Charles & Ada: The Computer's Most Passionate Partnership - Brossura

Essinger, James

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0750990953 ISBN 13: 9780750990950

Casa editrice: The History Press, 2019

Riassunto

The names Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace are synonymous with pioneering computer science and engineering, their work on the Analytical Engine shifting paradigms and sparking the advent of the computer age in which our society is now based. The one seemingly a stereotypically repressed Englishman, while the other would become an early feminist icon. Without Ada there would have been no Charles, and it is through their ever-strengthening friendship that history was made. James Essinger tells the fascinating story of the gradually intensifying friendship that formed between Charles and Ada, interweaving it with tales of their outstanding professional collaboration. Using personal letters to and from the duo, the true feelings behind their unique friendship are revealed for the first time, adding personality, warmth and passion to the partnership that changed the world.

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Informazioni sull?autore

James Essinger is an established author of narrative non-fiction books focusing on STEM subjects and personalities. These include the acclaimed Ada's Algorithm: How Lord Byron's Daughter Launched the Digital Age Through the Poetry of Numbers, which was an AV Club Notable Release, and has been optioned for film by Monumental Pictures. Lisa Noel Babbage is the great granddaughter of Charles Babbage as well as an author, teacher, and philanthropist. She lives in Northeast Georgia.

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                                                                     Preface
Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer, mathematician and polymath, designed the world's first programmable computer. He did this, not in our century, or even in the twentieth century, but backin the 1830s.
    His great friend Ada Lovelace, born Ada Byron, encouraged him and supported him emotionally in his endeavours, and her insights into his work ' insights that not even Babbage had had ' help posterity understand just how far ahead of its time his thinking really was. In particular, Ada saw that Babbage had in fact invented a general-purpose machine that could govern all sorts of processes, including even the composition and playing of music, whereas Babbage thought that he was only designing machines for carrying out mathematical calculations.
    Babbage and Ada were both geniuses and their talents existed in a kind of symbiosis with each other, although neither Babbage nor Ada fully understood this at the time.
    After first inventing a revolutionary machine he called the Difference Engine, devised to print accurate mathematical and navigational tables, Babbage, in 1834, realized that a much more general machine, which he christened the Analytical Engine, was possible. Programs (to use modern terminology) and data were to be furnished to the Analytical Engine by means of punched cards, which were already being used
at the time to govern the operation of the Jacquard loom, a remarkable and inspired automatic loom for weaving complex images and patterns.
     The Analytical Engine's output would be a printer, a curve plotter and a bell, and the machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read into the machine later. The Analytical Engine was the world's first ever general-purpose computer.
     Many of the great inventions that have made the modern world possible were devised in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. Of these, none is more important than the computer.
     Unfortunately, at the time, hardly anyone recognized the importance of Babbage's computer, apart from Ada Lovelace.

Charles & Ada is the first book to make maximum use of the extensive collection of material in the British Library Babbage archive in London. Anthony Hyman's 1982 biography of Babbage, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer, uses some material from that remarkable archive but curiously omits ' or perhaps overlooks ' abundant personal material which reveals extensive information about Babbage's personality and his personal feelings towards many of the events of his life, including his tragic private life and the rejection he felt at the hands of the world.
     Posterity can be grateful to Babbage for many reasons: one is that he had a habit of making handwritten copies of important letters he was sending or important documents. They may also have been early drafts and it often impossible to know whether an ostensible copy is that or an early draft.
     By definition, someone's archive usually only consists of letters or other documents sent to them, but because Babbage made these crucial copies, we have this additional material available. He was a brilliant writer, and while he expressed his own emotions rarely, when he did it was often with deeply moving intensity. Also, and this is no means a trivial consideration when one sees just how many of the letters he received from others are written in handwriting that is close to, if not completely, unreadable, his own handwriting is usually very legible and there are only a few instances where I have been unableto decipher crucial words.

     Anyone seeking to write Babbage and Ada's story ought to be humbled by the task; indeed, if they were not it is difficult to imagine that the resulting biography could have any merit. This biography, like any other of Babbage, can only ever aspire to offer an approximate idea of what Babbage was like when he lived. Still, it is at least a consolation that ' with perhaps only two exceptions, his beloved wife Georgiana, who died tragically young, in September 1827, and his close friend Ada Lovelace, who also died tragically too young ' nobody who knew him when he was alive had very much idea of what to make of him either. Today, we do at least have the privilege of being able to look back on Babbage's life in its entirety and to do our best to try to fathom what made this remarkable genius the man he was, and what he was really like.
     What is incontestable is that Babbage was a far more emotional and deeply feeling man than we have so far regarded him as being.
     Still, if posterity doesn't usually get him right in this respect, that's to a large extent Babbage's own fault. By all accounts, he wasn't much of a communicator in private about his personal emotional state, and in public he was even less so, even by nineteenth-century standards.
     For example, in his 1864 autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (meaning 'scientist'), there is much excellent material about his plans and aims for the machines he called Difference Engine 1 and Difference Engine 2. There is also some first-rate material about the Analytical Engine, but even given the reticence we habitually expect to encounter in autobiographies written during the latter years of the nineteenth century, Passages contains almost no material whatsoever relating to Babbage's personal life. Babbage does not even mention his beloved wife Georgiana by name on even one occasion, although he does refer to her indirectly:

                              The Queen of Sardinia was the sister of the Grand Duke of Tuscany (Leopold II) from whom I had,
                              many years before, when under severe affliction from the loss of a large portion of my family,
                              received the most kind and gratifying attention.

That 'large portion of my family' certainly includes his wife Georgiana. As for Ada Lovelace, Babbage only mentions her once in a passage which is explored later.
     A major problem with the autobiography is that it has helped to give later generations the impression that Babbage was a hard and unfeeling, mathematically minded man without much in the way ofemotions. Ada, on the other hand, is quite reasonably popularly regarded as  being someone who wore her emotions on her sleeve and who was passionate about her work.
     At the start of his autobiography, Babbage employs a quotation from Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824). Byron was Ada Lovelace's father. The quotation, which is completely at odds with the reticence and indeed deliberate evasion of mentioning emotional topics in the autobiography, is:

                                   I'm a philosopher. Confound them all.
                                   Birds, beasts and men; but no, not womankind.

In fact, Babbage misquotes Byron here: Byron wrote, 'Bills, beasts and men' rather than 'Birds, beasts and men.' Babbage, with an enormous inheritance, was not so preoccupied with money on a day-to-day basis as Byron was.
     The misquotation may be due to Babbage confusing the lines in Don Juan with an extract from Byron's poem Darkness (1816), which reads:

                                     ... and kept
                                    The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay.

This misquotation suggests he was a man for whom women were a spiritually vital part of his life, yet it's impossible to be certain what they really meant to Babbage. He was capable of very strong attachments and there is no doubt that he and Ada did indeed have a close romantic friendship which may possibly have become more physical, though there is no proof of this.
     Generally, there is very little evidence in the documentation that allows much to be written of Babbage's feelings about women other than his devotion to his wife Georgiana and all his children, his terrible distress when his daughter Georgiana died, and his great fondness for Ada.

The Sirens of Machinery
In Greek mythology, the Sirens are dangerous temptresses, who sang charmingly and lured nearby sailors to their death on dangerous rocks. Machines can be Sirens too.
     Charles and Ada were fascinated not only by the possibility of what mechanisms could do, but tended to see mechanisms as the manifestation of a kind of earthly religion. Babbage once remarked, when talking about a machine he'd seen in the industrial north, how extraordinary it was that every single time the machine operated, a particular part of its mechanism would reach up to exactly the same place as before. This might seem a commonplace observation, but to Babbage it was something akin to poetry. As for Ada, she once went on a tour of the industrial north with her mother, and enjoyed the tour very much.
     Babbage loved mechanical figures and toys that were able to move about by themselves. He grew extremely enthusiastic about them and when he bought one for his house he would beg his close friends to come and see it and he would introduce it to a wider circle of friends at his regular social soirees. Indeed, its regularity was itself a kind of manifestation of Babbage's love of order, precision, and the relentless progression of mechanism.
     He loved machinery of all kinds, being fascinated by it beyond its own utility. He loved devices for their own sake. Babbage was the kind of person who liked to play around with machinery to see what would happen. As we'll see, he even confesses in his autobiography to having the fundamental problem as a child of being far more interested in what was inside a machine than in what it could do for him.
     In his love of and appreciation for machinery, Babbage is not only a Victorian genius, but in a very real sense, a modern genius too. Researching into his life and writing about him, one is so often overwhelmed with a sense this was a man who was to a large extent timeless.
     The trouble with loving machines, though, is that machines don't usually love us back. What is true of physical machines generally is especially true of inventions. It's never enough merely to conceptualize the invention; you need to build one if you're going to be an inventor of any importance. That can be a task that requires superhuman persistence and patience.
     For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, James Dyson (now Sir James), the inventor of the revolutionary cyclonic bag-less vacuum cleaner made more than 5,000 prototypes of the vacuum cleaner he dreamedof building before he finally got it right.
     Indeed, machines often have a tendency to turn into Sirens who break inventors' hearts. The reason for this is that physical materials need to do complex things very accurately and reliably if the invention is going to work.
     Most of the technical problems Babbage faced throughout his career stemmed from his decision to try to construct his computation machines from cogwheels. These were designed to function in the Engines to represent numbers which in modern computers would be embodied in microchip circuitry.
     Babbage did not give serious consideration to using any other technology for his machines than cogwheels. Electrical science was nowhere near sophisticated enough in his time to make an electrical Difference Engine or Analytical Engine even remotely feasible. Cogwheels, on the other hand, had an excellent tried-and-tested pedigree within a meticulous, highly commercial, practical science that spanned the globe: the manufacture of clocks and watches. Cogwheels allowed a weight to fall in regular, measured increments and so brought the passage of time ' which, until the invention of the cogwheel in the Middle Ages, had been only tracked by sundials and clumsy estimates ' under the precise dominion of human awareness and observation.
     Babbage wanted to extend that same precision to arithmetical and mathematical calculation. With the help of engineers he employed, he was able to produce cogwheels he needed for the required accuracy ' indeed there is evidence that his level of accuracy was actually in excess of what was required to make the machines work.
     But Babbage needed to do more than just produce a handful of cogwheels. The Difference Engine, if it was to be completed, required about 20,000 essentially identical cogwheels at a time when the only way of making them was basically by hand; this was simply too big an undertaking even for someone as ambitious and wealthy as Babbage. The Analytical Engine would need even more. As Doron Swade
explains in his book The Cogwheel Brain (2000):

                            The lesson from Babbage's unhappy fate was that unless he could produce the hundreds of nearidentical parts in a credibly                              short time and at low cost, the world at large ' and bank managers in
                            particular ' would lose patience.

The point is that brilliant ideas are dreams and dreams need to be made to come true with investment of time, expertise and hard cash. In imagination things may work perfectly well, but reality could often tell a different story.

While heartbreak is the swansong of many an inventor, Babbage at least had the defence against the Sirens that he lived very much inside his own mind and to some extent in his own world as well, which could make reality less painful for him. In January 1832, the geologist Charles Lyell traveled to Hendon,today a northern suburb of London but at that time a village separate from the capital, and visited his  friends Dr William Fitton and William Conybeare, who were also both geologists. Babbage was there aswell. As Lyell recalled:
 
                          We have had great fun in laughing at Babbage, who unconsciously jokes and reasons in high
                          mathematics, talks of the 'algebraic equation' of such a one's character in regard to the truth of
                          his stories etc. I remarked that the paint of Fitton's house would not stand, on which Babbage
                          said, 'no: painting a house outside is calculating by the index minus one," or some such phrase,
                          which made us stare; so that he said gravely by way of explanation, 'that is to say, I am assuming
                          revenue to be a function.' All this without pedantry, and he bears well being well quizzed by it.

Lyell found his evening in this stimulating company delightful:

                          Fitton's carriage brought us from Highwood House to within a mile of Hampstead, and then
                          Babbage and I got out and preferred walking. Although enjoyable, yet staying up till half-past one
                          with three such men, and the continual pelting of new ideas, was anything but a day of rest.

It was in the summer of 1821 that Babbage is definitely known to have started working on automatic calculating machines, though it is possible he might have thought of them before then.
                         In Passages, Babbage states:
               
                        The earliest idea that I can trace in my own mind of calculating arithmetical tables by machinery
                         arose in this manner:
                        One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning
                         forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me.
                        Another member, coming into the room and seeing me half asleep, called out, 'Well, Babbage,
                        what are you dreaming about?' to which I replied, 'I'm thinking that all these tables (pointing to
                        the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery."

However, Babbage adds immediately after this: 'I am indebted to my friend, the Rev. Doctor Robinson, the Master of the Temple, for this anecdote. The event must have happened either in 1812 or 1813."
     If Babbage did mention to a fellow student his plans for using machinery to calculate mathematical tables back in the days when Babbage was at Cambridge University, it seems unlikely that Babbage ' a man with a prodigious memory ' would not have remembered this himself. This particular anecdote therefore is probably apocryphal, although the fact that Babbage put it in his autobiography shows how
significant in his intellectual development he saw his notion of mechanizing calculations.
     Robert Pirsig, in his autobiographical philosophical memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), characterises two kinds of attitudes towards technology in his memoir. Pirsig depicts himself as interested in the details of maintenance in order that his machine will have the best chance of delivering excellent performance during the trip: the 'Classical' approach to technology. His friend John Sutherland, conversely, is shown as having little or no interest in the details of motorcycle maintenance. He basically just hopes for the best and that his own motorcycle won't break down. Pirsig calls this the 'Romantic' approach, suggesting that most people tend to fall into one category or the other when it comes to technology.
     Employing this terminology, Babbage could be said to have held the 'Classical' and 'Romantic' attitudes simultaneously. We might say that he was both a classical and romantic inventor, capable of being a superb engineer while simultaneously maintaining a thoroughly idealistic and passionate attitude towards his inventions and remaining deeply excited about the benefits they might bring to humanity, even while behaving much of the time in ways that were fundamentally inimical to any chance of that happening. This, essentially, was the nature of the tragedy of his life.
     In time to come, Ada understood this fundamentally self-destructive aspect of his personality, and did all she could to help him overcome it. With what effect, we shall see.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: The History Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0750990953
• ISBN 13: 9780750990950
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 256
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile