Computer pioneer Charles Babbage came from an old Devon family - his grandfather, Benjamin Babbage, was the Mayor of Totnes in 1754. So, although Charles was born in London, he's regarded as a Devonian. He was a remarkable man. Mad about mathematics, he set about inventing machines which would help businesses and corporations during the industrial revolution.

Unlike some other leading thinkers of the 19th century, Babbage saw factories and industry - rather than agriculture - as the key to Britain's future economy. He's best known for pioneering computing and calculating machines.

He drew up plans for calculating engines, which incorporated many of the elements which were to later appear in modern computers.His engines were never actually made during his lifetime. But in recent years, researchers - using the plans - have built some of the machines and found that they work.

Babbage regarded the railways as vital, and worked with Great Western Railway on the best guage for railway tracks. He also invented the speedometer, and the opthalmascope, used to examine the inside of the human eye.

If anything, Babbage was ahead of his time. His theories and ideas came too soon to be implemented in practice. But he was one of the innovative pioneers at the very forefront of the computer age, and is fully deserving of the tag 'father of the computer.'

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould is best known for writing the hymn, Onward Christian Soldiers.But he is also thought to have inspired his friend George Bernard Shaw to write Pygmalion - which was later made into the film, My Fair Lady.

Baring-Gould was himself a prolific writer and was reckoned to be the tenth most popular novelist of his day. At one point there were more books listed under his name in the British Museum Library than under that of any other English writer. He was born in Exeter in 1834, and his family owned the Lewtrenchard Estate near Lydford in west Devon.

He took Holy Orders in 1864 and became a curate in Horbury, Yorkshire. It was in Horbury that he met mill girl Grace Taylor. He sent her away to be educated and then married her in 1868. The couple were married for 48 years until Grace's death in 1916 and had 15 children!

However he appears to have had little understanding of his offspring. Apparently at a children's party one evening he called to a young child "And whose little girl are you?" The child burst into tears and said "I'm yours Daddy". Baring-Gould wrote Onward Christian Soldiers while at Horbury, and was amazed at its popularity. He said he had dashed the words off in no more than ten minutes as an occasional piece for a procession of school children.

He returned to Lewtrenchard in 1881, where he was the squire and parson. It's believed he had more than 200 works published, but the thing he was most proud of was his collection of folk songs from Devon and Cornwall, called 'Songs of the West.'He spent 12 years travelling in the two counties, learning the songs from old singers and then publishing them.

Baring-Gould died at Lewtrenchard in 1924 aged 90, and his body was buried in his own churchyard.