Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  Humphry Davy died in 1829, leaving the chair of the Royal Society empty and open to contest. Herschel and Babbage, both now of age and in the midst of their own scientific accomplishments, readied themselves for a fight—not with each other, but with an old establishment of old thinkers and old thinking. John, inheritor of his father’s ambitions and his mother’s wealth, and just as carefully raised on his aunt Caroline’s principles (she was, after all, a discoverer of comets and the first female astronomer to be paid a living by the crown), seemed like the most natural choice. Faraday had refused to stand for the chair, preferring his position as director, and Babbage, member of the “Ghost Club,” graduating without honors, and otherwise reckless, would not even be considered for the post. In the end, however, even Herschel would not make the cut—defeated 119 votes to 111, the young scientist lost to the Duke of Sussex, who actually knew nothing about science at all. He was, however, helpfully related to King George IV.15 The nature of the loss led to open revolt among the young heads at the table, and some left the society altogether. Shortly after, Babbage published Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. Science, he argued, must be more than simple observation—it needed training in the skills of science, in self-control and dedication, and critical interpretation. Babbage’s “manifesto” would become the foundation, there and then in 1831, of a new kind of unified society: the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Faraday didn’t leap at the new model, though; instead, he encouraged Dutch chemist Gerard Möll to write a reproof of Babbage’s bold assertions.16 It would be Herschel who came to Babbage’s aid, offering his own manifesto about the inductive method—about the testing of hypotheses, free scientific enquiry, and the investigation of the unknown.17 It has a democratic flavor, and the British Association began to attract national attention by 1833. Even so, it would never fully overturn the Royal Society, and it did not encourage the government to increase its funding of scientific schemes, either—including Babbage’s difference engine. He abandoned the project 17,000 pounds in debt. The year was 1833, and Babbage was broke and bitter. In keeping with his usual style, his answer was to throw another of his intellectual soirees (for which he’d grown famous), and to invite the well connected, well educated, and well-to-do. One such guest was the mathematician Mary Somerville, and she’d brought with her a young pupil named Ada. It was a fortuitous meeting, because Babbage needed a new partner.

  Ada Lovelace: only (legitimate) daughter of the mercurial poet Lord Byron, ostensibly responsible for the first written computer code, and a well-connected visionary of the mechanical future and in constant poor health. Tracking exactly who Ada was and what she achieved is like catching an oiled fish, not because nothing may be said of her but because everything might be. Both calculating and incalculable, Ada has turned up repeatedly in modern steampunk and science fiction, from Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine to Sydney Padua’s recent graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage [Fig. 12].† Christened Augusta Ada King-Noel, Ada lived estranged from her wayward father with her mother, the countess of Wentworth. Annabella Wentworth saw in Byron’s poetics the rash insanity that drove him from her (they separated when Ada was only one month old) and determined that Ada’s life would be very different. She would be nurtured on “true science,” by which she meant the safety and utility of numbers, those same jots and dashes that described the heavens and ordered the world. The countess, when mentioned at all, receives a bare footnote in history as stiff and inflexible, but Annabella rose from a long tradition of women trained above their station, whose minds sought to build empires they could inhabit separate from bodies that could be mocked and traded upon by a world of men. It isn’t surprising that she would have chosen Somerville as a tutor for her daughter, the foremost scientific woman of the age, and the same who was first to be admitted to Babbage’s Royal Astronomical Society. Ada Lovelace clung to numbers not only as vocation, but also, as described by Iwan Rhys Morus, for physical salvation; she saw the future of machines as a future of body exploration—what might be learned in this “living laboratory” for the investigation, particularly, of electricity?18 “It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics,” she explained by letter, including in her repertoire Euclid, arithmetic, algebra, and also Newton’s treasured astronomy and optics. “I do not anticipate any serious difficulties; here I am, ready to be directed!”19 She meets Babbage shortly after his plans to transform the Royal Society into a place for young ideas had all but collapsed, a talkative teenager, full of energy and a quick appreciation for the possibilities of the machinery.20 Babbage dubs her his “Enchantress of Numbers,” and by the early 1840s, they had become fast friends and correspondents, trading letters on the next phase of Babbage’s calculating engine—and more importantly, how to sell the idea. It begins, like nearly all the other technological turning points, with a publication.

  An Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, had published on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. He had heard Babbage’s lectures at Turin, and the work offered the first in-press description of the device (not delivered by Babbage himself). There were two problems with the publication, however; first, Menabrea was a virtual unknown at the time. Babbage had hoped the more esteemed Giovanni Plana would write the paper (and lend it his seal and credibility). Second, the paper was issued in Italian. If Babbage wanted to gain the attention of the world, particularly the English-speaking world, at least one of these disadvantages had to be surmounted—and Lovelace was more than capable of the task. In 1842, she published the translated memoir as Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, and with it, documentation that has been considered by some to be the most important contribution of the early computing age: an algorithm, the first software program ever written. Babbage had already acquired a series of punch cards, slips that could be fed into the new automatic Jacquard Loom for weaving. With some adjustments, the cards could be punched to program a very different sort of engine; as Ada puts it herself, “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”21 The punch cards operated like a more advanced version of the Writing Boy’s replacement alphabet; as Babbage writes in a letter, “the system of cards which Jacard [sic] invented are the means by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to calculate any formula however complicated.”22 Lovelace’s own breathless prose offers greater possibilities: “A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.”23 It wasn’t a mere calculation machine they wanted; no! Why not follow what Leibniz himself had so long ago suggested? Why not build a machine to analyze and solve problems? Babbage’s “Analytic Engine” would be the greatest feat of his day, a punch-card apparatus and mechanical storage on 50,000 cogs—what Holmes calls “the genuine equivalent of a modern computer’s RAM memory.” Lovelace saw the future the same way George Shattuck Morison did, but nearly fifty years before him. The future belonged to practical machines, and to the engineers who could build and run them. The machine, however, was not to be (not outside of fiction, anyway).

  George Zarkadakis’s 2016 In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence describes the way this singular achievement has fascinated historians and fiction writers alike. “How would the world be today,” he asks, “if the British Treasury had not stopped funding Babbage’s dreams and designs?”24 Would he and Lovelace have ushered in the computing age a hundred years earlier? In the alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, also called The Difference Engine, Babbage and Lovelace do indeed usher in a technological age nearly one hundred and fifty years before the first computer, ENIAC, was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in 1946. In this future, mass production of
computers occurs by the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of information technology, while classical literature and humanities are abandoned in favor of engineering and accountancy—and Lovelace remains Ada Byron, the “queen of engines.” But the answer to the question “what would happen if” Babbage had succeeded in getting additional funds for the difference engine is probably moot. Even with his personal capital to spare, he had not been able to make good on his plans, and moved from one idea to the next rapidly, abandoning the difference engine in favor of the analytic engine, then moving on to plan Difference Engine No. 2. Author and illustrator Sydney Padua describes him in an National Public Radio interview as a “blend of Mr. Pickwick [from Charles Dickens], Mr. Toad, Don Quixote, and Leonardo da Vinci.”25 He had a brilliant but erratic mind, one of the many reasons he’d not been considered for chair of the Royal Society and likely responsible for his inability to shift that body toward his aims and ideals. Lovelace is the hero of Padua’s novel, a bright and expansive adventure that turns history’s Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, into a lean, lithe, pipe-smoking, pants-wearing adventuress. The boisterous Babbage (who might have been as mercurial as Lovelace’s own poet-father) is rendered a little less grand that he probably would have liked; it is the adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and not the other way around, after all [Fig. 13].

  The real-life Lovelace is hardly less fascinating. “The Devil’s in it,” she boasted after her successful translation, “if I have not sucked out some life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.”26 Babbage aimed for a calculating engine; Ada aimed much higher. The algorithms opened up possibilities that set her mind alight—and she willed and wanted almost entirely without direction, like Victor having discovered a secret but with no way to put it in practice. She wanted “cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations; in short a law or laws, for the mutual actions of the molecules of brains,” that were “equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary and sideral world.”27 She felt certain there were connections that somehow bridged the gap between material and immaterial, among intellectual, moral, and religious understanding and the electrical impulse of body tissues. The physical universe and the teeming millions of thoughts in the teeming millions of brains must all be one; we need only map them as we had the great dark continents. Had she been alive to know Kepler, she might have found a kindred spirit, but she knew Babbage instead—and Babbage would lay the foundation of computing largely without her. William Aspray, author of Computing Before Computers, suggests that Ada never really programmed anything at all, while James Essinger’s work claims that she launched the digital age. In her later years and in increasingly poor health, her interests in electricity would become profoundly personal, linked to a wave of (usually unwholesome and often dangerous) medical-electrical treatments rather than to building computing machines—something we’ll return to in later chapters. Could she not build a better body—or even a mind? It returns us to Hiroshi Ishiguro’s aims to replicate himself in robotics, and to the idea that even inanimate things may have souls. Did the real Ada Lovelace “code” or not? It remains difficult to say, but no one can argue about her influence. “Can I do that, truly?” asks Sybil, the protagonist of Difference Engine, about a woman’s right to be a clacker. “Can a girl do that?”28 Ada’s powerful connections gave Babbage something he hadn’t been able to pull together entirely on his own: publicity, finance, and noise. Ada was captain to Babbage’s engineer, the salesman with a taste for the carnivalesque and the pedigree to rub shoulders with the scientific elite. And no engineer ever got very far without one.

  Why, then, doesn’t the difference engine succeed? Scientific progress in electricity continued; in 1833 Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, or the production of force across an electrical conductor due to its interaction with a magnetic field; engines and hydraulics and telegraphs would be developed in the ensuing years. But of the analytic and difference engines: nothing. Babbage understood the punch cards; he’d solved the first problems of the machine and even built small models that worked. Menabrea grasped the concept that mathematicians might “execute, by means of machinery, the mechanical branch of these labours, reserving for pure intellect that which depends on the reasoning faculties”—that the hard and arduous business of calculation might be gotten at by engines with less time and trouble. Ada’s translation provided the tables of numbers, explained how the numbers could be worked into the machine by using theorems and laws on punch-card programs, and her further speculations explain how an analytical engine would operate. Between the two of them, they had all the necessary connections to intellectual and high society, including the support of John Herschel and (if not enthusiastically) of Faraday. They conversed with other great minds at the British Association meetings, which gained in importance and influence, and they promoted all their doings through publication and display. Gibson and Sterling—and Sydney Padua—begin their alternative narratives in a world where the success of the engine is taken as first principle. But what makes a success? And why, with so much on their side, did Lovelace and Babbage ultimately fail? To answer the question, we have to start down a different path entirely. Not surprisingly, it has everything to do with purpose—and with dread.

  The Tale of a Ship

  In 1868, the United States Navy commissioned a ship called the Wampanoag. The ship still retained the mast and sails, but unlike all other vessels in the fleet, she was propelled by steam. An engine with two cylinders 100 inches in diameter punched out power with a four-foot stroke that turned giant wooden gear wheels and a propeller 19 feet wide. A 60-pound gun, two 100-pound guns, ten 8-inch guns, and four howitzers completed the armory, and she could compete in heavy seas at 17 knots—the fastest in the world.29 She’d been built by an inventor named Benjamin Franklin Isherwood, and she accomplished things that most engineers thought impossible. She was too long, the ratios were off when compared to other ships, her shape would cause her to roll over in the water, she would be hard to maneuver—or so claimed the board of naval officers sent to examine the Wampanoag. They listed out six points in their report, called the ship a miserable failure, and had her decommissioned . . . even though none of their predictions came true. In fact, the ship succeeded in every possible way. She beat all the other navy ships at their own game: swift, steady, efficient, and easy to steer.30 But though the officers stood on her decks and saw her in action, they still recommended she be scrapped as a failure, posthaste. Here we had a ship, far more excellent than any of her day, and she never made official maneuvers in the capacity she’d been designed for. Like Babbage’s difference engine, all the means of success appeared to be on her side, and on the side of her inventor, Isherwood. And like the difference engine, the Wampanoag never catches on.

  The Wampanoag story appears in a lecture by Elting Morison, nephew of George Shattuck Morison. “Now it must be obvious that the members of this Naval Board were stupid,” he writes. The men who opposed the future did so on bad principles, because they feared the future or had fixed attitudes, he supposed; they might be compared to the intractable Royal Society and the refusal of funds for new inventions by new minds. Steam engines disrupted the world they knew, the world of sails and masts and canvas and rigging. Steam engines needed boilers, dark hovels, and grime-faced engineers to run them. Resistance to change is built into our very genes. But, then again, so is the desire for the new. What is it that determines whether a new thing will be embraced or tossed to the side? “It was at this point in my research that I began to be aware of a growing sense of dis-ease,” Elting admits. The officers had described the ship the way Frankenstein’s monster described himself: she was “too much of an abortion”—by which they meant an anomaly, anathema, a thing that did not fit and should not be.31 The Civil War, you see, had ended. And, in being a ship like no other ship, she had no opponent and no purpose. That is, as a ship of war in a time of peace
, the Wampanoag had nothing to do. Elting ultimately determines that the “stupid” officers are right, in a way. The new ship was too new; she’d arrived too soon and was “a destructive energy” in their society. To return to the very beginning of this book, a machine, if left to itself, will “establish its own conditions,” and bend the man to the machinery rather than the other way around.32 And that is fearful business.