Lovelace and Babbage
This post is about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and how they exchanged ideas to further Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In my project to create hand-crafted data visualisations as my final assignment for my Master of Data Science , I am looking at links between Victorian England, Colonialism and its aftermath, how we communicate with data via visualisation, the high cost of cheap fashion, and data humanism. You may be wondering how this all hangs together, but hang in there, and have a read of the other posts starting here.
The Jacquard Loom
“You are aware of the system of cards which Jacard (sic) invented are the means by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to weave any pattern that may be desired. Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated. But I have also advanced one stage further and without making all the cards, I have communicated through the same means orders to follow certain laws in the use of those cards and thus the Calculating Engine can solve any equations, eliminate between any number of variables and perform the highest operations of analysis”
Writing to French astronomer François Jean Dominique Arago in 1836, Charles Babbage requested that his friend try and obtain a famous silk portrait of Joseph Jacquard. “The portrait of Jacquard was indeed fascinating as it was essentially a digitised image. Made using 24,000 punched cards, it wove an image of the inventor of the loom on which it was woven”. (Essenger, 2014, p307/563)
Babbage could see in the weaving machine the potential of abstraction.
The notion of abstracting information away from its physical substrate required careful emphasis. Babbage explained, for example, that the weaver might choose different threads and different colours — “but in these cases the form of the pattern will be precisely the same.” As Babbage conceived the machine now, it raised this very process of abstraction to higher and higher degrees. He meant the cogs and wheels to handle not just the numbers but variables standing in for numbers.” (Gleik 2011, p.207/1114)
The Analytical Engine
Babbage used terms like store (where information in the machine would pass from one area to the other via cogs and precision machinery), and mill (describing the action of how the information would be moved and processed in his machine), but it was his friendship and exchange of ideas with Ada Lovelace that would take his ideas further.
Lovelace met Babbage in 1833 at a reception at his house, and they quickly went on to become firm friends. Lovelace was a prodigious thinker, and had enjoyed an education not normally afforded to women in that period. Her father was Lord Byron, but after divorcing Byron, Lovelace’s mother raised her alone. Lovelace took on the cause of championing Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and indeed, she progressed the thinking and concept behind it further than Babbage ever did.
Babbage travelled to Italy in 1840 to present his Analytical Engine ideas. After this the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea wrote “Notions sur la machine analytique”, a paper that aimed to outline and promote Babbage’s work. Lovelace translated this work into English, and encouraged by Babbage, infused her own thinking into the paper.
“Her exposition took the form of notes lettered A through G, extending to nearly three times the length of Menabrea’s essay. They offered a vision of the future more general and more prescient than any expressed by Babbage himself. How general? The engine did not just calculate; it performed operations, she said, defining an operation as “any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things”. (Gleik 2011, p.219/1114)
In this work she also outlined her thinking on the symbolic potential of the machine. It could stretch beyond numbers and mathematics. “It had been an engine of numbers; now it had become and engine of information.” (Gleik 2011, p.220/1114). Gleik goes on to say, “she was programming the machine. She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not exist.” (Gleik 2011, p.225/1114)
“…We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves “ — Ada Lovelace
In ‘Mistaken Ancestry: The Jacquard and the Computer’, Martin Davis and Virginia Davies take a very literal and dim view on the Jacquard loom and its influence on computing (Davis & Davis 2005). They rightly discredit the idea that the loom is a direct ancestor to the computer, but fail acknowledge rather the influence it had on thinking. How it set forth thought, associations, frameworks and ideas in the mind of both Babbage and Lovelace on how information could be processed and manipulated by machines. The section titled “Two Sad Stories: Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace” is a nasty, tear-down of Lovelace, who they say was used by Babbidge to gain publicity for his work. They regard Lovelace as bright, but mathematically mediocre (Davis & Davis 2005, p. 85).
“Her life was pretty awful. She suffered from persistent mood swings that suggest bipolar disorder, and had a large number of purely physical disorders. She took opium several times a week, which seems to provide her with some relief. She became a compulsive gambler, repeatedly pawning the family jewelry. Poor Ada was just shy of her thirty-seventh birthday when she died a painful death of cancer of the uterus.” (Davis & Davis 2005, p. 86) *
Luigia Carlucci Aiello addresses the Davis and Davis article, and her own preconceptions of Lovelace’s limited contribution to computing and indeed artificial intelligence compared to Alan Turing (Carlucci Aiello 2016). She states that by further exploring Lovelace’s writings and propositions she was able to revisit these beliefs and see that;
Ada was not limited or rigid; she worked a century before Turing, she envisioned the idea of software and had the intuition that we could develop formal mathematical theories and operations and implemented them in programs that apply operations to symbols, let them be numbers to be used in calculations, words to generate poems, or musical notes to generate music. Ada envisioned symbolic processing and with a century of research in mathematics and logic Turing could look further more into the future of thinking machines. (Carlucci Aiello 2016, p. 62)
Carlucci Aiello, L. 2016, ‘The multifaceted imapct of Ada ovelace in the digital age’, Atificial Intellegence, no. 235, pp. 58–62.
Davis, M. & Davis, V. 2005, ‘Mistaken Ancestry: The Jacquard and the Computer’, Textile, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 76–87.
Essinger, J. 2013, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace launched the Digital Age, Gibson Square, London, UK.
Gleik, J. 2011, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, Fourth Estate/Harper Collins eBook.
*Is it just me, or does it sound a little too gleeful about the dying of cancer part? I have read accounts of Lovelace’s death, and it sounds horrific. It was a long and excruciating battle with uterine cancer.
