1 Crown - Elizabeth II Charles Babbage

Issued to mark the bicentennial of Babbage's birth, this crown acknowledges the man who spent decades — and a personal fortune — attempting to build the Difference Engine and later the more ambitious Analytical Engine, neither of which was completed in his lifetime. The British government withdrew its funding for the Difference Engine in 1842 after sinking roughly £17,000 into the project, equivalent to the cost of two Royal Navy warships.

The Science Museum in London completed a working Difference Engine No. 2 in 1991, just four years before this coin was struck.