Gaspard de Prony (1755–1839) was a French mathematician and engineer who proved that if you couldn’t build a machine to calculate, you could build a human “factory”. The French government tasked him with the Tables du Cadastre, and he drew inspiration from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
He organised his project like a manufacturing line, dividing complex calculations into simple ones. His “factory of figures” provided the organisational model that inspired Babbage. Prony demonstrated that data processing wasn’t just a matter of genius, but also about systematic, divided labour.