The Information - James Gleick [54]
As he traversed the rails, he realized that a peculiar danger of steam locomotion lay in its outracing every previous means of communication. Trains lost track of one another. Until the most regular and disciplined scheduling was imposed, hazard ran with every movement. One Sunday Babbage and Brunel, operating in different engines, barely avoided smashing into each other. Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: “It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be off to Liverpool on their way to America at the rate of twenty miles an hour.”♦ Babbage could only express the hope that science might yet find a remedy for the problem it had created. (“Possibly we might send lightning to outstrip the culprit.”)
As for his own engine—the one that would travel nowhere—he had found a fine new metaphor. It would be, he said, “a locomotive that lays down its own railway.”
Bitter as he was about England’s waning interest in his visionary plans, Babbage found admirers on the continent, particular in Italy—“the country of Archimedes and Galileo,” as he put it to his new friends. In the summer of 1840 he gathered up his sheaves of drawings and journeyed by way of Paris and Lyon, where he watched the great Jacquard loom at Manufacture d’Étoffes pour Ameublements et Ornements d’Église, to Turin, the capital of Sardinia, for an assembly of mathematicians and engineers. There he made his first (and last) public presentation of the Analytical Engine. “The discovery of the Analytical Engine is so much in advance of my own country, and I fear even of the age,”♦ he said. He met the Sardinian king, Charles Albert, and, more significantly, an ambitious young mathematician named Luigi Menabrea. Later Menabrea was to become a general, a diplomat, and the prime minister of Italy; now he prepared a scientific report, “Notions sur la machine analytique,”♦ to introduce Babbage’s plan to a broader community of European philosophers.
As soon as this reached Ada Lovelace, she began translating it into English, correcting errors on the basis of her own knowledge. She did that on her own, without telling either Menabrea or Babbage.
When she finally did show Babbage her draft, in 1843, he responded enthusiastically, urging her to write on her own behalf, and their extraordinary collaboration began in earnest. They sent letters by messenger back and forth across London at a ferocious pace—“My Dear Babbage” and “My Dear Lady Lovelace”—and met whenever they could at her home in St. James’s Square. The pace was almost frantic. Though he was the eminence, fifty-one years old to her twenty-seven, she took charge, mixing stern command with banter. “I want you to answer me the following question by return of post”; “Be kind enough to write this out properly for me”; “You were a little harum-scarum and inaccurate”; “I wish you were as accurate and as much to be relied on as myself.” She proposed to sign her work with her initials—nothing so forward as her name—not to “proclaim who has written it,” merely to “individualize and identify it with other productions of the said A.A.L.”♦
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,” and declaring: “This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe.”♦ The science of operations, as she conceived it,
is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and