Herman Hollerith invented the tabulating machine to support work in the US 1890 census, tabulating numbers for the count of population in the country.
1890 US Census.
The purpose of inventing the machine gun was to have better fire power during the wars to defends places and win positions and the war.
The zeroth generation of computers started in 1642 - 1946. It started with the invention of pascaline by Blaise Pascal, then in 1822, Charles Babbage invented Difference Engine to compute tables for naval navigation. Then came the Tabulating machine by Herman Hollerith in 1880 for counting US census which was followed by invention of Mark I and II by Howard Eiken in 1944, which was the first US general purpose electro-mechanical computer.
To not have to walk
so you can communicate
to color
Slicing meat.
It was to replace horses as a means of transportation.
So people can listen to amazing music.
To ease healing and avoid infection.
To take pictures and to capture the memorable moments.
No, a difference engine is just a very powerful automatic calculator for tabulating polynomial functions by the method of differences, but it is neither programmable nor can it perform conditional tests or logical functions. It cannot be used for any other purpose than tabulating polynomial functions.