Museum in London has subsequently built the machines he conceived and the Royal College of Surgeons has preserved his brain - the brain invented the computer.Jun 4, 2004

We could argue that the first computer was the abacus or its descendant, the slide rule, invented by William Oughtred in 1622. But the first computer resembling today's modern machines was theAnalytical Engine, a device conceived and designed by British mathematician Charles Babbage between 1833 and 1871. Before Babbage came along, a "computer" was a person, someone who literally sat around all day, adding and subtracting numbers and entering the results into tables. The tables then appeared in books, so other people could use them to complete tasks, such as launching artillery shells accurately or calculating taxes.
It was, in fact, a mammoth number-crunching project that inspired Babbage in the first place [source: Campbell-Kelly]. Napoleon Bonaparte initiated the project in 1790, when he ordered a switch from the old imperial system of measurements to the new metric system. For 10 years, scores of human computers made the necessary conversions and completed the tables. Bonaparte was never able to publish the tables, however, and they sat collecting dust in the Académie des sciences in Paris.