MALE SPEAKER: Hello and welcome.
Thank you all for joining us
for another iteration of Authors
at Google, where we are
very pleased to welcome
Sydney Padua.
I hope I actually
pronounced that right.
I failed to ask.
So in recent months, we've
had the good fortune here
to host many leading lights.
We had Barney Frank, and more
recently, David Duchovny,
but today's guest puts
all of those to shame.
We are happy to have
a preeminent scholar
of the Victorian
computing era among us.
Sydney Padua, who
hails from Canada,
did her schoolwork at
University of Alberta,
where she got a PhD
apparently in footnotes
and has since become both
an impressive comic artist
and impressive scholar of the
history of early computing.
And as I was just
saying to her, I'm
very glad that she reads all
the primary source material so
that I don't have
to because there's
quite a copious
amount of it, and I'm
truly impressed by the depth
to which she has explored it.
So I guess without
further ado, we'll
welcome Sydney to tell us all
about Lovelace and Babbage
and the marvelous
history of computing.
[APPLAUSE]
SYDNEY PADUA: Thanks.
Hi.
My name is Sydney Padua.
I don't have a PhD I
should hasten to say.
So this is me.
I am just a random cartoonist
and also a VFX artist.
Most of the time, I
can be found making
imaginary monsters appear to
attack people for the movies.
I came from hand drawn
animation many years ago.
I worked on "Iron Giant,"
which is a film a lot of people
really like.
Since then, I've moved on to
computers, where apparently, I
work on blue and orange movies.
I have to say it's really
very strange and hilarious.
Five years ago,
if you had told me
I would be giving a talk
on computers at Google,
I would have
laughed in your face
because I was a very, very
reluctant convert to computer
animation.
I've always
distrusted computers.
I was probably the last person
to be dragged backwards,
with my fingernails
digging into the carpet,
into CG from hand
drawn animation.
But the reason I'm here
is because of these two
crazy kids.
So that's Ada Lovelace
and Charles Babbage.
I think a lot of people
know their story roughly
from computer science 101.
You kind of get
the quick rundown.
Charles Babbage, the
[INAUDIBLE] professor
of mathematics at Cambridge,
the position once held by Newton
and currently held, I
believe, by Stephen Hawking,
so he's pretty clever.
He was famous in
his own time for
this mysterious
calculating machine
which was perpetually
planned and never built,
which we would now
recognize as a computer.
It is really amazing
their computer,
as I'll talk about a bit later.
The other person in that
duo is Ada Lovelace.
She was born Ada Gordon,
probably better known
as Ada Gordon, daughter
of George Gordon,
better known as Lord
Byron, the infamous poet.
I learned about these people
when I was in a pub in London
with a friend of mine,
Suw Charman-Anderson, who
started this thing called
Ada Lovelace Day, which
you might be familiar with.
It's sort of an online
blogging festival
every year to celebrate
women in computing
and raise their profile.
And she said to me, Sydney,
you're a woman in tech now.
You should do a blog post
for Ada Lovelace Day.
And I said, I don't even
know who Ada Lovelace is.
I'm also not really
a woman in tech.
I work on tech.
I'm not in tech.
But I went to Wikipedia,
like anybody else would,
and there I found this
extraordinary story
about Lovelace, who was
raised by mathematicians so
that she would not become a
crazy poet like her father.
It had very much a feel of
a superhero origin story.
It had that nice, angsty
story of conflict.
I thought, oh, that would make
a really cute little comic.
And I thought
because I didn't know
who Lovelace was that a
nice idea for a blog post
would just be a
short, little comic.
I did it as a strip so
it's about this long,
just explaining who Ada Lovelace
is, and I did it like this.
So this is all true.
I can now verify, having read
a hell of a lot of letters--
sorry, heck of a
lot of letters--
that Lovelace's mother was
very concerned that she not
become "poetical,"
which I believe
was a Victorian euphemism
for not ladylike or wild.
So she had her tutored
in mathematics and logic.
She met Babbage at a party in
1833, always the best place
to meet someone.
He's leaning there on the only
working fragment of a machine
that he built. That's a
fragment of the difference
engine, which was a calculator.
You can actually see that
piece, a beautiful machine
made of brass, in the
Science Museum in London.
It's about this big.
And you could turn a crank
and it could turn out
some little calculations.
At this party,
apparently someone
said, "Has everyone gazed
upon the machine like savages
looking at a looking glass?"
Only Ada Byron understood the
true beauty of the machine
and understand its function.
She sort of hung out
with Babbage for a while.
She became very fascinated
with his machine,
in fact, obsessed with
the analytical engine
and wrote, of course, a
famous paper about it,
which I'll talk about in a bit.
However, this was
a very short comic.
I should stress the original
comic was maybe four pages long
laid out.
And of course, I
reached the end, which
is a really stupid ending,
said Babbage doesn't build
his machine and
Lovelace dies at 36
and it's 100 years before
there's another computer.
So this was a real dead
end, unfortunately,
in computing history.
I think I knocked this whole
comic out in an evening,
and when I reached this
panel, it was about midnight
and I thought, ugh, I
can't end it like that.
That's terrible.
So I just threw in
as a joke this panel.
I think I was aware of steampunk
as a thing that existed,
so I just threw them in fabulous
clothes and gave them ray guns
and resurrected them
briefly as a punchline.
I think I was thinking
of "The Avengers."
It's uncanny.
So I kind of threw the
comic up online on my blog
and went to bed, and then
when I woke the next morning,
it was turning up
all over the internet
as, "This person is going to do
a comic in which Ada Lovelace
and Charles Babbage
fight crime."
It was a joke.
I succumb easily
to peer pressure,
and also, I was putting off
working on something else,
so I started drawing comics
about Ada Lovelace and Charles
Babbage fighting crime.
Anyone who's read the
comic will tell you this
is a very sporadic comic.
They fight crime.
They fight it quite badly.
It's quite a silly
comic I should stress.
Anyone expecting a very serious
comic about Victorian computing
is going to be out
of luck because it's
quite silly, especially because
their chief enemies, of course,
as they were in life, were
poetry and street music.
Babbage's famous bugbear
was street music,
so that's his main
nemesis is the organist.
Aside from silly comics,
if you look at the book,
you will notice there's quite a
lot of words in it for a comic.
This is because as I
was doing the blog,
I became very
obsessed with reading
all the wonderful
primary documents that
were turning up online.
In a sense, the
footnotes are a joke
on Lovelace's
famous paper, which
you can see on Google Books.
This is it as it
originally appeared.
Lovelace wrote her paper.
It began as a translation.
Babbage himself
never wrote, never
published anything on his own
machine, or anything in detail,
and of course, women
did not normally
publish scientific papers.
This was not something
that was done.
However, there was
a space for women
to do translations as sort
of a ladylike accomplishment.
So when this paper--
this is Menabrea.
He eventually became
prime minister of Italy.
At the time, he was a guy at a
conference where Babbage spoke
and described his machine.
Menabrea took notes.
He published the
notes in French.
A year later, Lovelace
translated the notes
from the French into the English
and begin adding footnotes
because as she read along.
She herself was considered an
"expert" on Babbage's machine
at this time, mostly by
hanging out and continually
begging him for the plans.
So she was known as someone
who knew a lot about it.
That's why she was asked
to translate the paper.
But as she went down
the translation,
she began to add
footnotes saying,
actually, I have a much
clearer illustration of this,
or in fact, another way
to say this is this.
A lot, I think to some
extent, she's actually
writing the footnotes to Babbage
because she often says things
like, "I don't know
if this has occurred
to the creator of the
calculating machine,
but I have this idea about
how this could actually work."
And this is one of
those notes where
she says-- this is the first
appearance of general computing
theory-- "in enabling the
mechanism to combine together
general symbols in successions
of unlimited variety
and extent--" she goes on.
She's Victorian,
so these sentences
get extremely lengthy.
If you battle your way
through this paper,
you'll see it's not the most
readable thing in the world,
but it is wonderful and it can
be found on Google Books, which
is my favorite
thing in the world
and which is why
I'm so delighted
always to speak to Google
because this entire comic would
not have been possible without
the incredible cornucopia
of amazing documents that were
poured out right around 2009
when I began comic.
Google Books was
dumping, basically,
all this 19th century
ephemera online.
I should stress again
I'm not a proper scholar.
I'm just some random clown.
But the great power
of Google Books
is that I don't have to go
through some specific place
in an archive and know
what I'm looking for.
I can just type "Babbage
street music 1830-1870,"
and you would get
amazing amounts of stuff.
This is what it
looks like in situ.
"A Great Calculator, Anecdotes
of the Famous Problem Solver
Babbage."
I think the first thing
I was surprised to find
when I started my research
was how famous Babbage was.
This was actually from
the Salt Lake City News,
and Babbage was famous enough
that the Salt Lake City
News would run some random
anecdotes about him.
I also like this because
of the "Pocket cigar case
free to smokers of
Tansills Punch."
This is a great
set of anecdotes.
This is in the book, I
believe, and actually, they
come to some Lovelace
stuff in the end.
I think she says, "Our family
is an alternate stratification
of poetry and mathematics"
along the line there.
Also, to get a sense
of the Victorian era,
"A clever woman is one whose
ability is never unpleasantly
felt by the rest of the world."
So I found just fantastic stuff.
"This calculating machine was an
endless subject of monologue."
A lot of people remarked
on Babbage's tendency
to go on and on about
his calculating machine.
What else?
Of course, it wasn't only
Google that I found stuff in.
The general method
of my approaching
the comic was I
would run around,
read a bunch of
primary documents,
and then just riff on it,
basically, in a comic.
This is from when Queen
Victoria's diaries were
digitized and put online.
so of course I immediately
searched Babbage,
who was, by the way,
very obsessed with what other
people thought about him.
He used to keep a scrapbook
with all of his news clippings
in it.
And I like this.
This is a classic
Babbage quotation.
Lord M-- that's
Lord Melbourne-- has
said, "Babbage has made
a great fool of himself,
as he does everywhere."
Poor old Babbage.
He had many, many
fantastic talents,
but he did have some
issues socializing properly
with people.
So that's Queen Victoria
on Charles Babbage.
This is Babbage in Punch
on the Great Exhibition.
He's very angry at
only being honorably
mentioned-- "Is that all?
Scandalous!"-- to go into
the Great Exhibition of 1851.
He was very angry
that they didn't
put his calculating
machine in there.
I think the feeling was
that people would not
understand what it
was, which I think
shows a sad underestimation
of the British public.
I think people would have
thought it was great.
I like this one, "Babbage, the
logarthmicetical Frankenstein."
That's from Google Books.
There's a ton of primary
documents in the book,
probably too many, apparently.
This is 1833, The
New York Mirror.
You need good eyes
to read this one.
"Oh fie.
It is said that Ada Byron, sole
daughter of the noble bard,
is the most coarse and vulgar
woman in England," which
I do have her swear
a fair bit, so that's
sourced, if anyone's dubious
about the historical accuracy
of that.
You'll notice these
wrong pop-ups here.
That is also sourced.
Babbage did, in fact,
invent an error pop-up
for the analytical
engine, believe it or not.
"If any mistake had been
made by the attendant
and a wrong logarithm had
been accidentally given
to the engine, at
the proper place,
you'd see a plate above the
logarithm with the word 'wrong'
engraved on it."
He later adds the continually
ringing loud bell,
which I'm sure would be
absolutely delightful if you
were the attendant
trying to hunt down
this error in this
gigantic machine.
So this is Lovelace debugging
one of these error pop-ups
here with a crowbar, which
is the only way you can
debug the analytical engine.
So this just my
joke on the subject.
"Let's see how Lady
Lovelace is getting on."
Some cartoon swears
which I won't say
because this is being recorded.
"That's a special language
we're developing just
for the engine."
Babbage and Lovelace
were actually
both very funny people.
People tended to remark
on them as being eccentric
and tell stories about
how strange they were.
But amongst all the wonderful
things in Google Books,
this is by far my favorite.
This was a really magical
find that would only
have been possible
with Google Books
because this is
from a thing called
the Southern Review, which
was a short lived journal
out of, I believe, Maryland.
It was put out in
1867, this is from,
"to celebrate the
culture of the South
in the wake of the Civil War."
It reads like a church circular.
It's clippings from all sorts
of random stuff happening
around Maryland, generally
speaking, but one of them
is your basic letter
home to the folks
from the guy who took
a trip to Europe.
This is Walter Reed, who is a
wonderful writer, by the way.
He was actually
from Pennsylvania,
an English professor
there, and he
writes by far the most
vivid description of Babbage
that I found from the period.
This is actually a
letter from 1854.
I don't know why.
I guess they had some space to
fill in the old Southern Review
10 years later because I'm not
quite sure why they put it in.
They put in the entire letter,
which is about 13 pages long.
He meets several people,
but one of them is Babbage,
and there's just
a magical section.
This is about two years
after Lovelace had died,
and we get here,
"After he got up to go,
by some chance of conversation,
the late Lady Lovelace's name,
Lord Byron's daughter
Ada, was mentioned.
He knew her intimately
and spoke highly
of her mathematical powers
and of her peculiar capability
higher, he said, then that of
anyone he knew, to prepare,
I believe it was the
descriptions connected
with his calculating machine.
I fear I'm not expressing
myself rightly here
as to the precise
nature of the subject."
And I think he's talking
about the programs
here, the descriptions
of how the machine would
go through a problem.
So this is something
that would not
have been found without
Google search, basically.
If you were a Babbage
scholar, I can't
see any conceivable
reason you would
be reading through every
single issue of the Southern
Review, 1867.
So thank you, Google.
It's just a magical thing.
The other stream
of research I took
was regarding the
analytical engine.
In addition to all these
wonderful primary documents
that are extremely evocative of
Babbage and Lovelace as people,
they are extremely
vivid personalities
and they write all
their own material.
They come up with great gags for
themselves and great dialogue.
But there's sort of a third
character in the comic,
and that was always
the analytical engine.
As I said, I'm not
a computer person,
so for me, when I tended
to draw the engine,
it's this vast, building
sized labyrinth of confusion.
People tend to get lost
and attacked in it.
But I guess as I was
drawing the comic,
I began being really
frustrated by the fact
that pretty much every
book, even fairly
specialist books on the engine,
would, A, say it was exactly
like a modern computer but
it's too complicated for you
to understand it.
And also, they wouldn't give me
a drawing of the engine, which
really, as a comic
artist, I want
to see a drawing of a huge
ass engine made of cogs.
It's just eye candy.
I had to actually
make one myself
so you can get a sense
of what this engine was.
A lot of you are familiar.
Sorry, this is my own video,
and I know I shot it like a noob
in portrait.
So this is the beautiful--
let me turn on the sound
because you have to hear it.
This is the difference
engine that they've built
in Mountain View, California.
This is them demonstrating
it for me, which
was just wonderful of them.
You can hear me oohing and
aahing like an idiot over it.
Those beautiful arms at the
back are carrying the ones.
So that's the difference engine.
It's a huge machine and
it's incredibly beautiful
and incredibly
clever, but that's not
the analytical engine.
There's two machines of
Babbage, the difference engine
and the analytical engine.
The difference engine
is essentially an adder.
It really only adds.
It adds in a very specific
way and a very clever way,
but it can only add.
Right around the early
1830s, pretty much
when Babbage met Lovelace,
he began to think,
what if you could
take the sum that
came out of one
end of the engine
and put it back
in the other end?
He described this as the
engine eating its own tail.
So he devised a second
machine, the analytical engine.
He didn't build either of
them, partly because it's just
really super hard.
I think a lot of
people asked me,
why didn't Babbage build
the analytical engine?
It's actually really,
really, really hard
to build a giant computer
entirely made of cogs.
It's not a disgrace
not to complete it.
Babbage also kept
changing the plans.
So this is the famous Plan 25.
It's the most beautiful
and the most complete
of Babbage's plans.
This is from 1840, so
this is the machine
that Lovelace would have
been writing her paper about.
So at first, as a comic
artist who is not very clever,
I looked at this picture and
said, ooh, and then I said,
I have no idea what
I'm looking at here.
So in order to draw
the machine accurately,
I had to basically
go in and start
doing elevations and hunt down
as many of Babbage's diagrams
as I could.
It was by no means
straightforward to do
an image of this,
partly because Babbage
wasn't very good at showing
complete elevations.
So this is very much an
interpretation of me,
but anyway, this is possibly
the first visualization
of the entire engine.
You may go "ooh" because
it took me forever.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
There's the punch
cards at the bottom.
I'll actually show
you in animation
how I believe it works
because it's much clearer.
There's a lot going on.
Basically, you have storage
going down the back here.
This is a whole line of gears.
For Babbage, this
machine was exclusively
a machine for doing arithmetic.
The entire bulk of this
thing is numerical.
So each of these columns
represent a number
with 50 decimal places.
So each little gear has a number
from one to 10, its decimal,
on it.
So you set this to 5,
this to 2, and then
you have 25, this
to 3, you have 325.
So it just goes up.
And so if you have a
column of 50 gears,
it's a column of a number
of 50 decimal places.
50 is a lot of decimal places.
Babbage said himself that
the reason he put in so many
is that he thought
that should "be
sufficient for all future
purposes of science."
That's Babbage all over for you.
So here's the three
types of punch cards
that I'll go through
in a bit, barrels.
I should say I think the
machine was probably actually
a bit taller than this.
Cats for scale.
I think also it's very likely
it could have been freestanding.
I think you would
have had to have
enmeshed the entire
thing in an enormous cage
to keep it stable.
The whole machine is based
around numerical gears that
turn around and they have
locks to hold it in place,
and if the lock hits
a tooth at any point
in this gigantic machine,
the whole thing will freeze.
So absolutely nothing
can be out of alignment
by so much as a
couple of millimeters,
so stability would be
a big, big, big issue
with this machine.
Although, that said,
the difference engine
works on that same principle,
and generally speaking,
it hardly ever crashes ever.
AUDIENCE: Do replicas
of the [INAUDIBLE]?
SYDNEY PADUA: No.
They think there are only 20,
so you have a little more space
for error in those.
So that's the analytical engine.
So in the book, without
the power of animation,
this is the plan I did.
It's actually quite a bit
more clear in animation.
I had a great
advantage in building
these diagrams in that I
am a computer animator,
so I work on this
thing all day long.
So this is a simplification.
This is sort of a
cartoon engine version
that's stripped down,
partly because it's
really difficult to see
what's going on when you have
the whole thing in,
and also, it's so huge,
so you have helpfully labeled
the layer "whole thing."
It's so huge my
machine really starts
to struggle once you
put in all those gears,
but it's just decimal places.
So this is actually just a
slice, and each slice going up
is exactly the
same, so you don't
need all those 50 to understand
the information flow.
So here's your engine.
I'm assuming you guys
are interested in this,
because [INAUDIBLE].
Some people start
to glaze over, but I
thought Google would
probably be into it.
So just so I can explain here,
basically, the red colors
indicate the driver and
the greens are passive.
So the first thing that
activates is the number card,
and that will be a card
with each 50 decimal number
in holes, basically, or
rather, a lack of holes.
The way these punch
card things work,
so you have a whole
arrangement of levers,
each lined up to all the holes.
You'll have a hole
pretty much everywhere
except for one point.
So as the card is pushed over
the levers, if there's holes,
it just goes right
through, nothing happens,
but if there's no
hole, then the card
will push the lever at that
corresponding position,
so that's how the
punch cards work.
So that will basically
select a bunch of levers,
50 of them-- I
haven't animated 50
because that was
just way too much
work-- and that sends
it to an address
on the store The address
is on the card as well.
Babbage has an
addressing system.
The machine is an incredibly
beautiful and incredibly clever
thing, and really
shockingly like a computer.
This is the store.
This is short.
The store would have gone
on into the distance.
Babbage said maybe 100,
maybe 1,000, maybe 5,000.
Everyone wants more
storage, obviously.
You'd run into a problem
because the entire way
that these read-- so it reads
one number onto the store,
and then reads the second
number into the store,
so that's the two
storage positions.
Now, this is the
operations card.
I should say I'm slightly fuzzy
as to the order of events.
I think the operation
card is next
but it might be the address,
but it doesn't actually matter.
The operations cards
are amazingly clever.
They were quite small cards.
A single hole would then
rotate these barrels
to a certain position.
There's actually
three sets of barrels,
and each of the barrels has
50 or 80 rows of pegs around.
So a single hole in
an operations card
could activate dozens
and dozens of levers,
which is what you need
to run an operation.
The machine could do
basically four things.
It could add, subtract,
multiply, divide.
Any more complicated
mathematical thing
you did, you would have to be
very clever in the programming
end, break it down into
those four operations,
run it down a string of cards.
So all those levers are
activated, and what they do
is they then engage
all the levers
at one of these sections.
Basically, each of
these little sections,
this is just a cartoon version.
All these little sections
are beautifully worked out
and extremely complicated.
But each of these
little sections
does a specific thing,
adding or carrying ones.
If you were
multiplying a number,
it would break it up into
multiply by 1, multiply by 2,
multiply by 3, into all
these sections for speed.
So it basically
engages that section
so it's all ready to go.
Then the variable card, which
is the third kind of card,
this is the addressing
system, basically.
It then says, OK, pick up
from address number one,
engages the rack.
The rack slides
off into what you
call the ingress axis, which
is this one at the front here.
Sorry.
I'm pointing, which
you can't see.
So this is the
position in the store,
so it actively reads out to
the passive ingress axis.
Then that engages the big
central wheel possibly.
I mean, this is all much
more complicated, actually.
There's way more bits
than I'm showing here.
And then this becomes
active and reads the number
off into whatever section
has been indicated,
reads the second number.
So now it's got both numbers,
and then it does a thing,
basically.
Each of these little bits
is very, very specialized
for a specific
arithmetical thing.
You'll notice the barrels
are turning around.
The barrel would
have, basically,
a little program
in wedges around.
So once you set it up
with one operations card,
then it runs through a
little micro program.
[MECHANICAL SOUND] That's
my scientific sound
that it would make.
So once it's done, hooks back
up so that now it's ready to go.
The number is processed.
So it's taken those two numbers.
It could only work on
two numbers at a time
and spit out a result.
So it takes that number,
hooks up to the output.
The output hooks up
to the variable card
to take the address that it's
supposed to read out to you
and then reads out.
So now you have the
results on the store,
and that will animate for you.
Now you understand how
everything's going on.
It runs in cycles
like a computer.
They're just way,
way, way slower.
Multiplication might
take a few minutes
to run because it's got to go
through over and over again.
I don't know much
about computers.
I probably know more about
the analytical engine
and how it works than a
computer and how it works,
but it is remarkably
computer like and it's
incredibly detailed.
This is not an abstract concept.
Babbage left extremely detailed
plans for all these levers.
He thought through all the
timing, all the weights
and all that stuff.
And there is, in fact, I
should give a plug to Plan 28.
If you go to plan28.org,
there's some crazy folks
who are trying to get one
built in reality like they've
built the difference engine.
So that's the analytical
engine and a bunch
of primary documents and
my comic, and that's it.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I think we have a few
minutes for questions
if anyone has any questions.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So you said there would
be one layer of these
for every digit
of the 50 digits.
Do you know how the carry
system worked between layers?
SYDNEY PADUA: Yes.
Actually, I put a
video on YouTube up
and it took me nine minutes to
explain the analytical engine
carry.
I guess I could put it up.
I could bring up that
file and explain it.
He basically uses a very,
very ingenious system.
The carry arms, the
spiral ones that
go up the back of the
difference engine,
Babbage discarded those
because they were too slow.
They cost 10 imaginary seconds
off his imaginary machine.
So he devised-- and this
was by far his favorite part
of the engine was
the ones mechanism,
so he would be absolutely
thrilled that someone
was asking that question.
In his autobiography,
he says, this
is by far the most
important part of the engine
is the system for
carrying the ones.
Basically, he had a little
peg on the nine on each gear.
So as it came around,
if there was a peg--
it's really hard to explain.
If there's a peg and a
peg below for a carry,
it would lift two carries
onto the next gear.
It's super hard to explain,
but if you come up after,
I'll show you the
animation, and everyone
who's into it can see it,
which is probably everybody,
actually.
It does take awhile to explain
because it's quite fiddly,
but he had it all
worked out, for sure.
AUDIENCE: You may have implied
an answer to this question,
but it sounds like you do have
YouTube videos with things
like this explaining
all the parts as well?
SYDNEY PADUA: Yeah,
I've got a couple.
The carry one is
the most complete.
This one I'll put up
shortly with an explanation.
I just have the animation
with no explanation right now.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: So you said that
the operations it could do
did the four fundamental
arithmetic operations.
It actually divides?
SYDNEY PADUA: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Wow, because
division is arithmetically
a far more complicated
operation to do,
and modern CPUs devote
an inordinate number
of transistors to
division alone.
So how is division
implemented here?
SYDNEY PADUA: You're
asking me to explain--
and actually, division is
the one I'm fuzziest on.
I haven't built it yet.
Basically, it's unwinding
it, if that makes sense.
So to multiply, it's
winding around and around
and it's got accumulators,
and to divide, it
unwinds by the divisor.
It breaks up the
divisor into units
and then unwinds
it unit by unit.
It's quite complicated and,
like everything Babbage did,
it's very, very clever but
quite Rube Goldbergian.
AUDIENCE: Seems
like you could just
go through and
stamp on every part,
"This part is quite clever."
SYDNEY PADUA: He was so clever.
AUDIENCE: So Ada
Lovelace famously
wrote programs for this device.
Were her programs
strictly mathematical?
Was she calculating logarithms
and that sort of thing,
or was there any approach
towards the more general
computation?
SYDNEY PADUA: Lovelace's
paper has a bunch of programs.
Most of them are quite short and
were Babbage's little tiny work
outs.
There's a huge fold out one,
the Bernoulli numbers one, that
demonstrates all the loops.
This machine can
loop, by the way.
It can instruct itself
to go background.
Those programs are all
strictly mathematical,
and Babbage for sure
only saw the machine
as for doing
specifically arithmetic.
AUDIENCE: So no Minecraft, then?
SYDNEY PADUA: No.
It was Lovelace who looked
at the machine and said,
actually, with the new
developments in logic--
this was before [INAUDIBLE]
by about 10 years,
but she was a student
of Augustus De
Morgan, who was trying to
find this way of mathematizing
logic.
So she looked at it, said,
with these levers and pegs,
you could in theory turn this
into a logic machine, not
an arithmetic machine.
And her example was
music theory, which
is probably way in advance.
But she said if you could
take the rules of music theory
and find a way to express them
into-- she didn't use the word
program, but into a set
of rules for the machine,
the machine could in
theory compose music,
"scientific music," she
said, of any extent.
But no, we don't have,
unfortunately, any experiments
in that direction from her.
And I think to actually do that
sort of thing with the machine,
you'd have to redesign
the whole thing
because the enormous bulk
of it is really, really,
very, very specialized
to arithmetical bits.
AUDIENCE: So I'm
really blown away
by the extent to which you got
your head into the workings
of this machine.
I also expect you got your head
into the workings of Charles
Babbage and Lovelace personally.
Can you talk to me a
little bit about how
you came to grips with what
motivates them as people
and to what extent
you personally
identified with them in the
process of doing all that work?
SYDNEY PADUA: They
both definitely
became incredibly
absorbed with this machine
and what it could do.
In terms of what drove
them, it's hard to say.
I mean, I think once you
see how it could work,
especially if you're Charles
Babbage with this brain that
can see all these possibilities
and that can see the machine.
I guess, what you call his
spatial reasoning skills must
have been remarkable.
It drove him nuts that something
he could see so clearly
wasn't actually
happening, so he became
obsessed with solving
all the problems
and he kept solving the
problems past the point
that the problems were so many
decades away from existing.
You're like, Babbage, stop.
The carrying mechanism
is classic Babbage
in that he had a
carrying mechanism
design that worked,
the difference engine
one, but if it was too slow.
It couldn't look ahead.
It had to feel
out one at a time.
And he spent a year.
He says in his autobiography,
he spent an entire year
shaving these imaginary
seconds off of this machine.
So for him, it was definitely
solving all these problems
and getting the perfect machine.
For Lovelace, as always,
she's a lot murkier
and more complicated.
In the comics, she can be the
Batman-esque, angst ridden one.
She actually wrote in
a letter to her mother,
it was a bit weird.
Obviously, her father's
legacy as a genius,
but also as a genius who
had brought basically
sex and danger
into the world, she
said to herself that she felt
she should redeem her father's
legacy by finding a way to unify
poetry and mathematics, which
is an extraordinarily strange
thing but an extraordinarily
marvelous thing to say.
She said she wanted to create
a poetical science, which
in a way, if you think
about it, programming
is sort of a poetical science.
It's a unifying of
metaphor and logic
in a way that's very beautiful.
So for her, she felt that
she had this dark legacy
that she had to redeem.
And in terms of
identification, I don't know.
I could never have come up
with this in 15 million years.
I'm not a super genius, and I
really felt that every second,
looking at this machine, and
also at Lovelace's paper.
To make the leap from this
before, again, as I say,
logic at the time was still
basically Aristotelian
in terms of sentences
and syllogisms.
To look at this machine
and say, there's
got to be a way to make
logic this perfect and this
machine-like, and then this
machine could compose music.
I mean, it's just a
completely extraordinary feat
of imagination to see
that in the machine.
I'm just completely blown
away by their genius
and I'm humbled by it.
Does that answer the question?
AUDIENCE: So in my
reading about this,
I stumbled on
something about I think
they were a pair
of Swedish brothers
that actually commercially
made several difference engines
and had customers for them.
Did you stumble on that as well?
I don't remember their names.
SYDNEY PADUA: Scheutz.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, that's right.
SYDNEY PADUA: I'm not sure if
I've ever heard it pronounced.
I think it's "Shoots."
They were Swedish.
And actually, I was delighted
to see some Swedish comics blog
pop up when the book came
out saying, as we all know,
the difference
engine was actually
built by the famous Swedes,
the Scheutz brothers.
Everyone has their own national
history in the computer.
Yeah, they built
their own machine off
of Babbage's
arithmetic, basically,
this method of differences, but
they had a completely different
mechanical system.
When I saw one at
the science museum,
I thought it was a model
because it's a tenth of the size
or less than Babbage's engine.
There is, in fact, a beautiful
video of it on YouTube.
If you look up "Scheutz
difference engine,"
it'll come up, because I
think the Smithsonian has
one that they run
every once in awhile.
It's an absolutely
delightful little machine.
But as it turned
out, nobody really
needed a difference
engine after all,
so I don't think they
made any fortune off
of it, unfortunately.
AUDIENCE: I think I
heard they did three.
SYDNEY PADUA: Yeah.
I guess the Astronomical
Lab in the US bought one,
and there was one in
England and one in Sweden,
I guess, and everyone
was like, oh actually,
these aren't that useful.
It's quite sad, actually.
AUDIENCE: I recall a
reference early in the book,
it was a passing reference,
it must have been a footnote,
that mathematics would
not only probably
be too rigorous for
the spirit of a woman,
but also her
constitution, which seems,
obviously, odd to modern ears.
How many women mathematicians
were there at the time?
Lovelace seems to have been
fairly well accepted as one,
but was it, in fact,
an anomaly for there
to be a woman mathematician?
Was she seen of
some sort of oddity?
SYDNEY PADUA: I mean, people
tend to see it as cute,
to be honest.
They tend to write, oh,
isn't that adorable, a woman
trying to do mathematics?
The letter about mathematics
damaging a woman's constitution
is actually from Augustus De
Morgan, who wrote to her mother
twice, apparently, saying,
I'm very, very concerned
because Lady Lovelace has
as much mathematical power
as would challenge the
constitution of a man,
and somehow he felt
that it was over
clocked for a woman's body.
I mean, this was actually
a very common idea.
He gave me some
great comic dialogue.
He said, "Soon, the struggle
between body and mind
will begin."
It's actually incredibly sad
and ironic because the idea was
that mathematics, this excessive
use of that part of the brain,
would specifically
damage women's wombs,
and Lovelace did, in fact,
die of uterine cancer.
I can't find anyone
using that as proof.
I'm sure somebody
somewhere said, I told you.
And actually, Lovelace's
mentor was Mary Somerville,
after whom Somerville
College in Oxford is named.
She did all these very
complicated translations
of works from the continent,
and Lovelace is very
definitely modeling
herself on Somerville
in doing the translation of
the analytical engine paper.
But Somerville had
to study in secret
because her parents
thought she would
hurt herself studying math.
I think her first husband didn't
agree with her studying math,
so she wrote her first
mathematics books
when she was 45 when he died.
That's when she got
her first freedom.
So no, it was
very, very unusual.
Lovelace is kind of at
the end of that era.
They started to have
women's programs in college
in the 1870s, 1880s,
and I think that's when
it started to turn around.
AUDIENCE: So I want to thank you
for all the amazing work you've
done, the great comic and
the really beautiful book,
but I've got to wonder,
where are you heading now?
You said that you were
ambushed by the comic.
Is there still going
to be a comic, I hope?
SYDNEY PADUA: I get
this question a lot.
Actually, I have not quit
the proverbial day job.
I still work as an animator,
which is quite all consuming
work when it's on.
I definitely have a bunch
more comics I'm dying to do.
I've got a ton of sketches,
so when work dies down a bit,
I'll be cracking on, for sure.
AUDIENCE: My understanding
is that there
was a couple of critical
problems, maybe just one, that
needed the difference engine.
Back when Babbage was born,
"computer" was a job title.
They were the people who
manually computed tables
of logarithms and they
were full of errors,
and this led to things
like ships sinking.
It may just be that one
difference engine was
enough to solve that
problem and there
weren't any other problems.
SYDNEY PADUA: Yeah.
This was Babbage's thing.
The difference engine
wasn't supposed
to solve a specific calculation.
It was supposed to print
out these big tables.
What would happen is you'd
have these giant books
of every iteration of a problem,
and then when you were at sea
without your difference engine
or in your accountant's office
or whatever, you would
just go to volume 15
and pull it up and look up
that one little iteration.
But Babbage himself actually
supervised this production
of these beautifully triple
checked, error free logarithm
tables, after which you
don't need it anymore
because they're all done.
The difference engine
was redundant by the time
those tables were printed.
I think for him, it was
more of an art object maybe.
He used to throw a lot of stuff
around about all the problems
it could solve, but he was
really more into just building
the engine itself, I think.
AUDIENCE: What's happening to
your originals from the buck?
SYDNEY PADUA:
There are, in fact,
no originals from the book.
It's completely drawn in
Photoshop, [INAUDIBLE].
So it's a virtual comic,
computer generated.
AUDIENCE: So if the
point of the engine
was to produce tables of
numbers without errors
and he had 50 decimal
digits of precision,
did he ever work
out how many volumes
were going to be required
to print that out?
SYDNEY PADUA: I am
quite sure he did.
Babbage loved working
stuff like that out.
So I can't tell
you specifically,
but I will tell you if
it involves working out
an amount of a
thing, Babbage would
have done it at some point.
AUDIENCE: Even
under fixed point,
you're talking about
a lot of books.
Are there any other questions?
OK.
Well, let's thank our guest.
Thank you very much.
SYDNEY PADUA: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
