Great hi.
So please bear with me, there's a reason I usually work behind the scenes.
I can be an awkward public speaker so brace yourselves.
So this is me.
>> [LAUGH] >> I'm not, in spite
being the British Society for the History of Mathematics Newman prize winner.
Which is now my middle name, by the way.
[LAUGH] I'm not a mathematician or a computer scientists or a historian or
an enviornmist, or even a scholar, or an academic, or
any of the other extraordinary range of specialists that Ada
has brought together in this really unique way today.
I'm an animator, I do visual effects for the most part.
I used to work hand drawn on paper and film.
Now I work in extremely complicated software.
And I actually, around 2009 I was looking for a comic to draw.
Because I was trying to get away from computers.
[LAUGH] Yeah.
[LAUGH] As on this fateful period in 2009,
Sue started.
I know a friend of mine had started Ada Lovelace day and
we were in a pub or I should say, strictly speaking a wine bar.
>> [LAUGH] >> It sounds a bit more she-she, though so
I usually say it's a pub.
And Sue had started Ada Lovelace day and she said you're a woman in tech,
you should do a blog post and I said I don't even know who Ada Lovelace is.
And she said it doesn't matter,
and I said well I'll do a comic, I've been wanting to do a comic for ages.
Ran to Wikipedia, found these crazy kids and
literally in one evening I drew this comic.
It's about this long physically.
It's only eight panels.
[LAUGH] This is possibly
the gag that sealed my fate.
It was just a very, very brief sketched history of Lovelace and Babbage.
This rating of the program, and then when it came to the end of this micro story,
I had to have a blank panel because of course Lovelace dies and
it's on a computer.
It's not really an ending.
It just sort of goes ra, ra, ra.
So I used to work in story.
I know you are not supposed to do that.
So I just threw in this panel.
[LAUGH]
And then this one.
[LAUGH] I think I was thinking of the Avengers.
Which, actually.
[LAUGH] >> So [LAUGH] and then I went to bed,
put it up online and
then the next day it had thousands of hits, and it turned out
that it had turned up in Wired, a Wired blog.
As an announcement that, oh look, this person is going to do a comic about
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace fighting crime.
>> [LAUGH] >> So I should say there's two enormous
misconceptions that were generated by this.
Number one, that I had any intention of drawing a comic about Charles Babbage and
Ada Lovelace fighting crime.
This was a punchline joke about an imaginary comic and
what it would have looked like.
And the other thing is that Charles and Ada are not super-heroes,
they are in fact super-villains in this comic because,
as it happens, I hate computers and they invented this terrible thing.
>> [LAUGH] >> The computers.
I hated. I should say that in the past tense,
cuz it's been a journey for me, this whole comic here.
So I started drawing comics.
Where, here we go.
Just started a WordPress blog, it's very easy.
You can do it on a whim.
I started throwing out these little comics where, of course, fighting crime.
I fight crime badly.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] If I fought
crime well it wouldn't be funny.
Sorry I have to look at my notes here, cuz every once in a while
a wave of terror will come across me and I have to reconsult.
So of course now that I was going beyond the eight panel comic,
I had to do a whole bunch of reading to get more gags, obviously.
So I just went to a bookshop and starting leafing through
books on Lovelace and Babbage, and of course what I discovered
was that I had been handed by the universe
both a wonderful gift and a ticking bomb.
>> [LAUGH] >> Because of course the scholarly lion
was that Lovelace was this fraud.
Who was just used by Babbage.
And of course this makes her absolutely the worst conceivable role model for
women in technology.
As a woman in technology, sort of,
actually that sort of is kind of the point here.
Because I'm very used to being underestimated.
But I'm also very used to feeling like a fraud.
So drawing this comic became this very strange,
fraught space for me.
And it always an undercurrent I guess of terror in the comic, but
also of curiosity, and also, I don't know I felt
I had been tasked with doing this thing, I had a reputation in my hands of Lovelace
who's very important to a lot of people and.
I also, and we're all nerds here, I'm guessing.
And I also became obsessed.
I mean, it's very, very easy to become completely obsessed with these people.
There's huge personalities and they tick a lot of boxes and they ring a lot of bells,
and they push a lot of buttons, so I couldn't stop reading about them and
I couldn't stop coming up with gags about them, and I couldn't stop drawing them.
I was constantly doing little doodles of the characters.
So I kept going online, and so here I
was with this task from the universe, so.
I guess the big question for me was how to approach this.
So I'm not, as I said, a scholar of any kind.
I'm an animator. And in animation,
what we do is we create illusions.
We create illusion of life, of thought, an illusion of movement,
but to create these illusions you have to be very knowledgeable.
And you have to do a lot of study and a lot of anatomical breakdown.
Because once something begins to move, all the relationships change.
You start to see the back of things, you see the underside of things,
you see all sides.
So for the animator it's very important to understand.
How things are constructed and put together, and
I think that's how I came at this project.
The first thing the animator does even if you're doing something quite
cartoony is research.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
what you [LAUGH] I do some unicorns and things.
It looked a bit plain.
>> [LAUGH] >> And also,
Google Books is simply wonderful.
I think the other very serendipitous thing that happened was that
I started drawing the comic.
Pretty much identical to Google Books project.
Dumping enormous amounts of 19th century material searchable online.
And this gave me actually super powers.
>> [LAUGH] >> Because actually Babbage and
Lovelace were incredibly famous people.
Babbage especially, I was very surprised because I had been
kind of given this story that he was this sad underdog ignored by all.
Whereas he was in fact incredibly famous as a super genius who had invented this
incredible calculating machine.
Babbage's stuff is absolutely everywhere, there's tons of fantastic Babbage stuff.
And he's very frequently paired with Lovelace in these kind of little
anecdotes so he shows that this is very typical, this is the great calculator.
I think this is the Deseret news, it's a re-print of a famous set of
anecdotes that got re-printed all over the place.
Just Babbbage talking about, you know, this stuff.
It's just an example.
I think this one's in the book.
The form that the comic began to take was, because I was in a strange place,
that I was reading a lots of 19th century sources that no one had ever read before.
I was also reading, I think I'd read every secondary source inside out, and
I began to feel this disconnect between this story that some people are telling
and the story that I was seeing in the kind of more contemporary view of them.
So I started doing this split.
The comic is very much about these two cultures.
I loved the whole CB Snow two cultures thing even though it's a bit silly.
You have the world of the humanities and poetry and craziness,
and then you have the world of facts.
So the comic is split, very literally split, between the comic
which takes place in the top half and the notes which happen in the bottom half.
And certainly on the blog I avoided as far as humanly possible any sort of
interpretation whatsoever.
This was the fact part, so it was, generally speaking,
links to interesting primary documents, of which there are tons.
I mean, the really nice thing is that Babbage talks in particular are incredibly
entertaining and nine times out of ten because he was a very funny guy.
So there was always something fun to link to and
so I was having this very extreme split between the story and
the fact that, let me consult my notes here.
Where am I? All right, said that, said that too.
>> [LAUGH] >> Said all this stuff.
All right.
So, in a sense it was also a very passive.
A lot of the comic, I confess was sort of a passive-aggressive joke about
the secondary scholarship, in that I was doing these very broad,
crazy comics creating these invented stories.
And it was a little bit of a commentary I think on how I think a lot of I think
biographers could stand to bear in mind that they are also creating a character
in creating a story, very much the way you create a fictional character.
So because I was doing a comic,
I wasn't under any requirement at all to be realistic in any sense.
I come from theater actually before animation, I studied Del Arte so
there's a lot of that in the comic, this feeling of character types.
So in the comic half I'm trying to tell this almost,
it's a satire of course about tech and
its impact on the world then how people think technologically and of our data.
The first comic was a very extended joke about the economic crisis.
Where Babbage fills this economic model that rampages around.
So it's satire with broad characters.
But I wasn't quite sure what to talk about in this
tarot I thought this might be fun, I used a lot of tarot cards.
Again it's a bit of a two cultures thing because I was looking for this dreamlike
fantastical side to this story, what people feel about these characters,
what people think about these characters, what associations people have with them,
as opposed to this kind of jumble of facts that you have so.
I found tarot really extraordinary because the first two cards
of the tarot deck after the magician and the high priestess.
And the magician deals with physicalities, objects,
the manipulation of the physical world.
And the high priestess is about secret,
conceptual, hidden knowledge,
relationships, religious ideas.
And Lovelace actually specifically calls herself Babbage's high priestess,
referring I'm pretty sure to the Oracle of Delphi.
She was picturing the machine as this oracle and she would be the high priestess
of it and Babbage of course, it's very much about this division of hardware and
software so I played a lot with these kind of divisions of types and
all these sort of story telling things, I thought that might be interesting.
But I had to keep coming back to again in animation we deal very much with.
We always have to come back to the real and keep it nailed down.
Otherwise you can't do the illusion.
This is just an example of the sort of study that I do,
hand studies for Lovelace's type hand, Babbage's type hand.
It's dealing with these dualities, these contrasts between these types of figures,
types of anatomy.
That might be interesting,
and again think about [LAUGH] I love that, this is my very favorite, it's so tiny but
it's just my favorite Babbage snippet and
I guess I started to think about the anatomy of
the comic as being related to the notes and to the primary documents and specific.
So I kept coming back to the primary documents and feeding stuff out of that
and going back in and going back and forth between kind of these stories and
associations and these facts and so from this,
this is another, just thinking that people would be interested in the process here.
So these are some sketches of averages sort of body language that I drew
to get a sense of that committed to thing.
Because it's, I love that sort of very broad style of body language.
And, I was thinking of him as this very linear person.
And, this is very much drawn from his own writings.
I mean Babbage wrote a tremendous amount.
[LAUGH] I think if you stacked up all his books they'd about,
if you include the pamphlets it's like this, and then there's tons of
anecdotes he was a very very popular person for people to tell anecdotes about.
The thing about Babbage is that he's easy.
I fell in love with Babbage first, I'm not gonna lie, he's still kind of my favorite.
And his personality is extremely evident in every single thing he wrote, and
it's very consistent.
And it's kinda perfect for
my little schematic, because this very solid grounded guy is very direct.
His body is always a kind of straight line, he's a bit centered,
kind of in the middle of this body, he's a very confident guy.
And his body language is, in my head, it comes out of his writing.
You can feel the way that he's standing.
And I was absolutely delighted when I fell across this.
>> [LAUGH] >> I am 95% sure this is Babbage.
It's not actually labelled as Babbage.
This is 1851 from, the punch Great Exhibition gag issue.
And there's gags about all the types that you're seeing around the Great Exhibition.
And this is the fancy portrait of a gentlemen who has been honorable
mentioned by Prince Albert, honorably mentioned indeed is that all scandalous.
And Babbage of course was furious that they didn't have the Difference Engine
fragment in the exhibition.
He wrote a pamphlet about him.
[LAUGH] So yeah, I guess I was really pleased that I
maybe sort of captured something about the guy.
But then you come to Lovelace, and of course Lovelace is a problem,
cuz Lovelace is always a problem.
These are some sketches that I was kind of coming at.
Because I had Babbage, and Babbage was so clear,
I started building Lovelace in opposition to Babbage.
So Babbage is very linear, he's very direct, and
he's in the middle of his body.
Whereas Lovelace, I'm always looking for spirals and indirect lines,
she's always looking kind of off to the side or around.
And this something that really comes out in her letters I think, in that,
she's this incredibly prodient person.
Anyone whose read her letters will find that she's changing personalities like
drastically from [LAUGH] one day to the next, almost, she's
got a completely different personality, they're almost unrecognizable sometimes.
Always quite forceful, and
there's something always a bit ferocious about her.
But sometimes she's a bit the coquette, and sometimes she's joking around, and
then sometimes she's this complete weirdo, and sometimes she's this and
sometimes she's that.
So, she's trying on and I feel she's very difficult to know if not impossible
to know as a human being, because she's always trying on all these personas.
I guess, just speculating here but I think at the end of the day,
her base actual personality was simply not possible to have as
a Victorian woman, and certainly not as a Victorian aristocrat.
You can't be that sort of person and be in that position.
Part of the thing in her letters is I feel she's always pretending to be
who the person that she's writing to wants her to be.
And she always over plays it a little bit.
So Ada and the comic kind of wound up being what I felt she wanted to be a bit.
I kind of wanted to set her free,
because she's obviously a person who's in so much pain.
And so not comfortable with kind of her lot in life.
So I wanted her to have this wonderful
engine to play around in and all this stuff.
So the Lovelace I wound up kind of choosing to use, is actually
very much the one in relation to Babbage, not only cuz they're a dynamic duo.
But also because for me my favorite Ada of all the myriad Ada's
is the one in her correspondence with Babbage over the writing of the notes,
where she's so confident and funny and she's joking around,
and she's on task, and I just really love this Ada.
And she herself wrote about the notes.
In her own notes she says, it's got this masculine quality, feminine quality it's
a hydrogenous sort of style of writing that she had discovered for herself.
And her persona as the person writing the notes,
which is a really remarkable persona with this.
Actually, I have to say from the lecture this morning, I was so thrilled to get
confirmation that she had read Peacock's algebra, because I was casting around for
where she picked up this bizarre style that she does the notes in.
For someone who'd been taught by De Morgan and Babbage,
both of whom are extremely lucid, very clear and straightforward writers.
And then for her mathematics paper she's writing,
in this convoluted, sentences this long.
And then as part of my researches, I read Peacock's Algebra, and
I was like Peacock, [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> And you could see her thinking,
this is how a mathematician would write, with these long sentences and
the detached we, that she uses and all this stuff.
So there's a bit of Peacock maybe [LAUGH] in this Ada.
So it's the Ada with Babbage that I sort of wound up using,
because I felt that with Babbage and again this is my speculation,
cuz we can't know, everyone's dead and long dead.
For me, it always felt like Ada felt she could really be herself with Babbage and
vice versa, but that was her most authentic self.
I love this thing that I found.
This isn't in the book actually cuz I was saving it up for something else,
but this is Lady Eastlake, who's slightly catty [LAUGH] lady.
But I love this line, he was amused at my saying that Babbage and
not Byron should have been her father.
She doesn't know that they know each other at this stage.
I was amused, a couple of days later she says,
I was amused after my remark to find that Babbage and herself, the greatest friends
I think this is 45.
So this idea of her and Babbage as
these people who could, it was them against the world a little bit,
was the sense that I started getting from the letters,
from the documents, just I guess it's a sense that you get, I mean, I can't
tell if it's an objective sense or not, probably not, but it's a sense that I got.
This is another, one of the things about Lovelace is that,
where as Babbage is always on character, like I have never, ever, despite reading
hundreds of kind of things about Babbage, he has never stepped out of character.
He's always like, oh Babbage, or oh Babbage what are you doing?
He's always very exactly as he should be.
Whereas, Ada, every single thing I've ever found about her I'm like,
oh I didn't know that side of her at all.
Everything is surprising, everything is different.
So here she's pitching in to the Turkish ambassador about the rights of women,
which is not what I pictured her doing at all.
>> [LAUGH] >> So that 's a little surprise there.
Now I've lost my thought again, let me go back to my notes.
Talk amongst yourselves.
[NOISE] All right, oh actually Richard Holmes
has told you to expect me to explain why Lovelace smokes a pipe.
Oh wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I would have to jump ahead here.
This is Pocket Universe Ada vs the actual Ada.
Smokes a pipe.
To begin with, because I was filling in a compositional gap in a drawing.
This little white space that I didn't like, and so I stuck a pipe in it.
It is a reference to Sherlock Holmes obviously, but it's also that I thought to
be blunt that people would take her more seriously if she was smoking a pipe.
>> [LAUGH] >> I've always thought that
sometimes famous philosophers are talking complete bullshit.
But people take them seriously because they've got the pipe.
>> [LAUGH] >> That's obviously the missing
accoutrement.
So this is just a little demonstration here, of kinda the process again.
So this, again, is Ada completely surprising you.
This is the New York Mirror, 1833.
This is actually the same year that Lovelace met Babbage.
Oh it is said that Ada Byron, sole daughter of the noble bard,
is the most coarse and vulgar woman in England.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
I believe this might be referenced to the fact that Ada very weird.
Pretty much everyone remarks on the fact that she's quite odd socially.
But it also might be alluding to the fact that she tended to swear.
She swore a lot in her letters, and
then I kinda combined that with Babbage's wonderful error pop up, which,
this is, for some reason, in the Exhibition to 1851 Pamphlet.
He describes his error pop-ups, so if you have the wrong thing in the engine,
this little plaque will pop up that says wrong.
And then he adds later the continually ringing loud bell, which I'm sure
would be absolutely delightful if you were programming this machine.
So I did this.
>> [LAUGH] >> This is drawn form life.
>> [LAUGH] >> And then if you have to have
the punch line eventually >> [LAUGH]
>> For a special learner].
>> [LAUGH] >> It's a good time.
So yeah, I think Pocket Universe Ada is a specific facet of Ada
because it's too hard to draw all the various Ada's.
And this image that I did for the 200th,
I just wound up kind of turning her face from camera because I think
there's something very ultimately unknowable about her as a person.
Oh it's another thing that in terms of
playing between how I played with stuff I guess.
Lovell's of course famously,
I think as every single person has mentioned had an addictive personality.
Gambling, opium and that sort of thing.
So in the comic that appears as her addiction to poetry,
of course, the actual Lovelace very much
had reconciled these two halves of herself.
The poetical science bit.
But if that was reconciled in the comic,
then you wouldn't have any character movement.
So she's still very much against poetry, and it's this kind of dark side to her.
This is from Organist's, which is a later story, not in the book, but
she's getting kicked out of a poetry club here.
She’s had a little too much.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, that's Miss Babbage.
I guess,
for me there's a lot of serendipities that keep happening in the comic.
And although initially I was very annoyed at Ada for failing to stay in character
for even two letters in a row- >> [LAUGH]
>> At the end of the day, actually,
her very prudian quality, her very ambiguity, her slipperiness,
wound up making her the perfect representative of this chaotic,
illogical, ambiguous side.
In a comic that's very much about the two cultures,
you've got fact, and then you got this other world.
It's not fiction so much as sort of stuff that cannot be pinned down.
And I think this been a lot of trying to pin down this very ambiguous thing,
and I think it's a very engineer sort of thing to want to do, to say oh,
she was this or she was that.
It's like Babbage is, who is the most left-brained,
unambiguous person possibly ever, with his little buffers to make
sure that no gear could ever be perfectly out of alignment.
An intolerance of ambiguities is not gonna sit well with
anybody who needs to hang with Ada for
a while cuz you have to be able to tolerate this ambiguous side of her.
But I think that's healthy.
Sometimes you just can't know stuff.
That said, I just want to bring up this paper because
sometimes you find the document and your scholars here
must know this feeling Charlie must be fantastic.
Sometimes you find something that is just really magical.
This is from the Southern review, which is a very short lived paper to celebrate
the culture of the south published in Maryland in the wake of the Civil War.
It's kind of an odd little journal.
It only lasted a couple of years.
But one of the things they printed in it was
letters home from this guy, and on his way around London,
God, I'm blanking out on his name.
Isn't that terrible?
It's in the book.
Peal, Pike, it starts with P, very short name that starts with P.
So he met Charles Babbage, cuz he was connected with scientific types.
And there's this incredibly vivid description of Babbage,
the most vivid description of Babbage, as this nervous mannered guy.
And this is '54, so this is two years after Lovelace had died.
And I just love this line, her peculiar capability higher
he said then out of anyone he knew to prepare.
I believe it was, there was an ambiguity again.
The descriptions connected with his calculating machine,
I fear I'm not expressing myself rightly here as to the precise nature of
the subject he mentioned.
And then you get this beautiful little very human moment.
It was the recollection of her miserable life.
He spoke of it as a tragedy, that seemed to sadden him for a while,
speaking in a lower tone of voice and in a manner so
subdued that as I stood listening to him I could scarce believe he was the same
nervous-mannered gentlemen who had entered the room an hour before.
There was so much feeling in both his words and
manner that I did not feel at liberty to question him as to the precise nature of
the unhappiness of the life he was speaking of.
This moment for me was a very, very beautiful moment,
because I had not been able to articulate why I felt that Babbage and
Lovelace's friendship was not only genuine but quite a profound one.
And this was very much not an opinion held by most of the serious scholars for
whom obviously Lovelace was a tool that Babbage was cynically using.
Which to me, I guess, ultimately that just felt almost impossible, to picture Babbage
putting up with someone who thought he was a fool, for even more than five minutes.
So this was a very beautiful thing to find.
And it was such an obscure journal that I don't know if anybody would've found it
without Google Books.
And at least understood, I guess, what it meant.
And there's also some nice little character moments here.
This delightful bit speaking of Lady Lovelace's matter of fact mind,
Mister Babbage told me he used to have a good deal of good natured fun by telling
her all sorts of extraordinary stories and I'm just dying to know what sort of.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> What sort of strange little jokes they
had going on because
they have this very chummy elusive kind of way of writing letters that.
One does long to listen in on a conversation.
You also see Babbage gossiping like crazy.
Good day with a Byron devil in her.
Uncongenial match with Lord Lovelace.
And oh my god, Babbage, stop it.
[LAUGH] So in this you get everything.
You get a little bit of the calculating machine.
You get this very emotional thing.
And you get these little, these little, wonderful character moments.
So hooray for primary documents.
And that's kind of the image I drew.
So, that's the comic.
There's a third character in this comic.
A central character in the comic.
To move my feelings are always in Belint.
[LAUGH] And that's the analytical engine.
As I said, it's a darn [LAUGH] sweet lesson that has assured you guys that
you'll understand the [LAUGH] analytical engine by the time I explain it.
>> [LAUGH] >> Which I can't swear to that
happening, but.
So after all of this going back and forth fact and fishing blah blah blah,
here I had something, an engine that was completely indescribable, apparently.
Because no matter where I turned, everyone would say, oh it's very, very brilliant.
But you can't understand it, it's too complicated to explain.
And for someone drawing a comic with this thing in it, I felt that I needed to have
engine in there, to contrast it with the comic book engine.
Which looks like this.
This is George Elliot getting her spellchecking done.
[LAUGH] So the engine in the comic is this vast labyrinth,
which is how I feel about computers.
So in contrast, of course I need to have the real engine and so
I just wanted a drawing of the thing that I could rip off.
But sadly, I was completely shocked and horrified to discover that there did not
exist a visualization of the entire engine.
So I had to do one myself based off of this.
The papers of the late Allan Bromley,
which, anyone who does anything analytical engine is a helpless slave to.
And this was really hard and
I have no idea if it's right but that's my elevation.
>> [LAUGH] >> Ish,
there's a lot of question marks as anyone will tell you here,
that's about how big it was I think.
It's got three types of punch cards, now the easiest way to describe,
this is go on there you go, so that's how I did the elevation.
But before you do that, and here's the person.
[LAUGH] Before you do that,
I kind of had set aside a couple of weeks to do this.
And as it turns out, I spent about five months on the engine alone.
Because to do the elevation, you have to know where everything is, and
to know where everything is you have to go through all the papers.
And oh my God, it took forever.
So in the book I explain it like this.
[LAUGH] As Babbage himself found, and God I feel for
him, to explain how something is moving in relationships on
a static image, is really hard and I don't understand his mathematical notation and
neither does anybody else, so I couldn't just use that.
So I did this and I don't think it's as clear as it could be had,
so I'm going to show you the best way.
Here's some bits I built while I get this thing together.
So this is the sort of thing I would do, right.
Just take a plan.
Pull it apart.
Try to figure out what everything did, cuz you can't actually make
it do things without knowing how everything comes around.
This is how the cards work roughly.
I think this is actually Herschel design I'm not sure,
Babbage's son did some stuff, but the punch cards work
on the basic principal that there's levers that are activated,
this is a bit inverse in that the levers activated if there's a whole, these
are the lovely barrels which I'll explain in a sec, they're pretty marvelous.
I think that's all I got, yeah, yeah.
But the easiest way to kind of explain how the whole thing is put together which is
my missing piece.
So this is sort of a baby engine.
It's not the whole thing.
This, by the way, is why I hate computers.
This is the software I have to work with.
In my actual job these are all your controls.
These are more of your controls.
Each of these opens up even more controls.
>> [LAUGH] >> God knows what most of them do,
I've got all these [LAUGH].
I'm just an animator, man, but you wind up having to work your way around this.
How much time do I got?
Oh no, I'm out of time.
Okay, super quick.
This is my artist impression of the flow, just really roughly, of how this goes.
I'm painfully aware that there's all sorts of experts in here who are sniggering and
going what the hell?
>> [LAUGH] >> So.
As I understand it, you've got these three cards, right?
So there's the number cards which have the number.
These are 50 digit numbers and Babbage's kind of most ambitious plan.
Each of those columns in that big engine is just one number.
The whole height of the engine is just all those digits.
If you're only dealing with a three digit number, the engine's like this high.
All the height is just the size of the number.
So this is just a one digit kind of slice and all the slices just go up.
So the number card which I've just stuck where he put it on the plan,
so you have these cards with
exactly Jackart Link style if you've seen how one of those things works.
It's just a pasteboard card and
if there is a hole, the levers go right through and nothing happens.
So that's most of the time.
But you leave one hole unpunched and that pushes a little lever.
And mostly what Babbage seemed to have those levers do is engage
something to the cams.
This power that was continually turning onto the engine.
So then they start to move, once they were engaged.
So this is a 50 digit number written on a punch card there.
So you have 58 rows of ten columns each.
Each of these would in theory have one unpunched hole and
that reads off into the store, I don't know how.
[LAUGH] Can you [LAUGH] no, no, nobody knows how.
Somehow this takes the car, I mean you could figure it, I'm sure we could come,
every one of us could come up with some nifty design that would do that.
So that sets off all these levers.
And the levers hook up.
All right actually you probably have the variable card.
Is the address, now I can ask you guys!
The address, if you're just reading the number cards into the store.
The address would have to come off the variable card, or is that only for mill?
Okay.
So before we do that you have to have the addressing cards,
the variable cards, what do you call it.
I call them address cards just cuz to me it's more, okay,
that's the address of where in the store you're picking it up.
And so it'd have apparently some really cool way of designating all these things.
And this is a problem, apparently,
how these variable cards are gonna all deal with stuff.
But this just hooks up,
the variable card just hooks up a number in the store by lifting a little
widget between these racks and the number cards.
You read out an address, read out a number so the address hooks it up and
then the number just reads off on to the storage.
So now you've got two numbers just read off the card into the store.
And then these guys are the operations cards, so these is the main event here.
It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, so there are these little.
They're the smallest cards, with only a very limited number of options on them.
And what these cards do is so unbelievably clever that I still can't get over it.
How do you do this very complicated thing of adding two numbers together with
a single card?
The card runs this little mini widget,
which is the barrel.
So the card will turn the barrel to a specific location.
To say, okay, we're gonna add now.
The barrel turns around.
And then the barrels go through a little wedge.
At least on the plan 25,
there's barrels all over the place controlling all these things.
So the barrels will then, from a single instruction on the operation card,
run for a little bit here.
The barrels will run through a little wedge of instructions.
And they're tall barrels with all these zillions of pegs.
So one line of pegs in a barrel will activate a couple of dozen levers and
it took like 50 or something to run these operations and then you'd just run
through a dozen or however many turns of operations you need to get through it.
So the basic flow is, number cards
read off the numbers into the store with the variable cards telling them where.
Then the operations cards says, okay, let's add these guys.
So the variable cards will select a number.
We'll say pick up whatever number is over here.
And it just hooks up.
The whole machine just works by hooking and unhooking stuff.
So it just hooks up with a little pinion.
Reads it off to this section.
So the different functions are a different section of very specific machinery for
each specific function.
So it sends it over here, and then picks up the second number.
Sends that over there.
And then these guys go to work.
And they do their little jazz.
I've got an anticipating carry build I can show you outside.
I'm sure there's a bunch of them around.
So it runs its jazz.
And once it's done, then the variable card says, okay, read out the output.
Sorry, first it reads its output to the little output right there.
So it just hooks up, reads it out.
Variable card says, okay, read the result out to location whatever.
And then it just reads that out, and it's done.
So that's the whole operation.
So that was a little,
slightly more confusing than I usually manage to do this.
I'm on the spot here.
This does animate, this isn't an emulator by the way.
This is hand keyed, cuz I'm just a monkey.
It's gonna run through its little thing.
At some point something would jam and then the bells would go off and
then, you'd have to the urchin with the tiny hands to crawl into it cuz.
>> [LAUGH] >> I don't know how he planned to fix
anything that jammed in this thing because it's basically a solid mass of metal,
I'm sure he had a plan.
And actually I just have one final point.
Which is, there was some concern which was just at the limit of my
technical understanding of the engine.
There was some concern over how the variable cards and
the operations cards and the number cards were all coordinated.
Cuz the problem is these are completely disconnected to each other.
They're on their own.
So you better hope to God that you've got the right set of cards coming through at
the same time.
So I designed for Ada in this universe of hers.
She's got her programming organ.
[LAUGH] It's got little shortcuts and things.
So she can just type in all the functions.
This is actually based off of, if you go up to Mackle's Field,
there's this beautiful museum of Jacquard looms.
And they have all these wonderful gadgets for punching the cards,
they're pretty magnificent so, had there actually been an engine
then somebody would've I'm sure built this thing.
So on a final note, sorry I've run way over and everyone's starving, on a final
note I have to say again with this with Ada.
I'm not clever enough to do this.
But if you love something and if it's meant to happen, you will make it happen.
For me to specify that she had to have all these specific qualifications.
And be amazing at this thing.
And then she would just step in I think that's a bit backwards.
I mean, Lovelace loved the engine.
That's very clear, I think, in everything that she wrote.
And in order to kind of serve her function with the engine she did
Extraordinary things, so that's my talk thanks.
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