He thought of the many marvels generated by the Industrial Revolution. If only, he wondered, there was a way to produce such tables faster, with less manpower and fewer mistakes. In 1819, Babbage visited the City of Light and viewed the unpublished manuscript with page after page of tables. Unfortunately, once the 18 volumes of tables – with one more describing mathematical procedures – were complete, they were never published. De Prony wanted to apply the division of labor to his mathematical project. De Prony was in turn inspired by Adam Smith's famous work "Wealth of Nations." Smith wrote about how the division of labor improved efficiency when manufacturing pins. The French wanted to standardize measurements in the country and planned to use the tables to aid in those efforts to convert to the metric system. In 1792 the French government had appointed Gaspard de Prony to supervise the creation of the Cadastre, a set of logarithmic and trigonometric tables. It was, in fact, a mammoth number-crunching project that inspired Babbage in the first place. The first machine design that came out of these efforts was Babbage's first difference engine. In July 1822, Babbage wrote a letter to the Royal Society proposing the idea that machines could do calculations based on a "method of differences." The Royal Society was intrigued and agreed to fund development on the idea. In fact, Babbage wrote that he was daydreaming over logarithmic tables during his time at Cambridge, sometime around 1812-1813, when he first imagined that a machine could do the job of a human computer.
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