Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 'Notes'

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 16-26

  Fuegi, John ^a,b,c,d   Francis, Jo ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

^b Maryland Inst Technol in the Hum   (United States)

^c HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

BALLISTICS TABLES; MECHANICAL CALCULATORS;

CALCULATIONS; CODES (SYMBOLS); COMPUTER PROGRAMMING; ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT; ENGINEERING RESEARCH;

COMPUTATION THEORY;

EID: 0348011361     PISSN: 10586180     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2003.1253887     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. British Library, London, additional manuscript (hereafter "add'l ms.") 40,514, folio 223.
2. A.A. Lovelace, "Notes by A.A.L. [August Ada Lovelace]," Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, London, vol. III, 1843, pp. 666-731. These notes were originally printed in both Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others, P. Morrison and E. Morrison, eds., Dover Publications, 1961 (which includes the full text of the Menabrea translation and the 1843 Notes, pp. 225-297), and in Faster Than Thought, B.V. Bowden, ed., Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1953, pp. 341-408. A.A. Lovelace's translation of Menabrea together with her "Notes" are also on the Web: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.
3. A.A. Lovelace, "Notes by A.A.L. [August Ada Lovelace]," Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, London, vol. III, 1843, pp. 666-731. These notes were originally printed in both Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others, P. Morrison and E. Morrison, eds., Dover Publications, 1961 (which includes the full text of the Menabrea translation and the 1843 Notes, pp. 225-297), and in Faster Than Thought, B.V. Bowden, ed., Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1953, pp. 341-408. A.A. Lovelace's translation of Menabrea together with her "Notes" are also on the Web: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.
4. A.A. Lovelace, "Notes by A.A.L. [August Ada Lovelace]," Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, London, vol. III, 1843, pp. 666-731. These notes were originally printed in both Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others, P. Morrison and E. Morrison, eds., Dover Publications, 1961 (which includes the full text of the Menabrea translation and the 1843 Notes, pp. 225-297), and in Faster Than Thought, B.V. Bowden, ed., Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1953, pp. 341-408. A.A. Lovelace's translation of Menabrea together with her "Notes" are also on the Web: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.
5. For information about the film, see http://www.mith.umd.edu/flare and http://www.computer.org/annals/an2002/extras/a405602x.htm.
6. P. Morrison and E. Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines ..., p. 249.
7. Ibid., p. 252.
8. She is, of course using the customary plural of scholarly writers of the time.
9. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 189-194.
10. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 326.
11. A. Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, Princeton Univ. Press, 1982, p. 227.
12. I.B. Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, MIT Press, p. 63.
13. Cited by D. Swade, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, Science Museum, 1991, p. 34.
14. Cited from H.J. Gray's Digital Computer Engineering, Prentice-Hall, 1963, in the annoted bibliography given by B. Randell, ed., The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer Verlag, 1973, p. 420.
15. Cited from H.J. Gray's Digital Computer Engineering, Prentice-Hall, 1963, in the annoted bibliography given by B. Randell, ed., The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer Verlag, 1973, p. 420.
16. A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Vintage, p. 304.
17. Ibid., p. 297 and pp. 357-358.
18. Cited by D. Swade, The Cogwheel Brain, pp. 160-161.
19. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK, box 168, folio 47, recto and verso.
20. Cited by B.A. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, p. 225. We might note that as we did our own transcriptions of letters, in a number of cases our reading and dating differs from Toole's. Ideally, all these documents should be put directly on the Web so that various people can do their own decipherments of texts that are often extremely hard to read. In some cases, Toole has very usefully included facsimiles of some of the handwritten documents, an excellent practice.
21. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 168, folio 43, recto and verso.
22. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 168, folio 45, recto and verso, and folio 46, recto.
23. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 337.
24. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 344.
25. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 348.
26. British Library, add'l ms. 37,191, folio 638.
27. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 351-352.
28. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 354.
29. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 357-358.
30. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 362.
31. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 386-725.
32. See D.A. Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, MIT Press, 1985, p. xi, where much is made of "her [emphasis added] curiously ignored translation of a printer's error." Stein claimed that if Lovelace missed a proofreading error, she must have been unsound in mathematics. Stein then argues we must see Babbage as the primary author of the "Notes" (though he, too, missed the printer's error) and see Lovelace's centrality as what Stein calls a "mythology" (p. ix). However, from the surviving letters of Babbage, Lovelace, Wheatstone, Lyell, Faraday, Menabrea, and the editors of Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, it is clear that proofreading was done with Babbage, and that the original typesetting error was missed by Menabrea. The original documentation shows that all contemporaries of Lovelace and Babbage, having first-hand knowledge of how the "Notes" came into being, acknowledged Lovelace at the time as the primary author.
33. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 393-394.
34. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 398-399.
35. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 414-415.
36. Letter is given in full in B.A. Toole, Ada, pp. 219-222.
37. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 168, folios 41 and 42.
38. D. Swade, Cogwheel, p. 163.
39. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 42, folio 76.
40. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folios 425-426.
41. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 42, folios 86-88.
42. Byron/Lovelace Collection, Bodleian Library, box 42, folios 101-102.
43. British Library, add'l ms. 54,089, folio 37.
44. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 445.
45. British Library, add'l ms. 37,192, folio 46.
46. British Library, add'l ms. 54,089, folio 54.
47. P. Morrison and E. Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines ..., p. 256.