>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I am thrilled to
welcome Sydney Padua to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. She'll be discussing
her graphic novel called The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. It's a retelling of
our history where Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage go beyond theory and actually build the
first computer and then use it to fight crime. Sydney Padua is a graphic artist, animator and
author of the Steampunk Webcomic 2-D Goggles. Her work has appeared in several films
including The Iron Giant, Clash of the Titans and John Carter. Her book has been featured on
BBC's Tech Lab, in The Times and Wired UK. Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome.
[applause].
>> Sydney Padua: Hello. This is one of the very first talks I've done, so be kind. If I choke,
someone poke me until I unchoke. This is a general-purpose talk. I'm not sure how many
people are familiar with the comic or even with Lovelace and Babbage, although, I presume
Microsoft at least Lovelace and Babbage might ring a bell. This is me. I draw this comment
generally speaking in my spare time. Normally, I work in visual effects making imaginary giant
monsters. That's what I do all day. When I put this together I realized I work on blue and
orange movies. I started out as a hand-drawn animator and it's a bit hilarious to find myself
giving a talk at Microsoft because I was one of the very last and most reluctant people dragged
into computer animation backwards leaving fingernail grooves in the carpet. But my
relationship to computers has changed a lot over the last few years and it has because of these
two folks. About five years ago I was in a pub. I'm usually in a pub, but five years ago I was in a
pub with my friend Sue Charman-Anderson. Any of you guys have heard of Ada Lovelace Day,
it's a kind of online festival celebrating women in tech. She started this thing and she said to
me Sydney you are sort of a woman in tech. Should I be talking to this?
>> Amy Draves: Actually it's okay.
>> Sydney Padua: Okay. I will stand over here. So she said you're a woman in tech. You
should do a blog post for Ada Lovelace Day. And I said I have no idea who Ada Lovelace is. I
looked her up on Wikipedia as anyone would do and found this extraordinary crazy story. I
thought this is such a great story. It would make a really fun comic. I did a short comic, if you
are not familiar with it or them, this is the introduction. Ada Lovelace was the only daughter of
Lord Byron the notorious poet, adventure and sex god. She was the only product of this
marriage between him and Annabella Milbanke called the Princess of Parallelograms. She was
a bit into math herself. When Ada was born her mother was concerned that she would become
poetical, is the word that they actually used. Byron himself actually said I hope that she is not
poetical. I think this was a euphemism for mental illness which ran in Byron's family.
Annabella's plan for eradicating poeticality was mathematics which is obviously the opposite of
poetry and, therefore was supposed to act as a countervailing force. She brought up Ada on
this diet of logic and mathematics, a very unusual education for a woman at a time. This was
the 1820s. Lovelace was born in 1815, so this is the 200th anniversary. So she met Charles
Babbage at a party. Babbage was leaning on his first calculating machine, the difference
engine. Babbage was professor of mathematics and he is very famous now has the inventor of
a computer which was never built, the analytical engine. Babbage and Lovelace became close
friends and then unfortunately they both died. Lovelace for quite some time after she had
written this big paper on Babbage's machine. So just some panels of this very short comic. I
think it's about a 12 panel comic describing these events so that people would know who they
were. I put it up online and I thought this was a miserable ending for the story. I work in
Hollywood and we don't like unhappy endings. I threw in as a joke the following panel. That
sucks that they died. This was actually a joke. The gag was with maybe hilarious if there was a
comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime. It turned up the next day on a
wired blog as this person is going to do a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage
fighting crime. I succumb easily to peer pressure, so I thought that would be a fun comic. I
think this image here was heavily influenced by the Avengers. Our people in the U.S. familiar
with the Avengers? Yay. I started drawing this comic, generally badly. It's very true to life, the
comic. Their definition of crime is street music and poetry. Be devoted themselves to the
destruction of the arts basically and the triumph of mathematics. I've been drawing the comic
for about five years. It's now available for sale at the back of the room. You should all buy it.
The thing about the comic is it's about, it's mostly comics but at the same time there's a lot of
footnotes. I call it the mostly true story of the first computer. I've had this disputed because
the comic is actually 30 pages of what actually happened and then 280 pages of crime-fighting,
which is mostly not true. However, it's mostly true by word count because of the footnotes.
Lovelace, of course, was famous for this paper. If you don't know the story, very briefly,
Lovelace and Babbage had been hanging out, I guess I would say. Lovelace was very fascinated
by the analytical engine. She's got a reputation as an expert on the subject basically from
listening to Babbage rattle on about it for about nine years. She was last for this reason to
translate a paper from French which was the only existing documentation of Babbage's engine
published at the time. This was in 1841. It's very strange that Babbage never wrote his own
paper on the machine, but because this was the only paper in existence they asked Lovelace
translate it. For a woman to right an original scientific paper was not a thing that would have
happened at the time, but translating papers from the continent was a known accomplishment
for women and considered the proper role. So she translated this paper, but Lovelace was not
a proper woman for the times. She had her very specific own ideas and opinions and she
started adding footnotes. The footnotes were actually three times as long as the original paper
and it's in the footnotes that so much of what we now know as computer science. Here, for
example, one of the great things I found when I started the comic, and I think anyone who has
actually read it online as I was putting it up, will have noted that I usually put a couple of panels
of comic and then a whole bunch of end notes. The comic is sort of my way of sharing really
interesting stuff that I found about them online. The comic coincided with the starting of
Google books and this kind of fantastic dumping of all sorts of Victorian ephemera onto the
internet that was made searchable. The great thing about that is that I could find just all these
mentions of them from their contemporaries at the time and what they thought of them and
what they thought of this project. You can read Lovelace's paper, for example, on Google
books. Although, tragically they haven't unfolded the program. The famous Bernoulli numbers
program is actually a foldout and if you open it up in Google books it's just this sadly blank
unfolded paper, so, and yet, so perfect and away. This is Lovelace's famous observation that
the machine can work on general symbols. Babbage had designed the machine as an
arithmetical machine for the doing of math. I'll show you at the end of this talk the
reconstruction that I've done of it in CG. But Lovelace as a theoretician of the machine was the
person who first said actually this is a machine for the general handling of information, not just
arithmetical stuff. That was interesting, of course and very worthy, but I also started reading -here are some footnotes, by the way. Here you can see these wrong signs in there. One of the
first things I read was Babbage's autobiography which is fantastic. Everyone should read it. In
there he describes the error pop-up which is actually a thing. This is a very complicated
machine with all kinds of widgets and bits and this is one of the very first things I read that
made me think that this is a lot of material for a comic in here. Not only does it come with an
error pop-up, it has a continual loud bell which I'm sure would be delightful if you were the
actual person programming the machine. So here is Lovelace debugging. You'll notice she is
swearing down there. She did swear quite a bit in her letters. The Byron political and other
nature was not eradicated in any way, shape or form. Her personality to her contemporaries
comes out a lot. I found this. You can't read it because it is tiny and super blurry. This is from
The New York Mirror, a tabloid that says, oh fie! It is said that Ada Byron, the sole daughter of
the noble bard is the most coarse and vulgar woman in England. She was quite weird. A lot of
her contemporary descriptions tend to describe her is not successfully socialized or ladylike,
which is what happens when you raise a child solely by mathematics. I wouldn't advise it. This
is my gag on Linda Lovelace's computer language. [laughter]. There is tons of stuff on Babbage.
One of the things I was really surprised to find, the popular view of Babbage's that he was a
poor misunderstood obscure genius who created this amazing machine but nobody appreciated
or understood him, which is completely not true. If you look at the contemporary newspapers
and stuff like that, Babbage was really hugely famous and he was famous as super genius who
had invented this amazing machine, but everyone wished he would really finish it. This is from
Punch. This is Babbage. He's very angry because he hasn't been given appropriate notice for
his machine from Prince Albert. I can say all kinds of great stuff about Babbage because he had
a very big personality, so there are literally dozens and dozens if not hundreds of contemporary
descriptions of Babbage, but I think this one is my favorite because it is just so typical. They put
Queen Victoria's diaries up online, searchable, which I always love to see. Of course, the very
first thing I did was to put Babbage in and this is what I get. Babbage has made a great fool of
himself as he is everywhere. Poor old Babbage. I like this. This is actually my absolute favorite.
[laughter]. There is so much Babbage stuff it's actually hard to pick out specific stuff. There's a
bunch in the book and a bunch more on my website where I link to all my primary sources,
which you can read for yourself in full. My absolute favorite though, and this is the true glory of
searchable documents, this is from a private letter from this guy Reid who was an American
poet who visited Babbage in 1854, two years after Lovelace had died. He wrote a letter home
and then 10 years later this letter appeared in the Southern Review a very strange and very
short-lived periodical that was like a church circular with all kinds of sort of random things, but
one of the things that it printed was this letter from Reid with this beautiful description possibly
of Babbage trying to explain what computer programming is. The description is connected with
his calculating machine. I fear I am not expressing myself rightly here as to the precise nature
of the subject. If it is computer programming that is being mentioned here, it's surprising that
he couldn't quite understand what the subject was. Anyway it's really magical when you read
this stuff. It really brings them back to life as human beings. I would encourage everyone poke
around these documents because they are great. How are we as far as time? I've been told to
keep this brisk so I'm going to rattle through. The one thing I found in researching was the third
character, I guess, in the comic is the analytical engine. Everyone has read the secondary
sources, computer history 101 or whatever. The first computer was Babbage's engine. It had a
memory. It had a processor. It was made of cogs. It was driven through steam and it's so
complicated that you can't possibly understand it. Now we're moving on. This drove me nuts.
I kept kind of paging through more and more dense papers trying to find someone who would
describe really how it worked and also what it looked like, because I'm a cartoonist and I just
wanted to see a drawing of a big ass computer made of gears, because who wouldn't? But no
such drawing existed. This is, as it appears in the comic it's this vast labyrinth of gears that is
continually changing, which is kind of reflective of my own experience in dealing with
computers. People are continually getting lost and attacked in there, as happens to us all. I'll
just quickly go over this because you guys are computer people and you'll probably find this
interesting. If this is really boring you should probably stop me. Just to kind of quickly go over
the basics, this is the difference engine. When we say the analytical engine was never built, a
lot of people say but what about one in the computer history museum? That's the difference
engine. This is Babbage's first machine. It's a calculator. So you can get a sense of what this
machine looked like. Oh I didn't queue it up. There we go. It's a beautiful machine but it's an
adder. That's the one carry. The rippling arms that go up the back are carrying the ones.
Above really all this machine does is add. It adds in a specific way for printing basically tables.
In the days before computers if you were a navigator at sea trying to triangulate a position or
much more excitingly, someone working for a life insurance company trying to figure out
compound interest over a course of 20 years, you couldn't just say da da and tap into your
machine. What you would use is these giant tables. You could pick them up for nothing
because every office had them, volumes and volumes this thick of every conceivable iteration
of a certain sum. You would say I need to figure out this x percent of this for this period of
years and you would look through and find that x percent and what it would be. The printing of
these tables, of course, was a huge pain, especially because these were calculations done by
human beings sitting in a room working through each one of these calculations. They were full
of errors. This was why Babbage invented this machine in first place. The theory being if you
could mechanize these calculations, they would be error-free and faster. The difference engine
is an adder. It uses the method of differences. That's why it's called difference engine.
Although it's very beautiful and it has this remarkable printer that they show, there's lots of
stuff online about this. The workings of the difference engine are extremely well understood
because it's been built in there is tons of great stuff on YouTube on how it works. It's just doing
adds and then the carries. It's a lovely thing but it's not the analytical engine and that's the one
I really wanted you to know how it worked. Basically, in the early '30s Babbage started to think
what if you could take the result that came out one end of the engine and then fed it back into
the beginning and did something else to that number. He called this the engine eating its own
tail, so he started doing all these designs on how to feed numbers back through and do
different things. Over the course of about, he worked on the machine for the rest of his life in
spurts. This is the machine in its state when Lovelace wrote her paper. He kept moving things
around which is one of the reasons it's so hard to find diagrams of it. But this is the most
complete overview of the engine, so this is what I used. You can see, did I get a pointer? I'll
just point. You can see this is the store. This is the storage, the memory. These are these giant
wheels that turn around and carry results around. It will be clear when I show you the
animation. Basically, I took this and started doing elevations which was by no means
straightforward because there is no proper elevation of the engine, so I had to kind of cobble it
together. To the best of my understanding, it would have looked like this. Punch cards are on
the bottom. That was kind of my first surprise. I always pictured them at the top. They are on
the bottom. The whole thing is driven by these cams and it's got these barrel controllers which
I'll explain in a second. This is possibly a little small. Each of those columns, the vast bulk of it is
numbered. Each of those columns represents a number. This is 40 decimal places, so you just
have little cogs, one, two, three, four, five going up with each layer is one decimal place. This is
40 decimal places high. Babbage ideally wanted it to be about 50 decimal places, which he
described as being as far as he could see necessary for all future purposes of science. I think
actually 50 decimal places is extremely unusual to use right now, so I think he over did it. But
he always like things to be as perfect as possible, which is probably why he never actually
finished the machine. It's got cats on it because I like to draw cats. What are we looking at
here? This is a bit of an overview. This is from the book. But the clearest way to explain it is
probably to look at the animation. This is way sliced down, simplified. I've stripped out
everything. Babbage never used one lever when 50 would do. [laughter]. He's always linking
everything with these wonderful Rube Goldberg devices to make things faster and more errorfree and to make operations more efficient. It took three different kinds of, I should loop this if
I can. It took three different kinds of cards to run a program. It's got the operations card. This
is the famous programming. This is the addressing system, the variable cards, and then there's
the number cards on the far end. What's happening here the number cards are just a card with
each number as holes. They push against the levers. If there's a hole it doesn't activate the
lever. If there is no hole it pushes the lever. You have each decimal place down. Each one will
have one spot with no hole, activates a lever, reads the number out onto the store. This is only
one decimal place, right? This machine would actually extend upwards, so each of those little
gears would then register whatever the number was on the card. So that card then is read on
to the store, onto the memory. Once it's got the numbers it goes into the store. The next thing
that happens and this I'm a little fuzzy on. Actually, Babbage kept changing it. Whether the
operation card sets the operation first or the variable sets the address first, I'm not quite sure.
Just for clarity, I'm having the operation card set up. This is the mill and each of these sections
does a different mathematical function. It can add, subtract, multiply or divide. That's all the
engine could do. It had for speed specific sections for multiplying one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine. It would break the number of, multiply each bid in a chunk, put it back
together. It's a very, very, very complicated machine. This is just to kind of explain how the
information flows through. The operation code operates the barrel. It's incredibly clever and
it's incredibly like machine language in a sense. Each operation card will operate one lever. The
lever will rotate these barrels around and the barrels have rows of pegs. It actually controls
three different barrels at the same time. Each of those barrels has 80 pegs or so going up and
down. They push forward and you'll see it in a second here. The barrel pushes forward and
those barrels will activate dozens and dozens of levers at once to set up everything necessary
for a specific calculation. So if you have the operations card says I want you to add the
numbers are going to come in, it looks up the adding system so it will, as you see, select the
little pinion. This will bring the pinion up and then send it, basically, channel it over to this
section from the addresses on the variable card which has the address. In studying this
machine and then trying to describe how it worked for the book, I started to understand why
everyone said it's so complicated that it's hard to explain. It is in a sense quite a simple
machine, like all these bits even I can understand, so they must be pretty simple. But it's how
they all combine together, there's lots of stuff happening at the same time. Storage, ingress, so
it feeds everything into the ingress. The ingress sends it to whichever section depending on the
operations card. Operations does it's thing. These are all very specific little bits. It sends it
back out to the outgress which can go out to the printer or back into storage. When I say it's
basically a modern computer, they are not kidding because every part is basically there. Yes?
>>: How big is the storage? How many numbers did it store?
>> Sydney Padua: Babbage left this up in the air. As you can see, if I go back, and this time you
can see that the storage just goes off the page. Everyone wants more storage. It's basic design
had hundred. He had mentioned the number thousand, but he basically left it ideally obviously
you would have millions of these things. You are very constrained by the racks. The racks are
just these giant racks with teeth like it's a physical thing and the longer the storage is the longer
the rack has to be and it's just a rack and pinion, so it's turning this. You have this little pinion
that turns a thing and pushes the rack over however many units. Mechanically speaking, the
longer the storage is, the longer the racks get and the longer room you have for something to
go horribly wrong in moving the numbers around. His later designs moved the mill, the kind of
calculation bit, the CPU into the middle and put the storage down either side so it was a bit
more square than this. But I don't have proper plans for that, so I didn't do that one. These are
just some more animations of bits. All mechanical. This is basically how I worked. I would just
take a plan. Fortunately, I'm an animator so I have this kit around just to build it. For me, to
actually be able to build the machines was vital to understand them. Babbage's genius is
absolutely incredible when you think that he was doing this stuff in his head. If you think in
terms of spatial reasoning skills, it's really spectacular. There's thousands and thousands of
parts to the machine. This is the barrel controller and the famous, not famous, the obscure,
unless you're me, conditional arm. This is what gives the machine the ability to loop and do
feedback. Certain results would send calculations back to the system, so it has this little arm
that drops down if you get a result. The theory is -- stop. The theory is that Lovelace got the
concept of this machine as a logic machine. Wait. Not that. There we go. Of course. Yeah, I
have to keep running. If the lever falls down then it will activate. If there is no lever there that I
want. So there's and if then function. This is known as Lovelace's leave. Babbage put that in
there for mechanical reasons for pure math. There's no evidence that Babbage never thought
of it as a logic machine. Also, logic was not there yet. Logic at the time was still Aristotelian
logic, basically. This is about 10 years before Boole, but a lot of people were working on
mathematical systems of logic including, notably, Lovelace's teacher Augustus Morgan who was
teaching Lovelace mathematics. And that's probably where she had this conception that you
could put Babbage's analytical engine together with a mathematical logic system to handle
information generally and not just arithmetic on the machine. Just to cap it off, the punch card
system, of course was based on the jacquard loom. This has to go forward, please. There we
go. I took a trip up. I just thought this might be fun or interesting for programmers. The
jacquard loom, of course required thousands of cards to do these patterns in cloth. They have
these wonderful machines for stitching. This is a giant sewing machine for stitching the cards
together and this is a piano punch on the other side here which is how you punch the program
onto the cards, basically. You pushed the button and it makes a little hole and so you read
along the pattern and punch it in. I designed for Lovelace her programmer organ out of these
two machines. Oh yes. You need a lot of thread to hold the programs together. That is
hopefully not too long or boring. This is my first time doing a talk. I hope it went okay.
[applause]. Thank you. I guess I will take questions. Yes?
>>: Just glancing through the first bits of the comic, it seemed like you start using the term
difference engine instead of -- what's going on?
>> Sydney Padua: I'm getting a lot of stick for this. Obviously, the difference engine is the
crappy, simple matter machine. The analytical engine is the far superior giant punch card
controlled computer. Babbage would not be pleased to see me using the term difference
engine, but it's just way cooler than the term analytical engine. And if you just say to the
analytical engine, it doesn't have the same ring to it. So I am helping spread confusion and
misinformation by calling it the difference engine, but William Gibson did it first, so that's my
excuse.
>>: So who is going to direct the movie?
>> Sydney Padua: Me, of course, because I'm a control freak. [laughter].
>>: I more envision like a [indiscernible] version.
>>: Two things, one is how was his work funded, and then was there really a speaking tube and
what would that be used for?
>> Sydney Padua: Babbage, of course -- I say of course because I have been immersed in this
stuff. The story of Babbage and government funding would make an extremely boring but very
lengthy comic. Babbage got an enormous sum of money to make the difference engine.
17,000 pounds is the official figure I think. Even at the time they describe this as the cost of
two warships. It was kind of the first disastrous government IT project. [laughter]. Babbage
worked on the difference engine for 10 years or so. I think '23 was when he got his first grant
to do it. There were several reasons why he didn't finish it. The main one probably being that
he was Charles Babbage. Babbage was a perfectionist and not much of a people manager. He
was very extroverted. He loved people, but he wasn't very good at handling a crew, so the
difference engine fell apart. Then he came up with the analytical engine which was so
obviously superior to the difference engine that he abandoned the difference engine much to
the government's disgust. He tried to get funding for the analytical engine, but, of course, if
you haven't built the difference engine, then it's hard to get like three times as much money to
build a much more complicated machine. In terms of how he funded his own research,
Babbage was independently wealthy. He was loaded. He was like the classic gentleman
scientist, one of the last ones really of this guy who had tons of cash and was really smart and
so he just messed around with it, really on his own dime. What was the second question?
>>: Was there really a speaking tube, or was that your imagination?
>> Sydney Padua: That's my imagination. This machine does not exist
>>: I realize that but I just wondered if there was any, because of the size of it, maybe he
envisioned the need to be able to communicate with somebody on the other side fixing it. I
don't know.
>> Sydney Padua: I think it would be too loud. The analytical engine when running would have
made a hell of a racket. I don't think you could have heard anything.
>>: I noticed that the lots, and I enjoyed them, the lots and lots of footnotes on every page,
and it occurred to me that it sort of mirrors the relationship. Ada Lovelace wrote a bunch of
footnotes to Charles Babbage's paper, or the paper describing the machine. I was curious if
that really long footnote thing was a specific and purposeful illusion to that relationship or did it
just sort of evolve from what you were doing in making a mostly fictional account.
>> Sydney Padua: It definitely evolved out of the nature of the comic being a blog. People call
it a web comic, but I think real web comic people would object that there is not enough comic
and too many notes. But it was definitely, ultimately a joke about Lovelace's footnotes being
the real meat of the story.
>>: Are you familiar with Seattle's on the Phil Foglio and girl genius?
>> Sydney Padua: Of course. I didn't know he was from Seattle though. Neat. I am way less
prolific than Phil Foglio.
>>: But you have your own girl genius.
>> Sydney Padua: There you go. I used to read his stuff in Dragon magazine back in the day.
I'm that old. [laughter].
>>: He's still around.
>> Sydney Padua: That's so neat.
>>: Is the comic still ongoing?
>> Sydney Padua: Yes, I think so. I've got a lot of stuff I would love to draw. This is not my day
job. Both financially and time wise I'm working visual effects. If you know anyone that works in
visual effects, it's not the most free timing sort of let it all hang out occupation. It's very hard to
find time especially right now.
>>: So there are people that contain everything that as yet has appeared?
>> Sydney Padua: Everything except Organist. That is, if you don't know the comic the longestrunning story by a good way is Organist, organized crime. But that actually is 150 pages long, so
it's mostly cleaned up and so we might do another book with just Organist and a couple of
other things. Anymore questions?
>> Amy Draves: Thank you.
>> Sydney Padua: You're most welcome. [applause]