The Guardian website produced a couple of articles to announce the publication of Sydney Padua’s graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer. I strongly suspect that despite Padua’s qualifying ‘mostly’ in her subtitle what we will be presented with here bears very little relation to the historical facts. However, not actually having read the book, it is not the subject of this brief post but rather the Guardian article. This article is crowned with the following headline:
Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage designed a computer in the 1840s.
A cartoonist finishes the project.
Can you spot the major howler in the very brief first sentence? Who designed a computer? Charles Babbage designed a computer. Ada Lovelace wrote a puff piece about that computer, which was in all probability largely ghost-written by Babbage. Just in case you should think that this was an inadvertent slip of a subeditor’s thumb on his computer keyboard the claim is repeated even more emphatically in the title of an illustration to the article.
200 years after Ada Lovelace’s birth, the Analytical Engine she designed with Charles Babbage is finally built, thanks to the imagination of Sydney Padua. Illustration: The Observer
In case you should still think that the writer of the piece could or should be excused of all blame, embarrassed by the hyperbolic flights of fancy of that technology history ignorant subeditor, we find the following in the main body of the article.
Brought up to shun the lure of poetry and revel instead in numbers, Lovelace teamed up with mathematician Charles Babbage who had grand plans for an adding machine, named the Difference Engine, and a computer called the Analytical Engine, for which Lovelace wrote the programs.
Where to begin? First off both the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine are computers. The former a special purpose computer and the latter a general purpose one. Babbage would have been deeply offended having his mighty Difference Engine denigrated to a mere adding machine, although all computers are by name adding machines; computer coming, as it does, from the Latin computare which means to reckon/compute/calculate, sum/count (up). As a brief aside, when the word computer was coined in the 17th century it referred to a person employed to do calculations. Second, and in this context most important, Lovelace did not write the programs for the Analytical Engine. The afore mentioned puff piece from her pen contained one, note the singular, specimen program for the Analytical Engine, which she might possibly have written, although it seems more probable that Babbage wrote it. All the other programs for the Analytical Engine, and there were others were written by, you’ve guessed it, Charles Babbage.
The deification of Ada Lovelace marches on a pace with the honest historian of the computer barely able to keep pace with the waves of mythology that pour out of the unsavvy media almost every day it seems.
