Tag / Steampunk

by David D. Nolte

Maxwellian Steampunk and the Origins of Maxwell’s Equations

Physicists of the nineteenth century were obsessed with mechanical models.  They must have dreamed, in their sleep, of spinning flywheels connected by criss-crossing drive belts turning enmeshed gears.  For them, Newton’s clockwork universe was more than a metaphor—they believed that mechanical description of a phenomenon could unlock further secrets and act as a tool of discovery. 

It is no wonder they thought this way—the mid-eighteenth century was at the peak of the industrial revolution, dominated by the steam engine and the profusion of mechanical power and gears across broad swaths of society. 

Steampunk

The Victorian obsession with steam and power is captured beautifully in the literary and animé genre known as Steampunk.  The genre is alternative historical fiction that portrays steam technology progressing into grand and wild new forms as electrical and gasoline technology fail to develop.  An early classic in the genre is Miyazaki’s 1986 anime´ film Castle in the Sky (1986) by Hayao Miyazaki about a world where all mechanical devices, including airships, are driven by steam.  A later archetype of the genre is the 2004 animé film Steam Boy (2004) by Katsuhiro Otomo about the discovery of superwater that generates unlimited steam power.  As international powers vie to possess it, mad scientists strive to exploit it for society, but they create a terrible weapon instead.   One of the classics that helped launch the genre is the novel The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling that envisioned an alternative history of computers developed by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

Scenes from Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky.

Steampunk is an apt, if excessively exaggerated, caricature of the Victorian mindset and approach to science.  Confidence in microscopic mechanical models among natural philosophers was encouraged by the success of molecular models of ideal gases as the foundation for macroscopic thermodynamics.  Pictures of small perfect spheres colliding with each other in simple billiard-ball-like interactions could be used to build up to overarching concepts like heat and entropy and temperature.  Kinetic theory was proposed in 1857 by the German physicist Rudolph Clausius and was quickly placed on a firm physical foundation using principles of Hamiltonian dynamics by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

DVD cover of Steamboy by Otomo.

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879) was one of three titans out of Cambridge who served as the intellectual leaders in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The two others were George Stokes and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).  All three were Wranglers, the top finishers on the Tripos exam at Cambridge, the grueling eight-day examination across all fields of mathematics.  The winner of the Tripos, known as first Wrangler, was announced with great fanfare in the local papers, and the lucky student was acclaimed like a sports hero is today.  Stokes in 1841 was first Wrangler while Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1845 and Maxwell in 1854 were each second Wranglers.  They were also each winners of the Smith’s Prize, the top examination at Cambridge for mathematical originality.  When Maxwell sat for the Smith’s Prize in 1854 one of the exam problems was a proof written by Stokes on a suggestion by Thomson.  Maxwell failed to achieve the proof, though he did win the Prize.  The problem became known as Stokes’ Theorem, one of the fundamental theorems of vector calculus, and the proof was eventually provided by Hermann Hankel in 1861.

James Clerk Maxwell.

After graduation from Cambridge, Maxwell took the chair of natural philosophy at Marischal College in the city of Aberdeen in Scotland.  He was only 25 years old when he began, fifteen years younger than any of the other professors.  He split his time between the university and his family home at Glenlair in the south of Scotland, which he inherited from his father the same year he began his chair at Aberdeen.  His research interests spanned from the perception of color to the rings of Saturn.  He improved on Thomas Young’s three-color theory by correctly identifying red, green and blue as the primary receptors of the eye and invented a scheme for adding colors that is close to the HSV (hue-saturation-value) system used today in computer graphics.  In his work on the rings of Saturn, he developed a statistical mechanical approach to explain how the large-scale structure emerged from the interactions among the small grains.  He applied these same techniques several years later to the problem of ideal gases when he derived the speed distribution known today as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.

Maxwell’s career at Aberdeen held great promise until he was suddenly fired from his post in 1860 when Marischal College merged with nearby King’s College to form the University of Aberdeen.  After the merger, the university had the abundance of two professors of Natural Philosophy while needing only one, and Maxwell was the junior.  With his new wife, Maxwell retired to Glenlair and buried himself in writing the first drafts of a paper titled “On Physical Lines of Force” [2].  The paper explored the mathematical and mechanical aspects of the curious lines of magnetic force that Michael Faraday had first proposed in 1831 and which Thomson had developed mathematically around 1845 as the first field theory in physics. 

As Maxwell explored the interrelationships among electric and magnetic phenomena, he derived a wave equation for the electric and magnetic fields and was astounded to find that the speed of electromagnetic waves was essentially the same as the speed of light.  The importance of this coincidence did not escape him, and he concluded that light—that rarified, enigmatic and quintessential fifth element—must be electromagnetic in origin. Ever since Francois Arago and Agustin Fresnel had shown that light was a wave phenomenon, scientists had been searching for other physical signs of the medium that supported the waves—a medium known as the luminiferous aether (or ether). With Maxwell’s new finding, it meant that the luminiferous ether must be related to electric and magnetic fields.  In the Steampunk tradition of his day, Maxwell began a search for a mechanical model.  He did not need to look far, because his friend Thomson had already built a theory on a foundation provided by the Irish mathematician James MacCullagh (1809 – 1847)

The Luminiferous Ether

The late 1830’s was a busy time for the luminiferous ether.  Agustin-Louis Cauchy published his extensive theory of the ether in 1836, and the self-taught George Green published his highly influential mathematical theory in 1838 which contained many new ideas, such as the emphasis on potentials and his derivation of what came to be called Green’s theorem. 

In 1839 MacCullagh took an approach that established a core property of the ether that later inspired both Thomson and Maxwell in their development of electromagnetic field theory.  What McCullagh realized was that the energy of the ether could be considered as if it had both kinetic energy and potential energy (ideas and nomenclature that would come several decades later).  Most insightful was the fact that the potential energy of the field depended on pure rotation like a vortex.  This rotationally elastic ether was a mathematical invention without any mechanical analog, but it successfully described reflection and refraction as well as polarization of light in crystalline optics. 

In 1856 Thomson put Faraday’s famous magneto-optic rotation of light (the Faraday Effect discovered by Faraday in 1845) into mathematical form and began putting Faraday’s initially abstract ideas of the theory of fields into concrete equations.  He drew from MacCullagh’s rotational ether as well as an idea from William Rankine about the molecular vortex model of atoms to develop a mechanical vortex model of the ether.  Thomson explained how the magnetic field rotated the linear polarization of light through the action of a multiplicity of molecular vortices.  Inspired by Thomson, Maxwell took up the idea of molecular vortices as well as Faraday’s magnetic induction in free space and transferred the vortices from being a property exclusively of matter to being a property of the luminiferous ether that supported the electric and magnetic fields. 

Maxwellian Cogwheels

Maxwell’s model of the electromagnetic fields in the ether is the apex of Victorian mechanistic philosophy—too explicit to be a true model of reality—yet it was amazingly fruitful as a tool of discovery, helping Maxwell develop his theory of electrodynamics. The model consisted of an array of elastic vortex cells separated by layers of small particles that acted as “idle wheels” to transfer spin from one vortex to another .  The magnetic field was represented by the rotation of the vortices, and the electric current was represented by the displacement of the idle wheels. 

Maxwell's vortex model
Fig. 1 Maxwell’s vortex model of the electromagnetic ether.  The molecular vortices rotate according to the direction of the magnetic field, supported by idle wheels.  The physical displacement of the idle wheels became an analogy for Maxwell’s displacement current [2].

Two predictions by this outrightly mechanical model were to change the physics of electromagnetism forever:  First, any change in strain in the electric field would cause the idle wheels to shift, creating a transient current that was called a “displacement current”.  This displacement current was one of the last pieces in the electromagnetic puzzle that became Maxwell’s equations. 

Maxwell's discovery of the displacement current
Fig. 2 In “Physical Lines of Force” in 1861, Maxwell introduces the idea of a displacement current [RefLink].

In this description, E is not the electric field, but is related to the dielectric permativity through the relation

Maxwell went further to prove his Proposition XIV on the contribution of the displacement current to conventional electric currents.

Maxwell completing the laws of electromagnetics
Fig. 3 Maxwell’s Proposition XIV on adding the displacement current to the conventional electric current [RefLink].

Second, Maxwell calculated that this elastic vortex ether propagated waves at a speed that was close to the known speed of light measured a decade previously by the French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau.  He remarked, “we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists of the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.” [1]  This was the first direct prediction that light, previously viewed as a physical process separate from electric and magnetic fields, was an electromagnetic phenomenon.

Maxwell's estimate of the speed of light
Fig. 4 Maxwell’s calculation of the speed of light in his mechanical ether. It matched closely the measured speed of light [RefLink].

These two predictions—of the displacement current and the electromagnetic origin of light—have stood the test of time and are center pieces of Maxwells’s legacy.  How strange that they arose from a mechanical model of vortices and idle wheels like so many cogs and gears in the machinery powering the Victorian age, yet such is the power of physical visualization.

[1] pg. 12, The Maxwellians, Bruce Hunt (Cornell University Press, 1991)

[2] Maxwell, J. C. (1861). “On physical lines of force”. Philosophical Magazine. 90: 11–23.

Books by David Nolte at Oxford University Press

by David D. Nolte

Ada Lovelace at the Dawn of Cyber Steampunk

Something strange almost happened in 1840’s England just a few years into Queen Victoria’s long reign—a giant machine the size of a large shed, built of thousands of interlocking steel gears, driven by steam power, almost came to life—a thinking, mechanical automaton, the very image of Cyber Steampunk.

Cyber Steampunk is a genre of media that imagines an alternate history of a Victorian Age with advanced technology—airships and rockets and robots and especially computers—driven by steam power.  Some of the classics that helped launch the genre are the animé movies Castle in the Sky (1986) by Hayao Miyazaki and Steam Boy (2004) by Katsuhiro Otomo and the novel The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.  The novel pursues Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, through the shadows of London by those who suspect she has devised a programmable machine that can win at gambling using steam and punched cards.  This is not too far off from what might have happened in real life if Ada Lovelace had a bit more sway over one of her unsuitable suitors—Charles Babbage. 

But Babbage, part genius, part fool, could not understand what Lovelace understood—for if he had, a Victorian computer built of oiled gears and leaky steam pipes, instead of tiny transistors and metallic leads, might have come a hundred years early as another marvel of the already marvelous Industrial Revolution.  How might our world today be different if Babbage had seen what Lovelace saw?

Fig. 1 Sony Entertainment Ad for Steamboy (2004).

Boundless Babbage

There is no question of Babbage’s genius.  He was so far ahead of his time that he appeared to most people in his day to be a crackpot, and he was often treated as one.  His father thought he was useless, and he told him so, because to be a scientist in the early 1800’s was to be unemployable, and Babbage was unemployed for years after college.  Science was, literally, natural philosophy, and no one hired a philosopher unless they were faculty at some college.  But Babbage’s friends from Trinity College, Cambridge, like William Whewell (future dean of Trinity) and John Herschel (son of the famous astronomer), new his worth and were loyal throughout their lives and throughout his trials.

Fig. 2 Charles Babbage

Charles Babbage was a favorite at Georgian dinner parties because he was so entertaining to watch and to listen to.  From personal letters of his friends (and enemies) of the time one gets a picture of a character not too different from Sheldon Cooper on the TV series The Big Bang Theory—convinced of his own genius and equally convinced of the lack of genius of everyone else and ready to tell them so.  His mind was so analytic, that he talked like a walking computer—although nothing like a computer existed in those days—everything was logic and functions and propositions—hence his entertainment value.  No one understood him, and no one cared—until he ran into a young woman who actually did, but more of that later.

One summer day in 1821, Babbage and Herschel were working on mathematical tables for the Astrophysical Society, a dull but important job to ensure that star charts and moon positions could be used accurately for astronomical calculations and navigation.  The numbers filled column after column, page after page. But as they checked the values, the two were shocked by how many entries in the tables were wrong.  In that day, every numerical value of every table or chart was calculated by a person (literally called a computer), and people make mistakes.  Even as they went to correct the numbers, new mistakes would crop in.  In frustration, Babbage exclaimed to Herschel that what they needed was a steam-powered machine that would calculate the numbers automatically.  No sooner had he said it, than Babbage had a vision of a mechanical machine, driven by a small steam engine, full of gears and rods, that would print out the tables automatically without flaws.

Being unemployed (and unemployable) Babbage had enough time on his hands to actually start work on his engine.  He called it the Difference Engine because it worked on the Method of Differences—mathematical formulas were put into a form where a number was expressed as a series, and the differences between each number in the series would be calculated by the engine.  He approached the British government for funding, and it obliged with considerable funds.  In the days before grant proposals and government funding, Babbage had managed to jump start his project and, in a sense, gain employment.  His father was not impressed, but he did not live long enough to see what his son Charles could build.  Charles inherited a large sum from his father (the equivalent of about 14 million dollars today), which further freed him to work on his Difference Engine.  By 1832, he had finally completed a seventh part of the Engine and displayed it in his house for friends and visitors to see. 

This working section of the Difference Engine can be seen today in the London Science Museum.  It is a marvel of steel and brass, consisting of three columns of stacked gears whose enmeshed teeth represent digital numbers.  As a crank handle is turned, the teath work upon each other, generating new numbers through the permutations of rotated gear teeth.  Carrying tens was initially a problem for Babbage, as it is for school children today, but he designed an ingenious mechanical system to accomplish the carry.

Fig. 3 One-seventh part of Babbage’s Difference Engine.

All was going well, and the government was pleased with progress, until Charles had a better idea that threatened to scrap all he had achieved.  It is not known how this new idea came into being, but it is known that it happened shortly after he met the amazing young woman: Ada Byron.

Lovely Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, born Ada Byron, had the awkward distinction of being the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, lyric genius and poet.  Such was Lord Byron’s hedonist lifestyle that no-one can say for sure how many siblings Ada had, not even Lord Byron himself, which was even more awkward when his half-sister bore a bastard child that may have been his.

Fig. 4 Ada Lovelace

Ada’s high-born mother prudently divorced the wayward poet and was not about to have Ada pulled into her father’s morass.  Where Lord Byron was bewitched (some would say possessed) by art and spirit, the mother sought an antidote, and she encouraged Ada to study hard cold mathematics.  She could not have known that Ada too had a genius like her father’s, only aimed differently, bewitched by the beauty in the sublime symbols of math. 

An insight into the precocious child’s way of thinking can be gained from a letter that the 12-year-old girl wrote to her mother who was off looking for miracle cures for imaginary ills. At that time in 1828, in a confluence of historical timelines in the history of mathematics, Ada and her mother (and Ada’s cat Puff) were living at Bifrons House which was the former estate of Brook Taylor, who had developed the Taylor’s series a hundred years earlier in 1715. In Ada’s letter, she describes a dream she had of a flying machine, which is not so remarkable, but then she outlined her plan to her mother to actually make one, which is remarkable. As you read her letter, you see she is already thinking about weights and material strengths and energy efficiencies, thinking like an engineer and designer—at the age of only 12 years!

In later years, Lovelace would become the Enchantress of Number to a number of her mathematical friends, one of whom was the strange man she met at a dinner party in the summer of 1833 when she was 17 years old.  The strange man was Charles Babbage, and when he talked to her about his Difference Engine, expecting to be tolerated as an entertaining side show, she asked pertinent questions, one after another, and the two became locked in conversation. 

Babbage was a recent widower, having lost his wife with whom he had been happily compatible, and one can only imagine how he felt when the attractive and intelligent woman gave him her attention.  But Ada’s mother would never see Charles as a suitable husband for her daughter—she had ambitious plans for her, and she tolerated Babbage only as much as she did because of the affection that Ada had for him.  Nonetheless, Ada and Charles became very close as friends and met frequently and wrote long letters to each other, discussing problems and progress on the Difference Engine.

In December of 1834, Charles invited Lady Byron and Ada to his home where he described with great enthusiasm a vision he had of an even greater machine.  He called it his Analytical Engine, and it would surpass his Difference Engine in a crucial way:  where the Difference Engine needed to be reconfigured by hand before every new calculation, the Analytical Engine would never need to be touched, it just needed to be programmed with punched cards.  Charles was in top form as he wove his narrative, and even Lady Byron was caught up in his enthusiasm.  The effect on Ada, however, was nothing less than a religious conversion. 

Fig. 5 General block diagram of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. From [8].

Ada’s Notes

To meet Babbage as an equal, Lovelace began to study mathematics with an obsession, or one might say, with delusions of grandeur.  She wrote “I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature,” and she was convinced that she was destined to do great things.

Then, in 1835, Ada was married off to a rich but dull aristocrat who was elevated by royal decree to the Earldom of Lovelace, making her the Countess of Lovelace.  The marriage had little effect on Charles’ and Ada’s relationship, and he was invited frequently to the new home where they continued their discussions about the Analytical Engine. 

By this time Charles had informed the British government that he was putting all his effort into the design his new machine—news that was not received favorably since he had never delivered even a working Difference Engine.  Just when he hoped to start work on his Analytical Engine, the government ministers pulled their money. This began a decade’s long ordeal for Babbage as he continued to try to get monetary support as well as professional recognition from his peers for his ideas. Neither attempt was successful at home in Britain, but he did receive interest abroad, especially from a future prime minister of Italy, Luigi Menabrae, who invited Babbage to give a lecture in Turin on his Analytical Engine. Menabrae later had the lecture notes published in French. When Charles Wheatstone, a friend of Babbage, learned of Menabrae’s publication, he suggested to Lovelace that she translate it into English. Menabrae’s publication was the only existing exposition of the Analytical Engine, because Babbage had never written on the Engine himself, and Wheatstone was well aware of Lovelace’s talents, expecting her to be one of the only people in England who had the ability and the connections to Babbage to accomplish the task.

Ada Lovelace dove into the translation of Menabrae’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” with the single-mindedness that she was known for. Along with the translation, she expanded on the work with Notes of her own that she added, lettered from A to G. By the time she wrote them, Lovelace had become a top-rate mathematician, possibly surpassing even Babbage, and her Notes were three times longer than the translation itself, providing specific technical details and mathematical examples that Babbage and Menabrae only allude to.

On a different level, the character of Ada’s Notes stands in stark contrast to Charles’ exposition as captured by Menabrae: where Menabrae provided only technical details of Babbage’s Engine, Lovelace’s Notes captured the Engine’s potential. She was still a poet by disposition—that inheritance from her father was never lost.

Lovelace wrote:

We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Here she is referring to the punched cards that the Jacquard loom used to program the weaving of intricate patterns into cloth. Babbage had explicitly borrowed this function from Jacquard, adapting it to provide the programmed input to his Analytical Engine.

But it was not all poetics. She also saw the abstract capabilities of the Engine, writing

In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which in all mathematical analysis belong to operations, as distinguished from the objects operated upon and from the results of the operations performed upon those objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.

Again, it might act upon other things besides number, where objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine.

Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Here she anticipates computers generating musical scores.

Most striking is Note G. This is where she explicitly describes how the Engine would be used to compute numerical values as solutions to complicated problems. She chose, as her own example, the calculation of Bernoulli numbers which require extensive numerical calculations that were exceptionally challenging even for the best human computers of the day. In Note G, Lovelace writes down the step-by-step process by which the Engine would be programmed by the Jacquard cards to carry out the calculations. In the history of computer science, this stands as the first computer program.

Fig. 6 Table from Lovelace’s Note G on her method to calculate Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine.

When it was time to publish, Babbage read over Lovelace’s notes, checking for accuracy, but he appears to have been uninterested in her speculations, possibly simply glossing over them. He saw his engine as a calculating machine for practical applications. She saw it for what we know today to be the exceptional adaptability of computers to all realms of human study and activity. He did not see what she saw. He was consumed by his Engine to the same degree as she, but where she yearned for the extraordinary, he sought funding for the mundane costs of machining and materials.

Ada’s Business Plan Pitch

Ada Lovelace watched in exasperation as Babbage floundered about with ill-considered proposals to the government while making no real progress towards a working Analytical Engine. Because of her vision into the potential of the Engine, a vision that struck her to her core, and seeing a prime opportunity to satisfy her own yearning to make an indelible mark on the world, she despaired in ever seeing it brought to fruition. Charles, despite his genius, was too impractical, wasting too much time on dead ends and incapable of performing the deft political dances needed to attract support. She, on the other hand, saw the project clearly and had the time and money and the talent, both mathematically and through her social skills, to help.

On Monday August 14, 1843, Ada wrote what might be the most heart-felt and impassioned business proposition in the history of computing. She laid out in clear terms to Charles how she could advance the Analytical Engine to completion if only he would surrender to her the day-to-day authority to make it happen. She was, in essence, proposing to be the Chief Operating Officer in a disruptive business endeavor that would revolutionize thinking machines a hundred years before their time. She wrote (she liked to underline a lot):

“Firstly: I want to know whether if I continue to work on & about your own great subject, you will undertake to abide wholly by the judgment of myself (or of any persons whom you may now please to name as referees, whenever we may differ), on all practical matters relating to whatever can involve relations with any fellow-creature or fellow-creatures.

Secondly: can you undertake to give your mind wholly & 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; & can you promise not to slur & hurry things over; or to mislay, & allow confusion and mistakes to enter into documents, &c?

Thirdly: if I am able to lay before you in the course of a year or two, explicit & honorable propositions for executing your engine, (such as are approved by persons whom you may now name to be referred to for their approbation), would there be any chance of your allowing myself & such parties to conduct the business for you; your own undivided energies being devoted to the execution of the work; & all other matters being arranged for you on terms which your own friends should approve?“

This is a remarkable letter from a self-possessed 28-year-old woman, laying out in explicit terms how she proposed to take on the direction of the project, shielding Babbage from the problems of relating to other people or “fellow-creatures” (which was his particular weakness), giving him time to focus his undivided attention on the technical details (which was his particular strength), while she would be the outward face of the project that would attract the appropriate funding.

In her preface to her letter, Ada adroitly acknowledges that she had been a romantic disappointment to Charles, but she pleads with him not to let their personal history cloud his response to her proposal. She also points out that her keen intellect would be an asset to the project and asks that he not dismiss it because of her sex (which a biased Victorian male would likely do). Despite her entreaties, this is exactly what Babbage did. Pencilled on the top of the original version of Ada’s letter in the Babbage archives is his simple note: “Tuesday 15 saw AAL this morning and refused all the conditions”. He had not even given her proposal 24 hours consideration as he indeed slurred and hurried things over.

Aftermath

Babbage never constructed his Analytical Engine and never even wrote anything about it. All his efforts would have been lost to history if Alan Turing had not picked up on Ada’s Notes and expanded upon them a hundred years later, bringing both her and him to the attention of the nascent computing community.

Ada Lovelace died young in 1852, at the age of 36, of cancer. By then she had moved on from Babbage and was working on other things. But she never was able to realize her ambition of uncovering such secrets of nature as to change the world.

Ada had felt from an early age that she was destined for greatness. She never achieved it in her lifetime and one can only wonder what she thought about this as she faced her death. Did she achieve it in posterity? This is a hotly debated question. Some say she wrote the first computer program, which may be true, but little programming a hundred years later derived directly from her work. She did not affect the trajectory of computing history. Discovering her work after the fact is interesting, but cannot be given causal weight in the history of science. The Vikings were the first Europeans to discover America, but no-one knew about it. They did not affect subsequent history the way that Columbus did.

On the other hand, Ada has achieved greatness in a different way. Now that her story is known, she stands as an exemplar of what scientific and technical opportunities look like, and the risk of ignoring them. Babbage also did not achieve greatness during his lifetime, but he could have—if he had not dismissed her and her intellect. He went to his grave embittered rather than lauded because he passed up an opportunity he never recognized.

By David D. Nolte, June 26, 2023

References

[1] Facsimile of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage” translated by Ada Lovelace from Harvard University.

[2] Facsimile of Ada Lovelace’s “Notes by the Translator“.

[3] Stephen Wolfram, “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace“, Wolfram Writings (2015).

[4] J. Essinger, “Charles and Ada : The computer’s most passionate partnership,” (History Press, 2019).

[5] D. Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the quest to build the first computer (Penguin Books, 2002).

[6] W. Gibson, and B. Sterling, The Difference Engine (Bantam Books, 1992).

[7] L. J. Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club : Four remarkable friends who transformed science and changed the world (Broadway Books, 2011).

[8] Allan G. Bromley, Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1838, Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 4, Number 3, July 1982, pp. 196 – 217

Books by David Nolte at Oxford University Press
Read more in Books by David Nolte at Oxford University Press