The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

An imaginary comic about an imaginary computer, with a pair of heroes granted imaginary lives by the simple application of a pocket alternative universe thing. This plays giddy games with history and technology, science and biography, philosophy and literature and it has footnotes, so so many footnotes, a veritable footnote bubble ready to collapse into a terrifying footnote crisis that will lead to scholars who invested too heavily on footnote futures leaping off asterisks and bruising their ibids. Fortunately, the footnotes are witty, wise and full of amusing and fascinating historical trivia while the comics themselves are a warmhearted delight of unabashed silly cleverness. Long live Lovelace and Babbage!

I think in every single post I have ever done on comics I have mentioned that I’m not really all that much into comics… with the occasional exception. As can be expected from that, I’m not an avid reader of web comics either: There’s the occasional visit to xkcd or Oglaf, but that is pretty much it – except, that is, for the single web comic I have been following religiously ever since discovering it (which fortunately happened quite early in its history), namely Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

This is one of those books where it is hard (if not impossible) to imagine anyone not loving it. The author’s immense enthusiasm for his subjects and his characters shines through on every single page show more of this volume and transmits itself to the reader thanks to the wonderful drawings, the stunning inventiveness and the catching humour with which Sydney Padua tells her stories. While these are not quite the historical Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace but alternative version who live in a pocket universe where the Analytical Engine was actually build, the author obviously loves her research and has dug up a huge amount of actual, real information, ranging from the fascinating to know to entertaining anecdotes to the outright bizarre, and she pours out this cornucopia of facts in a wealth of footnotes, end notes to the footnotes and footnotes to the end notes of the footnotes.

For anyone familiar with the web comic this is a very close and nice approximation of all the links to Google Documents Padua likes to sprinkle across her pages (and of course there are footnotes there, too) and while not quite as extensive, bookish footnotes have of course the advantage of being more period-appropriate. Another difference to the web version of Lovelace and Babbage is that (at least to my untrained eye) she seems to have re-worked the graphics – on the web site you can follow the evolution of the author’s drawing style and see her control of and playfulness with the medium grow from comic to comic. The book on the other hand presents the (current) peak of her craft and is much more unified; it also contains a new story not on the website featuring Ada in Wonderland. Both “Organised Crime” and “Vampire Poets” are not in the books though – but one can hope for a future volume.

Anyone not familiar with the web comic is in for the even bigger treat of encountering Lovelace and Babbage for the first time and experience the unfettered glee of seeing a historic injustice righted, our intrepid heroes rewarded with the appreciation they deserve while they use the powers of the Analytical Engine to fight crime in an almost-historical Victorian London. On the way, you will meet many of their contemporaries like you’ve never seen them before, from William Gladstone to George Eliot, from Queen Victoria to that irresistible sex symbol Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and much loud laughter, astonished gasps and delighted squees are bound to ensue. It is not all fun and chortles, though – Sidney Padua never lets the reader forget that it is alternative history she is drawing and that things did not work out that well for her protagonists in our version of history. Thus, she keeps a faint but steady current of melancholy running underneath her merry tale but at the same time always keeps their very real achievements in view, turning the comic into an homage to the indomitable spirit of discovery and invention (and quirky character traits). At the very least, do check out the website but I really cannot recommend this book strongly enough. show less

Charles Babbage was a Victorian inventor who came up with very, very detailed plans for what he called the Analytical Engine: a calculating machine that really would have been nothing more or less than a computer -- a primitive, limited, and clunky computer, but a full-fledged computer nonetheless -- made out of cogwheels and powered by steam. Which is an idea that, I think, just gets cooler and weirder the more you think about it. Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, a woman whose impressive intellect was deliberately channeled into mathematics by her mother in hopes that she wouldn't end up like her crazy poet father. She and Babbage hit it off wonderfully and formed a firm friendship and show more long-term collaboration on matters concerning the Analytical Engine. Where Babbage was focused on the mechanics of the device, Lovelace was more interested in its operation, and had some genuinely prophetic ideas about what machines like it might be capable of. She is sometimes described as being the first computer programmer.

They were also, apparently, really fascinating, eccentric, and colorful characters who make great material for a graphic novel. Although I'm not actually sure whether "graphic novel" is quite the right word for this book. It's a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, with, as the subtitle suggests, rather more of the latter than the former. Actually, its origin story is rather charming. The author initially just created a humorous little biography of Ada Lovelace in webcomic form. But she found the end of that story a little too depressing for the light tone of the comic: Lovelace, sadly, died young, and Babbage died frustrated and unfulfilled, having never succeeded in actually constructing his Engine. So Padua instead concluded her comic by imagining a "pocket universe" in which they were able to build the thing, after all, and use it to "have thrilling adventures and fight crime." The comic turned out to be quite popular, which was nice, but also led to people assuming she was now writing a comic about the alternate-universe adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, when really she was just making a throwaway joke. She kept insisting to people that no, she wasn't writing anything of the kind, even as she kept finding herself, well, sort of writing it. This book is the result!

I actually do think the Lovelace bio that starts it out is the best part. It's hilarious, informative, geeky, and delightful. The fictionalized adventures that follow are sometimes whimsical -- one of them features an Alice-in-Wonderland version of Lovelace falling through a looking-glass into the Engine itself -- but are mostly just little excuses to bring in other famous people of the time, many of whom were personally known to Babbage and Lovelace, often taking their dialog directly from their written works or letters, and providing lots and lots of factual footnotes. Which sounds a bit dry, and the footnotes do get a little out of hand in the first adventure -- something the author notices and ends up making a meta-joke about -- but overall it actually works surprisingly well. The humor is always cute and fun, the historical facts are genuinely interesting, and Padua is clearly so fond of these two nutty geniuses and enthused by her own research into them that it's truly infectious.

She also includes interesting quotes from some primary sources she's found at the end, as well as a section showing her own drawings of the Analytical Engine and taking us through its workings. (Well, in a simplified fashion, anyway, because it's all very dauntingly complex.)

Recommended for anyone who's interested in Lovelace and Babbage, the history of computer science, the Victorian era in general, or a bit of pleasantly nerdy humor. show less

I am an English major turned historian turned web developer (and let's not forget feminist), and if you designed a book specifically to appeal to all of my geekinesses, you couldn't do much better than this.

First of all, it has Ada Lovelace, who is a fascinating person: the daughter of Lord Byron, whose mother didn't want her to be a poet and thus subjected her to a lot of math lessons, turning her into a mathematical prodigy who was able to foresee the potential of computing. Then there's Babbage, who is also pretty darn fascinating, not only for inventing a computer but also for being a classic British curmudgeon. Then, it sticks them in an alternate universe where Babbage has built his Analytical Engine. Since it's an alternate show more universe, Padua can make things happen just because it would have been cool if they had happened that way. A lesser author would just make a bunch of stuff up, but Padua recognizes that reality was almost the coolest thing ever, so she makes some very slight tweaks to reality (some episodes are almost entirely drawn from reality, and some episodes are more fantastical).

But what really made the academic historian in me squee was the research! Most of the dialog is quoted directly from primary sources. The book is full of other historical and literary figures such as Brunel, George Sand, Charles Dickens, and of course Queen Victoria. The comics not only have footnotes, but also endnotes AND appendices! Padua has done her research well, and clearly knows when she's being historical and when she is imagining alternate realities. The whole book is a labor of love and fascination, and as a reader, it is impossible not to share in that love and fascination.

This was fun to read, but now I'm looking forward to re-reading it. show less

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

The subtitle of this graphic novel is "The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer." The novel's creator, [[Sydney Padua]], manipulates the actual interactions of 19th century math prodigy Ada, Countess of Lovelace and eccentric genius Charles Babbage, so she can present and explain the workings of Babbage's Analytical Engine. She presents most of the story in comic strip format, taking liberties throughout to make an abstract (even abstruse) subject entertaining and, mostly, understandable. Notables of the Victorian Age—Queen Victoria herself, the Duke of Wellington, Marian Evans (bka George Eliot), Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dodgson show more (bka Lewis Carroll)—pass in and out of the narrative. Witty footnotes document the factual bases of situations, individuals, meetings, assertions, so the book isn't all comic strip. Yes, there actually are pages of text to read.

Babbage's Analytical Engine is central. Babbage designed a mechanical device, powered by a hand crank, with gears and shafts to calculate and print logorithmic tables. This he called the Difference Engine. A kind of test module was all that Babbage ever built, in part because he got a better idea: a much much larger and more complex machine with greater capabilities. He called that the Analytical Engine, and he didn't get that built either. He was fine-tuning his plans for it up until he died in 1871.

Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, you'll learn on the first page or two, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. She was a math wiz, but also, as befits the spawn of Byron, a bit of a nutcase. She was 18 when she met the 42-year-old Babbage. Although a few experts dispute the claim, Lovelace is often cited as the person who wrote the first computer program. Padua, needless to say, makes a great deal of their association.

Padua conjures an alternative universe—Is this de rigueur in this type of publication?—so she can imagine that the Analytical Engine actually is built. She portrays it as a mammoth and deafening conglomeration of cogwheels, towering stacks of gears, shafts, levers, toggles, gauges, pipes, valves, pumps, tubes, switches, and endless belts of punched cards, housed in a Victorian warehouse of parallel corridors overhung by a web of catwalks suspended from skyhooks, linked by spiralling and Escherian stairways, all converging to a vanishing point shrouded in shadow and steam clouds. Superintending this mysterious, clicking, clanking, hissing, yes, even frightening, industrial-seeming behemoth—always just on the thin edge of control—is Ada Lovelace. Oh, not the frail Victorian Countess of Lovelace, but steely-eyed Ada, standing tall, clay pipe clamped in her teeth, garbed in Jodphurs, riding boots, and close-fitting tunic.

In an appendix, Padua does a remarkable job of transferring Babbage's 2-D engineering drawings of his machine into perspective views, to elucidate its operation. I can't say I grasp it entirely, but her presentation is fascinating.

In the short term, it all came to naught. Lovelace descended into periods of madness and died at 36 in 1852. Babbage rumbled on until his death in 1871, his Engines never built. But in the long term, Babbage is popularly recognized as the first computer designer, Lovelace as the first programmer. The book is novel, entertaining, and pretty informative. show less

Had this book merely been composed of the comics we were promised on the front cover, it would have been charming enough. But where I really fell in love with this book was the NOTES. Footnote after footnote, then piles of endnotes after that, then footnotes in the appendices! Padua is clearly my kind of geek. She's not content just to present you with a clever comic, she's going to make sure that you are in on all of the jokes, prove just exactly how clever she is, and then back up nearly every single line and drawing with primary and secondary sources, leaping right into the fray of "How Important Was Ada Lovelace, Really?"

It's lovely and wonderful. I hope Padua writes more.

This is a rather madcap ride through the biographies of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. It's a bit disjointed, with some short sketches and other longer narratives, some biographical detail and some flights of fantasy. The illustrations are full of life and action and it's a great way to bring the information to life. I found it a bit disjointed though, and the footnotes/endnotes a bit of a distraction breaking the flow of the book. But lots to recommend it and clearly a labour of love.