"ada"
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directed a portion of it, consisting of sixteen figures, to be put together. It was
capable of calculating tables having two or three orders of differences; and, to
some extent, of forming other tables. The action of this portion completely
justified the expectations raised, and gave a most satisfactory assurance of its final
success.”
Shortly after this part of his machine went on public display, Babbage was struck
by the thought that the Difference Engine, still incomplete, had already super¬
seded itself. “Having, in the meanwhile, naturally speculated upon the general
principles on which machinery for calculation might be constructed, a principle of
an entirely new kind occurred to him, the power of which over the most complic¬
ated arithmetical operations seemed nearly unbounded. On reexamining his
drawings... the new principle appeared to be limited only by the extent of the
mechanism it might require.” If the simplicity of the mechanisms which allowed
the Difference Engine to perform addition could be extended to thousands rather
than hundreds of components, a machine could be built which would “execute
more rapidly the calculations for which the Difference Engine was intended; or,
that the Difference Engine would itself be superseded by a far simpler mode of
construction.” The government officials who had funded Babbage’s work on the
first machine were not pleased to learn that it was now to be abandoned in favor of
a new set of mechanical processes which “were essentially different from those of
the Difference Engine.” While Babbage did his best to persuade them that the
“fact of a new superseding an old machine, in a very few years, is one of constant
occurrence in our manufactories; and instances might be pointed out in which the
advance of invention has been so rapid, and the demand for machinery so great,
that half-finished machines have been thrown aside as useless before their comple¬
tion,” Babbage’s decision to proceed with his new machine was also his break with
the bodies which had funded his previous work. Babbage lost the support of the
state, but he had already gained assistance of a very different kind.
“You are a brave man,” Ada told Babbage, “to give yourself wholly up to FairyGuidance! - I advise you to allow yourself to be unresistingly bewitched ...” No
one, she added, “knows what almost awful energy & power lie yet undevelopped
in that wiry little system of mine.”
In 1842 Touis Menabrea, an Italian military engineer, had deposited his Sketch
of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage in the Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve. Shortly after its appearance, Babbage later wrote, the “Count¬
ess of Lovelace informed me that she had translated the memoir of Menabrea.”
Enormously impressed by this work, Babbage invited her to join him in the
development of the machine. “I asked why she had not herself written an original
paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted? To this Lady
Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her. I then suggested that
she should add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir; an idea which was immediately
adopted.”
Babbage and Ada developed an intense relationship. “We discussed together the
various illustrations that might be introduced,” wrote Babbage. “I suggested
several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working
out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of
Sadie Plant
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Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she
sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had
made in the process.”
“A strong-minded woman! Much like her mother, eh? Wears green spectacles and
writes learned books... She wants to upset the universe, and play dice with the
hemispheres. Women never know when to stop ...”
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
Babbage’s mathematical errors, and many of his attitudes, greatly irritated Ada.
While his tendency to blame other bodies for the slow progress of his work was
sometimes well founded, when he insisted on prefacing the publication of the
memoir and her notes with a complaint about the attitude of the British authorities
to his work, Ada refused to endorse him. “I never can or will support you in acting
on principles which I consider not only wrong in themselves, but suicidal.” She
declared Babbage “one of the most impracticable, selfish, & intemperate persons
one can have to do with,” and laid down several severe conditions for the
continuation of their collaboration. “Can you,” she asked, with undisguised
impatience, “undertake to give your mind wholly and undividedly, as a primary
object that no engagement is to interfere with, to the consideration of all those
matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual assistance & supervision;
Cb'can you promise not to slur & hurry things over; or to mislay & allow confusion
& mistakes to enter into documents &c?”
Ada was, she said, “very much afraid as yet of exciting the powers I know I have
over others, & the evidence of which I have certainly been most unwilling to admit,
in fact for a long time considered quite fanciful and absurd ... I therefore carefully
refrain from all attempts intentionally to exercise unusual powers.” Perhaps this
was why her work was simply attributed to A.A.L. “It is not my wish to proclaim
who has written it,” she wrote. These were just a few afterthoughts, a mere
commentary on someone else’s work. But Ada did want them to bear some
name: “I rather wish to append anything that may tend hereafter to individualize
it & identify it, with other productions of the said A.A.L.” And for all her apparent
modesty, Ada knew how important her notes really were. “To say the truth, I am
rather amazed at them; & cannot help being struck quite malgre moi, with the
really masterly nature of the style, & its Superiority to that of the Memoir itself.”
Her work was indeed vastly more influential - and three times longer - than the
text to which they were supposed to be mere adjuncts. A hundred years before the
hardware had been built, Ada had produced the first example of what was later
called computer programming.
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