10 MARCH/APRIL 2022PROFILES
Babbage. On an evening together in 1834,
Babbage explained to Ada and her moth-
er an idea he had for another invention.
Although the Difference Engine—that
clanging, hand-cranked machine he had
demonstrated for Ada the previous year—
remained unfinished, Babbage was already
envisioning a machine more complicated
and more capable. It would be powered bysteam, and its spinning wheels would take
up as much space as a locomotive.
He called the imagined machine the
Analytical Engine, and it would be able
to do more than simple math; instead,
it would be able to “[eat] its own tail,” in
Babbage’s words, which meant that the
machine could store its outputs and
then employ them in other equations.In essence, this machine would not just
calculate; it would compute.
Fascinated with the invention and
its potential, Lovelace stayed in close
communication with Babbage as he de-
veloped the machine’s schematics. In
1842 Italian mathematician (and future
prime minister) Luigi Federico Menabrea
published a paper on Babbage’s proposed
machine, which Lovelace eagerly trans-
lated into English, in hopes of drum-
ming up more support for the invention
in England. She signed her translation
only as “A.A.L.”
Along with the translated article,
Lovelace submitted her own notes on
the Analytical Engine. Her “Translator’s
Note” dwarfed the translated article
itself, clocking in at well over double
Menabrea’s word count. In the notes,
Lovelace included her own explanation
of how the hypothetical machine would
work, expressed in considerably greater
detail than Menabrea’s original paper.FATHER OF COMPUTING
ENGLISH MATHEMATICIAN and inventor Charles
Babbage was born in 1791. Devoted to math and
science, he helped found the Analytical Society in
1812 to introduce European innovations in mathe-
matics to England. His Analytical Engine — though
never fully realized — is often considered to be the
first modern computer.
CHARLES BABBAGE, PHOTOGRAPHED CIRCA 1860ALAN SPENCER PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMYHORSLEY TOWERS, a mock-Tudor
mansion in Surrey, southern
England, was begun in 1820. Ada
Lovelace’s husband acquired it in
1840 and added a great hall and
towers to the complex.ALAMY