I'm Sally [INAUDIBLE].
I'm professor in the English faculty here.
But perhaps more pertinently, for
the conference, I'm the PI on NHRC funded project,
Constructing Scientific Communities, Citizen Science in the 19th and
21st Centuries, to something I think that Ada would very much have approved of.
Seeing as what we're hoping to do is to unveil the hidden history of all those who
were working in science in the 19th century outside the professional domain.
Also, currently,
we're working with the wonderful online citizen science program Zooniverse,
which is extending science participation to over 1.3 million people at the moment.
So wonderful legacy, I think, of Ada.
I'd now like to introduce our first speaker, Dr.
Elizabeth Bruton who is a researcher in history of science,
based at the History of Science Museum in Oxford.
Thank you, Elizabeth.
>> Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for the invitation to speak here today.
And I'm really delighted to be part of this very exciting two day event and
I very much enjoyed the papers this morning, as well.
In this paper, the recently
published comic by Sydney Padra who is in the audience around here somewhere.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and
Babbage features a fictionalized version of the two historic characters.
One based on contemporary material and is the latest popular cultural representation
of Ada Lovelace, as well as Charles Babbage.
To mark the 200th anniversary of Lovelace's birth today, I will review and
explore academic and popular representations of Ada Lovelace, and
engage with controversy and
debate about Lovelace's claims as the first computer programmer.
Just to note before I begin, I'm aware that she has three different titles
throughout her lifetime, Ada Byron, the Lady King, the Countess of Lovelace.
But I've chosen, throughout her life, to refer to her as the modern term,
Ada Lovelace, even when perhaps she is, in fact, Ada Byron.
Just to clarify that, so I'm going to begin with the writings on and
about Ada Lovelace during her lifetime
as sort of a baseline to understand the contemporary understandings of her work.
Including her working relationship with Babbage, and
her contribution to the translations and notes.
Then I will move forwards just over 100 years to the mid-20th century, and locate
her work within the early histories of computer programming and computer science.
And how it was viewed and indeed, used by pioneers in the field
who mapped some of the work by Babbage and Lovelace in mathematics and calculation
onto the early computer programming and systems that they were using.
I'll then move on to the 1970s through to the present day to show how academic
interest and ideas about Babbage but more importantly,
Lovelace developed from the 1970s through to the present day.
To discuss the debate about her contributions and
whether we could consider her a computer programmer,
a debugger or maybe something completely different.
I will then show how Lovelace became, as a result of sort of academic and
popular interest, became a figure in popular culture, more generally.
Particularly, in the steam [INAUDIBLE] genre, particularly interested in her role
in the difference engine novel as well as Sydney [INAUDIBLE] work, and
indeed others.
How she came, at least, in popular culture,
to be understood as a figurehead and a role model and icon for women in STEM and
indeed, women in the history of STEM, which is something I believe will be
discussed in more detail later this afternoon.
In her lifetime, Ada Lovelace was probably best known for
her parentage, in particular being the only legitimate child of Lord Byron,
as much as for her intellectual activities and interest in mathematics and science.
Lovelace only knew her father in the first month of her life,
as we heard earlier this morning.
He separated from her mother a month after Lovelace was born, and left
England forever four months later, just around a year after they'd been married.
Lovelace had an early and natural interest in machines, in mathematics and
science, as we've heard earlier this morning.
Her somewhat distant but intellectually and
educationally progressive mother encouraged her interests by arranging for
her to receive a first class education even in science, mathematics, and logic.
Her mother also remained concerned about the influence of Byron's romantic nature
and mental instability upon her daughter and
believed her education might be one way to overcome this.
However, in many ways, Lovelace embodied what might later come
to be known as two cultures of science and humanities.
As we've heard earlier,
this is also a tension between her relationship with her mother and father.
With Lovelace describing her approach as poetical science and
herself as an analyst and metaphysician.
Babbage also acknowledged this dichotomy,
describing her in 1843 as the enchantress of numbers.
Quoting, forget this world and all its troubles, and if possible its
multitudinous charlatans, everything in short but the enchantress of numbers.
In her lifetime, the most substantial material relation to her contribution to
Babbage's difference engine are her translations of and
notes relating to Italian military engineer Menabrea's French
language memoir, sketch of the analytical engine, invented by Charles Babbage,
deposited at the Biblioteca Universal de Geneva in October 1842.
Lovelace's translations and notes,
the notes being approximately three times the length of the original text,
which she worked on for nine months between 1842 and 1843 and regularly
discussed with Babbage were published in 1843 in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs,
credited as notes by AAL, that is Augusta Ada Lovelace.
Lovelace's piece added far more detail giving the reading public
a clear description of what we would now call computer programming, as well as
an elegant account of the new field's inquiry which the machine would open up.
In his 1864 biography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher,
published over a decade after Lovelace's early death in 1852, Babbage
described Lovelace's contribution to and authorship of the translations and notes.
We've got the the full description here but the key would be the notes of Countess
of Lovelace extended to about three times the length of the original memoir.
The author has entered fully into almost the very difficult and
abstract questions connected with the subject.
The two memoirs of [INAUDIBLE] and Lovelace's taken together,
furnished to those who are capable of understanding the reasoning,
a complete demonstration that the whole of the developments in operations of analysis
are now capable of being executed by machinery.
He also describes how she essentially, to use modern terminology,
debugged what might be considered the first computer bug.
This important distinction in her work between the calculation operation
of Babbage's difference engine and the wider programmable application of his
analytical engine was perhaps the most important aspect of Lovelace's notes.
But one that went largely unnoticed and ignored by the British scientific elites
of the mid-19th century and was not fully appreciated until the advent of electronic
programmable computer over 100 years later, in the mid-20th century.
In the 1940s, the development of electronic programmable computers on both
sides of the Atlantic let early pioneers writing a history of this embryonic field
of computer science, on a revived interest in the works of Babbage, Lovelace, and
others whose work in calculation and mathematics had applicability in terms of
the new field of computer science over 100 years later.
Early computing pioneers shown here, such as Alan Turing in the UK and
Howard Aiken in the U.S. would claim inspiration and to a certain degree,
inheritance from the work of Babbage and Lovelace.
While Babbage's difference engine project,
as well as Lovelace's translation notes on the same,
had never been entirely forgotten, there is little or no evidence of the direct
influence of their work on the design of early computers until afterwards.
When these early pioneers wrote their own histories of computer science.
The somewhat Whiggish histories claimed Babbage's difference engine and
analytical engine as their intellectual precursors, creating a narrative
of computer science founded by Babbage and to a much lesser degree Lovelace and
continued through to electronic computing in the mid-20th century.
Nonetheless, as smaller, faster, and cheaper machines reached into
every area of 20th century life, first Babbage and then Lovelace gained
new prominence as early visionaries of the computer revolution.
First to the developments in the U.S. Howard Aiken, the original
conceptual designer behind IBM's automatic sequence controller calculator,
later known as the Harvard Mark I computer, built between 1940 and 1943,
claimed inspiration from Charles Babbage and his difference engine.
He cited Babbage's work in his proposal for the computer written for
IBM in 1937, and continually expressed his admiration for Babbage's work.
Further to this, an early article on the Harvard Mark I computer, written for
Nature in 1946, was entitled, Babbage's Dream Come True.
However, the 1937 proposal contained a misunderstanding of Babbage and
his work and little influence of Babbage's work can be found in the architecture and
design of the Mark I, as well as many other publications and
presentations by Akin.
Further to this, Aiken arranged for a set of original computing
wheels that had once been intended to form part of Babbage's difference engine.
Originally, presented to Harvard by Babbage's son,
Major General Henry Prevost Babbage in 1886 were put on display
at the Harvard computer laboratory where Aiken worked.
So he's making very explicit his inheritance
from Babbage in a sort of visual presentation,
as well as part of the content that he develops, despite the fact that the actual
design of the computer does not seem to have any direct inheritance.
To summarize, Babbage's influence on Aiken seems to have been
perhaps more spiritual than practical.
It would seem that by connecting his work with that of Babbage,
Akin was promoting his own work and
reputation rather than declaring a concrete inheritance from Babbage.
Despite interesting parallels between Babbage and
Lovelace and Akin and Grace Hopper, one of those early programmers,
including that of their hardware software delineations,
Lovelace was notably absent from Aiken's ruminations on the origins of computing.
Across the pond, Alan Turing and his work on machine learning and
artificial intelligence has perhaps a little bit more applicability.
Lovelace was not, however, absent from the work of British computing pioneer
Alan Turing who in a seminal paper on artificial intelligence and
machine learning, computer machinery and intelligence published in Mind in 1950,
referenced to Lovelace's work, in a section on Lady Lovelace's objection.
Which quotes Lovelace's 1843 notes, specifically her statement,
the analytical engine has no pretensions to originate anything.
It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
A strong argument indeed against machine learning but one which Turing
acknowledged was the principle of the equipment Lovelace was working with, or
rather the design of the equipment she could have been working with
in the mid-19th century, and not a general principle, and one unsurprisingly,
he argued quite strongly against.
By the early 1950s, Babbage, and to a lesser degree Lovelace,
were starting to become an accepted part of the canon of early computing history.
With notable examples including, B.V. Bowden's classic, Faster than
Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing History, first published in 1953 and
Morrison and Morrison's Charles Babbage And His Calculation Engines,
Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and others, published in 1961.
Both included Lovelace's translations and notes on the Menabrea paper and
their appendices, probably the first time that these had been published in the 20th
century, and quite so prominently.
However, both publications very much put Babbage front and center,
acknowledging his perceived importance in early programmable electronic computing.
In particular, Bowden remarked that, quote,
Babbage's ideas have only been properly appreciated in the last ten years.
We now realize that he understood clearly all the fundamental
principles which are embodied in modern digital computers.
More generally, Bowden noted that the whole book, which is a symposium on
digital computing machines, was in fact devoted to an account of the construction
and use of the machine which Babbage's vision inspired.
So, like Aiken he's very much claiming an inheritance as much to promote his
own work and the work other computer programming pioneers as
it is to sort of inflate of the importance Babbage's work.
These publications are representative of other publications in computing around
this time would situate Lovelace as but a minor footnote in the overall narrative of
Babbage's development of calculation and computing.
But accepted unquestioningly her authorship of translation and notes.
With these publications, the work of Babbage and
Lovelace attracted the attention of academic historians in the 1960s and
beyond, who began to examine their work in more detail.
And to some degree, question and
debate Lovelace's role in the production and authorship of translations and notes,
as well as the potential development, at least, of the analytical engine.
The early to mid-1970s saw a renewed and
popular academic interest in Lord Byron and
his family both legitimate, illegitimate, and apparently, also incestuous.
We've got a number here of publications published in the early to mid-1970s.
But it was not until 1976, when Lovelace was the subject of
individual attention with the publication of a short article in the Association for
Women in Mathematics letter by Dee Anglin, I think is how you pronounce her surname.
This was followed shortly the year after by Doris Moore's biography, and
the first monograph on Lovelace, that is Ada Countess of Lovelace,
Byron's legitimate daughter, published in 1977.
Now Morris, as I'm sure most of you know,
was the first person to have full access to, and indeed to make a full study
of the Lovelace papers, which are now held here in Oxford.
From the 1980s through to the present day, Lovelace became the subject of scholarly
attention with a number of key publications,
including those published and reissued over the past few years, and
lead up to the bicentennial of her birth that we are celebrating here today.
These include a number of publications,
got a rather long list of what I consider to be the key publications in the field.
Academic interest also led to a more critical approach
to Lovelace's contribution with some debates centered upon her authorship
of translations and notes.
In particular, her contribution to the sections now considered
to be part of the cannon in relation to computer programming.
Criticism centered upon how much work Babbage had put into the programs,
cited prior to Lovelace's involvement and
whether she was indeed capable of authoring the notes.
In particular, two publications which came out around 1919 included strong critiques
of Lovelace's contribution.
I am sure there are others.
Collier's 1990 publication, which is a significantly revised and
updated version of his 1970s Harvard PHD thesis,
argued strongly against Lovelace's claims to be the world's first programmer, thus.
It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Babbage wrote the notes to
Menabrea's paper but for reasons of his own, encouraged the illusion
in the mind of Ada and the public that they were authored by her.
It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive,
with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and
a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the analytical engine.
So quite a strong critique there.
>> [LAUGH] >> He did follow this up about
ten years later with a similarly expressed strong critique of Ada Lovelace that he
published in The Economist, so he clearly hasn't moved on from that position.
Many other scholars, however, noted that Lovelace had a broad and
natural interest and an aptitude for mathematics and science,
as we heard this morning, indeed yesterday, and had been educated and
tutored by some of the finest mathematicians in England.
In this regard, she was no ordinary aristocratic women, as Collier claims, and
did indeed spend nine months working on the article in consultation with Babbage.
Further to this, her contribution is acknowledged in Babbage's
biography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which I quoted earlier.
This is published in 1864, so over a decade after Lovelace's death when her
patronage was clearly no longer available, so it might've been the case that if
he was gonna tell that story and prove his reputation and standing.
Again, patronage, she's dead now.
So there's not really much she can do to help them in that regard.
Her correction of the bug in his equations, relation to the calculation of
the Bernoulli numbers, those quite probably make her the first debugger.
I believe that her status as the first computer programmer rests more on whether
the material contained in the notes constitutes a computer program or not.
I guess, obviously, with the usual caveats about using the term computer program is
something that is not what we necessarily think of as a computer program today,
or indeed in the 1950s, rather than Lovelace's authorship.
Perhaps it was computer expert, Henry Ledgard, an author of the 1980 manual for
Ada, a high level of computing language developed by the U.S.
Department of Defense and renamed Ada in Lovelace's honor, who presents
a more neutral view in his introduction, thus, to this introduction of the manual.
If Charles Babbage is to be regarded as the father of modern day computer
technology, then surely the Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace, Ada Lovelace
after whom his new language is named must be remembered as its midwife.
It's as Christopher Hollings said before, this is not arguing that
she's a computer programmer per say or indeed a mathematical genius or
indeed an idiot, but somewhere in-between but showing that she had a clear sense of
vision and something that maps quite interestingly onto computer programming.
Increased academic interest and
popular interest lead to Lovelace becoming a figure in popular culture,
as well as an icon for increased involvement for the women in STEM.
I've got some examples here.
Ada Lovelace has been the subject of much attention,
popular culture from the 1970s through to the modern day.
She has appeared on stage and on screen but it is her appearance
in the genre of steampunk which is perhaps of most interest.
Lovelace was featured in William Gibson and
Bruce Sterling's 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine.
Which is widely acknowledged as a science fiction classic as well as one of
the first populizers of the science fiction sub-genre of steampunk.
The authors imagine an alternative and
counter-factual history where Charles Babbage and
Ada Lovelace succeeded in making Babbage's difference engine a practical reality.
Thereby, dramatically changing the course of history, in particular,
the history of technology.
In this alternative history or alternative universe to acknowledge
a popular science fiction term, there are notable technological and
timeline differences in comparison to the Victorian age, as it was.
A network of difference engines connected by the telegraph network act
quite literally like a Victorian internet, operated by clackers,
that is technologically proficient individuals who are skilled at
programming the difference engines through the use of punch cards.
In the novel, many characters are concerned that the punch cards
are a gambling modus which would allow users to place consistently winning bets,
a reference to Lovelace's problems with gambling.
But one where perhaps she more successfully realized her
perfection of the gambling system.
A more recent steampunk publication featuring Lovelace and
one I can highly recommend is Sydney Padua's rather wonderful graphic novel,
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage published earlier this year.
This is based on her webcomic, which I believe was published
first as part of the Ada Lovelace Day and became just a cult favorite online
in the subsequent years and is now available in print.
It features Lovelace and Babbage, essentially, solving crime and
their thrilling adventures and other historical characters.
It includes, also, extensive footnotes on the history of Lovelace and indeed,
many of the lines of dialogue are gathered from actual correspondence.
Lovelace has also become a role model, an icon for calls for increased involvement
in women in STEM and indeed, the improved study of women in the history of STEM.
From 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded the Lovelace Medal
presented to individuals who have made an outstanding
contribution to the understanding or advancement of computing.
In 2008, the society also initiated an annual competition for
women students of computer science.
Perhaps better known is Ada Lovelace Day, established by Suw Charman-Anderson,
who I believe is in the audience and is also on the last panel here today.
This is an annual event, a celebration in mid-October,
with the goal of raising the profile of women in science, technology, engineering,
and math and to create new role models for girls and women in these fields.
In conclusion, I hope I have shown how academic and popular understandings and
representations of Ada Lovelace have evolved over the past 200 years.
Beginning with contemporary understandings of her working relationship with Babbage
and his difference engine in the mid-19th century through the claims about Babbage's
and Lovelace's influence on the development
of electronic programmable computing in the mid-20th century.
And how they became incorporated into early histories of computer programming,
as well as associated rhetoric.
This perhaps being about promoting the achievements of early programmers,
and indeed their status as it was,
about considering or celebrating those of Babbage and Lovelace.
I've also then shown how there's increased popular,
and indeed, scholarly interest in Lovelace, increasingly in her own right.
This has led to some debate about the nature of the authorship of
the translations and notes and hence,
her contribution to concepts which relate to modern computing.
I've concluded my paper with a discussion of Lovelace as a figure of popular
culture, most importantly, her role in steampunk, the genre of science-fiction,
as well as her status as an icon for increased calls for women in STEM.
I suppose perhaps the overall arching theme is that each age has
its own Ada Lovelace.
So I'm interested to see where she goes from here.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
