Cool People Who Did Cool StuffPart Two: Ada Lovelace and Lord Byron: The First Computer Programmer, Child of the First Vampire
Margaret finishes a conversation with Bridget Todd about the woman who invented software and her rather strange family.
Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Do Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast about how there's sometimes cool people who did cool stuff like me. I'm the host. I'm Margaret Kiljoy and I was going to segue into introducing Bridget Todd, who's the host of There Are No Girls on the Internet, but instead I messed it up. But Hi, Bridget, how are you?
Hi?
Margaret? You do plenty of cool stuff. That's all you do is cool stuff. All I do is read history books. But I kind of like it, so I'm not complaining about my job. I got the best one I think anyone on this earth has. And the person who helps me have that job is my producer, Sophie.
Hi.
Sophie, Hi, mag Pie, thanks for producing my podcast. Oh that's a privilege. We also have an audio engineer named Daniel.
Hi.
Danel Hey, Daniel, Hi, Daniel. Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And this is part two and a two parter about Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace, And it was meant to mostly be about Ada Lovelace, and then I spent an entire episode talking about the archtypical, the original fuck boy, her father, Lord Byron. Usually I say you can't listen to part two without listening to part one. You could probably listen to part two today. But I actually think it's really useful to understand where Aida is coming from because she's really into her dad. That's my disclaimer. So yeah, in part one we talked about an agent of chaos sent straight from hell to home wreck, or a misunderstood fuck boy. In part two, we're gonna talk about his daughter, Ada. The actual reason we're doing these episodes. The person who qualifies as a cool person doing cool stuff, Ada Lovelace, who was not born Ada Lovelace was born in eighteen fifteen, right before her mom left her dad. Her mother, Lady Byron, was a dedicated reform activist, And I kind of assumed that this was a pretty milk toast and uninteresting thing when I read that, like, oh, a dedicated orform activist, that just sounds like some rich lady who wants to feel better or whatever. She was part of the group that ended slavery in the British Empire than freed eight hundred thousand people.
So she was a cool person who or a person who was doing cool stuff on her own, right, Yeah, yeah, exactly, And she fought for prison reform. I wish I knew a little bit more about what that meant, but that's still great, especially since England at the time was like, let's just hang everyone, right, and she fought for the abolition of slavery. She was one of the very few women involved very actively in the British abolitionist movement because the men wouldn't let women be involved because men, and so she was one of like three or so women at the eighteen forty World Anti Slavery Convention. This was held in England. It was about two hundred Brits, fifty Americans, and a few other random folks. Almost all of them are white men. There's a handful of white women and a handful of black men, is the best I can figure. I'm not aware of black women being invited, since women weren't invited at all, and it was almost an afterthought. Whatever, I'm not impressed by the politics of this particular group around identity.
Issues, not intersectional right. However, this convention came out of movement that had just managed to abolish slavery in the British Empire in eighteen thirty four, which three day, one hundred thousand people like I mentioned the main group behind that I never would have thought would have done anything worthwhile based on their name. Usually the cool groups have like the League of Something or whatever. Right, this was the Society for the Mitigation and gradual Abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions? Who came up with that name? That was not a good name, no, but it it worked. I only read so much every now and then. I read about the Abolisist movement in the UK, but I don't know as much about it as I know about the Ablisihist movement in the US. Right, Okay, that said, you know how the British Empire can kind of take anything that sounds good and make it bad. Abolished slavery was the rallying cry that was used in the Scramble for Africa. That where like, they colonized Africa and killed fuck tons of people and set the content up for a pretty economically terrible twentieth and twenty first century. Because empire can make anything that's good into a bad thing. That's a just get that like tattooed or like put on a shirt. I know, I live by it. So they had this conference, right, this is forty years before the Scramble for Africa really kicks off. So I can't say that these people were responsible for that. They were in the middle of doing something actually good. The non inclusion of women at this conference was on purpose. It was for men only. The larger faction there was like a big fight about whether or not women should be included, and the larger faction won. And then three women showed up anyhow, and including Lady By, and they had some supporters from within the convention who forced their inclusion. The same faction that fought for the inclusion of women actually made an effort to bring Oh I don't know, black people from America, where slavery was a big problem, including this guy who is just really fucking cool. I'd never really read about him before, Charles Lennox Remond. He is credited as the first black public speaker talking about abolition in the United States. Oh wow, I hadn't ordered him either. Yeah, Like, he wasn't a minor figure at the time, but he wasn't like the wildest militant. He was born free, so he doesn't have the cool escape story. Like, don't get me wrong, the escape stories are fucking cool, but like he just was like putting in the work as an orator and as an organizer, and he was the kid of two hairdressers. And one of his big things that he fought for successfully was that he organized that basically like free black people would leave and mass any church that didn't let them sit as equals at the communion table. And when he made it to England for this convention, all the women were denied entry, so he protested and walked out alongside of them. He had just traveled across the fucking ocean to come to this thing that was like for freeing black people. And he was like, well, I'm intersectional. Fuck all that.
Yeah, I mean it's I was joking earlier about how the group wasn't intersectional, but it's not like there weren't people who were down intersectionality back then.
Yeah, And it's actually it's something that's come up a bunch of times, like when you look at for good reason, people are critical of the early feminist movement for being racist, right, and people look at some of the abolitionist movement and see the exclusion of women or whatever. But the thing that I actually run across way more is people who cared about both, saw them as connected and fought for both. Like they're just not as talked about, I mean, especially because like once rich people, feminism kicks in and the Suffragettes kind of there's some big racism problems and they're worth paying attention to, you know. But but yeah, so Charles, he's probably the most uncomplicatedly cool person in this week's episode. He helped recruit black soldiers to the Union Army. He after the war, he worked as a street lamp inspector, a clerk, and then ended his life as a farmer. So he's just a working class kid, a hairdressers who.
Yeah, do you know if he was like sending his pubic hair to people and like sleeping with everyone's partners and any of that.
See, I'm not aware of that. And so that's part of like I'm like, maybe he's the uncomplicated character because I didn't read a whole book about him, right, you know.
Because like everyone, he did all that and just didn't write it down.
Yeah, exactly. He was like, oh man, you won't believe what I got up to in England, you know whatever. As long as everyone's into it, I don't care. And Frederick Douglass went on to name one of his sons after this guy, Charles rem And Douglas was the first black man to join the Union Army, and Charles Remon Douglas, Douglas's kid was actually too sick to actually wind up marching on the Confederacy, but did a lot of work and was That's still a pretty fucking cool thing to get to say you did, you know.
So?
And one of the reasons I think about this is that I'm like, I'm about to talk about the origin of computers and all this stuff, and instead of thinking of history as this distinct, unrelated things you need your big red yarn board. The same guy who stands up for Luddites also fought for Greek independence against the Ottomans and was married to a British woman who was directly involved in the abolition of slavery in both the UK and the US. Like, and that's where computer software comes from. You know.
Yeah, I love how you put that, because it's so easy. No one who listened. I don't think anybody who listens to this pod thinks this way. But it's very easy to think of history as this thing that happened forever ago, that was like very distinct, right, and so like we'll put black history in one bucket, or like women's history in another bucket, or like you know, gender studies or sexuality in another bucket, and those and there's this idea that those things are not bleeding over and intersecting and having connections, and then something else like technology that's in a completely separate realm, and it's like, no, it's all mixed in.
It's all history.
It's all this like very complex, you know, patchwork of things that happened and intersected.
Yeah, my Google history is just full of like person's name, religious beliefs, person's names, political views, persons named feminism, person's name, abolitionist, just to see what comes up, you know, because there's always more to people, because people want to have this one dimensional view of everyone, you know. Lady Byron also set up England's first cooperative school, basically socialist education. I don't know whether she identified as a socialist or not, but one of the people who whose work she was using to set up this cooperative school was outspokenly a socialist and the specific point of it. One of the things that I feel like I don't quite understand about England. England is a weird thing, you know, I mean, so is America. Like white American society is evil too. I'm not trying to be like, oh those English so there's only bad people. But the educational system there was absolutely horrific in terms of bullying kids, forcing them into like a fearful environment in which they are hyper competitive of each other, right, and that I mean that causes the British Empire on some level, right' It's chicken an egg problem. But it's like this culture of fear and domination, and so Lady Byron tries to stop it by setting up a cooperative school. Her quote about this is about talking about how students should be treated, is that fear makes slaves and the love of distinction leads to bullying and the aggressive passions encouraged in England's elite public school systems.
That's so progressive to be seeing the ways that competition and I guess, like the desire to be distinct I guess how she put it, how that would fuel all these ugly things in society. I can't imagine that was like.
Well received at the time, I know, and the school managed to last about eighty years. They taught the basics. They taught kids how to garden and track their income and shit. Also in addition to like you know, teaching literature and math and all these things, so they actually like taught practical life skills, like useful stuff that we should have all learned in school. Yeah, exactly. And eventually it shut down in nineteen seventeen, but it lasted like eighty years. And yeah, like people kind of I think there was a little bit the best I can tell, I only read so much about her, but I read a decent bit about her as best as I can tell. People were like, oh, wacky hippie is doing their wacky hippie thing. You know. Probably there was a lot of culture war stuff about, like, no, it's the it's the fighting pits of educational system that makes England the world power we are, you know. So Ada's mother was pretty cool, at least politically. She used to take Ada around on tours of like textile mills to look at the conditions that workers were in, which is probably if you are raised a noble you should probably have to go see how the other half lives, you know. And anything that Lady Byron was working on was willing to hire black Americans escaping slavery, and that I think was a pretty big deal that a lot of people in England were like not okay with and she was like, I don't care, We're going to do it. And I'm annoyed that she's mostly remembered as the wife of Lord Byron.
Because all of these cool things, Like she was doing cool stuff on her own.
Yeah, not as like sexy, you know. She just kind of was like fairly polite and religious and tried to make the world better. You know. She stayed in love with her husband after their separation because and I think it's because she viewed his problems as madness right, not as a character flaw. And she was also constantly trying to save his soul from damnation. He's like in Greece and stuff, and she's like writing letters being like, hey, you're gonna repent, like you know that like meme format, that's like something something today, Hey babe, like you want to do this today? You know, yeah, basically just texting him constantly being like, what's up. You wanna you want to accept Jesus Christ your personal Lord and savior today. This probably didn't endear her to him. But as for how she raised Ada, this is messier. She seems like maybe not the best mom.
Now.
To be clear, single moms get way more flack than they should, and Lord Byron certainly didn't do a very good job of fathering her. On the other hand, she didn't let Lord Byron have an anything to do with their kid as far as I can tell. And basically Lady Byron was like, no matter what, I am going to make sure my kid does not end up a wild libertine like her father. Her father dies when eight is eight. And the way that she set about to do this was to not let her have an imagination. This is the way it gets described, downplayed or outright forbade teaching poetry and shit like that, no creativity all Stem, except according to other sources, did teach a lot of like music, so it might have just been a specific like no poetry, right.
Well, I mean it makes sense if she was like, I don't want my daughter to end up like her libertine poet dad.
No poetry in this house.
I was going to say something, though, I do think like the idea of STEM only. I know a lot of people who think that the only thing worth studying it if you're if you're interested in tech or you have aspirations to be in tech. The only thing worth studying is a hard science or a stem, and that humanity's poetry, music, gender studies, literature or all of that is just fluff and the only thing that matters is a hard tech. And those people I feel like they, even if they are like gifted engineers or something, I think that they might have trouble understanding what it is that people who are going to go on to use the technology that you build are using it for, which is often culture or you know, something that is not a hard tech.
And so I guess I would.
Say like I say that to say that you need all the things to be a well rounded technologist. I don't like it when people poo poo the humanities because they're like only focusing on programming or whatever. I think it's I think it's a really myopic way of seeing technology.
No, totally. And that's Ada's gift to computing and technology is that it's the reason that she's seen is so important or is so important, is that she bridged the world between math and creativity and this became like her whole fucking thing because she was both her parents' kid. You know, like exactly everything that you're saying about it is the thing that she was about, and like why I got really excited about her as I was reading all this stuff, you know, And so it didn't work, this attempt to stifle the creative spirit, which might be an unkind reading of Lady Byron. It's hard to tell. Everyone who's writing these things feels really strongly about Lord Byron. No one gives a shit about Ada. No one gives a shit about Lady Byron. Everyone either fucking loves or hates Lord Byron. So everything revolves around him. And I know that some of it does, and I had to start with him, but it's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell exactly because some of the people saying, oh, she was a terrible mother are Byron apologists or Lord Byron apologists. Anyway, there are definitely versions where the mother's pretty monstrous. She's a rich kid, so she has all these private tutors and shit, right, apparently any of them again, according to this reading, any of them got too close emotionally to Ada were fired, so she's like not allowed to care about her teachers or have like affection. And there's a portrait of her dad, Lord Byron, hanging in her grandmother's house, but she's not allowed to see it. It is behind green velvet curtains. Like, what a way to make a kid obsessed with their dad?
Yeah, that's I mean, first of all, that's like put anything behind big velvet green curtains and tell a child you must never.
Look behind these curtains.
Of course they're going to like fixate on what's behind those curtains.
I of course I know what's her obsession with the forbidden box of forbiddenness? Kid, Why can't you just forget about the forbidden box of forbiddenness? Yeah. So when she's eleven and her father is like safely dead in the ground, her mother takes her tour around Europe for a year because that's like a normal rich people thing to do. But they couldn't do it when she was younger because they didn't want to accidentally run into Lord Byron. Young Ada came back with her imagination on fire. She was like, holy shit, there's a world out there, and she became obsessed with trying to invent a flying machine. She studied birds, she tried to get every book she could about birds so that she could build a steam powered ornithopter. I don't think the word ornithopter existed yet, but this is what she wanted to build. Is before people figured out fixed wing aircraft, and so everyone's into ornithopters, which are like the fly he wants. I guess everyone knows what it is now because Dune's out, but some of us just have a terrible background in steampunk. And so I've known about this for a long time. And it makes sense that people thought about flapping wings instead of fixed wing aircraft, right, because if you look around and you see the stuff that's flying, it flaps its wings, you know. So she spends years trying to invent this thing. It wasn't until the eighteen seventies that the first ornithopters were built, and they used rubber bands, and so like rubber kind of successfully invented the ornithopter to some degree. So she's into the shit. She is the world's for steampunk. I would argue, much like our sponsor subcultures that seem promising and have some good elements but also some cringey stuff. Are we sponsored by that? Are you sponsored by? Big top hat and goggles. Who know, well, it's better than a fifth helmet. I guess anything's better than a fifth helmet. Steambug is the greatest subcultural betrayal of my life. I was like, what, we're all obsessed with punk and also where the industrial revolution and colonization really got going and started destroying the world, And so we're really interested in the people who are perfectly positioned to fight against it, and we're making alliances across the world to destroy empire. And then I went to the conventions and it was all top hats and goggles, and I was like, I think, I think I'm at the wrong convention. Anyway, maybe your next big disappointment is here in these ads. So we're back and Ada Lovelace is back from Europe and decides to do the one thing that you should not do in the nineteenth century, which is get sick. She is bedridden for about three years. Some folks, of course, chalk it up to psychosomatic stuff, like, oh, she has hysteria, she's just stressed. Why doesn't she try yoga? You know girls just do that. Sometimes it was probably measles and encephalitis, which I had to look it up at inflammation of the brain.
Oh my god, my roommate got that from a hot tub at beach Week when we were in college.
It was like crazy, Yeah, the wages of sin. Yes, that's terrible.
She all right, Oh she was fine, but like you just needed I mean, luckily this happened in like, oh yeah, two thousand and four and not back when Ada was living. But yeah, she does have to get antibiotics and it ruined beach Week, but she was fine.
Okay, yeah, okay, cool. Yeah. Ada spent three years lying in bed a little different. Yeah, from like roughly thirteen to sixteen or so. She gets better, but she's never going to be in the most robust health at any point in her life. And she goes off to London to join that bullshit society of five thousand rich assholes who run the world. She is presented at court and meets the King and all that shit and the whole like her whole life, she's a little bit like, she doesn't really play this game that much. She's like dresses as an intellectual instead of dressing as like a proper lady or whatever, because she's cool. I mean, dressing is a proper lady is cool too, but it's also cool when you flout all about. On June fifth, eighteen thirty three, she's seventeen years old. She meets the man who will change her life forever in cement her place in history, and thank god this is not a romantic story. She meets the forty one year old Charles Babbage, who is generally credited as inventing the first computer. Obviously that's more or less true.
Actually, did you ever go to the store babbage Is in the mall when you were a kid?
Oh?
My god, I did, and I would buy little I would buy video games that on three and a half inch three and a quarter inch floppy disks. I love. That's that's why I know who Charles Babbage Is've been like a figure in my life. Yeah cool. Yeah, no, I actually thought about including that in a script, and I was like, oh, I'm just gonna date me. I know. People are like, what are they talking about? Like, we're old y'all like that.
That's like where you where you got your janky ass video games? While your mom was shopping at Talbot's or whatever. You would go to Babbages?
Yeah? No, I like this one has a dragon on the cover. I want it so bad. Dragon War that was my favorite. I don't even remember what. Yeah, my dad was an early adopter and like spent all his like spent a lot of money on computers back when that was a hard thing to do. You know. That's like how he chose to spend the little money had or whatever. So she meets Charles Babbage and instead of at a mall, it's at a soiree at his house. And some people like to conjecture that they were sleeping together. Usually I am the first person to believe rumors of people fucking in history. I think that they had a platonic intellectual friendship. She meets Charles Babbage at a soiree at his house. He's got these like little automaton toys like everyone does to impress people at the time. I think he built them. He has like a silver lady with a turban on. It's a little wind up toy or whatever, you know. And her mother's nickname is the Princess of Parallelograms. This is what Lord Byron called her to make fun of her. But I think she's just kind of into it. So Ada and her mom are like not impressed by a little automaton. So he's like, oh, you want to see the real shit, and he takes them back to like back of the house. This thing he's been working on, a fucking difference engine, is a mechanical calculator, more ambitious than anyone has ever dreamed at this point that I'm aware of. He has a working fragment of it. It is about two feet tall, It has two thousand brass parts, and it is hand cranked. It can do basic math, including exponents and extract the root of a quadratic equation, which is a math thing that I looked up for this and then was like, yep, that's a math thing because I was a computer nerd and not a math nerd. Were you a math nerd? No, God, not at all. You dropped out of a PhD for literature. No, no no.
And like I was at a conversation with somebody where they were like, oh, I did TRIG in school. What was your math? And I was like, yeah, my math was just called math any of those names.
Yeah. I did real well at a level of math up where I didn't have to pay attention, And so I was like in the like gifted smart math until about PRECALC. And then I was like barely graduated high school because I almost didn't pass PRECALC because I didn't ever learn the tools with which to study because I had undiagnosed ADHD. I mean, because I was so smart. This is going to come up as related as Charles Charles Babbage actually, and so this two foot tall, two thousand part piece of a difference engine is all that will ever be built of his math machines until more than one hundred years after his death. The thing about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace that's so impressive is like what they almost did, what they dreamed up, what they could have done, and more and more the more I read, the more I realized if AIDA's poor health and Charles his neurodivergence hadn't gotten in their way, it probably would have done like this could have happened. They did manage to have a direct influence on modern computing, but it wasn't a direct lineage basically the best other people know this better than I do. But their work was kind of rediscovered early on in computing, rather than it being like people like immediately just building off of what they did. Don't sorry about Charles Babbage. You heard much about Charles Babbage Besides the storm.
I knew a little bit about him, but most of my entry point is the store in them all.
Yeah, fair enough, the real quick version, as he is a cranky old man with adhd. Charles Babbage was not nobility, but he was rich, which is kind of the same thing. His father was a successful goldsmith and banker, and so young Chuck. No one called him that besides me right now that I'm aware of. He grew up with private tutors, and then he went off to Trinity College, where Lord Byron had gone and Oscar Wilde, and while he was there, Actually, young Charles Babbage seems fun. He formed the Analytical Society with some peers, which is what I consider fun. But his other stuff is more directly fun. He was part of the Ghost Club. They were paranormal investigators. What Yeah. They actually both Aida and especially Charles Babbage do some interesting like theological science stuff that I'll talk about in a minute. He also either joins or starts a group called the Extractors Club, which is a group of students who swear to help each other escape asylums if any of them are ever declared insane honestly, like practical, I know, and just like that's like a good that is a green flag. It's a little bit of a red flag. But I'm not actually colorblind, but this would be the kind of thing I'm colorblind on. This would be a red flag and a green flag in a relationship for me.
Like the fact that you think that you might be institutionalized against her will not great. The fact that you would help if that happened. You were confirming that you'll help somebody escape.
That is that is nice? Yeah, exactly, and again and going back in time and being like this person's crazy in the following ways is like always fraught. But like I Charles Babbage was adhd or like had something that I identify with really hard, which was that he he was always starting something new. He was always studying some new thing, and he like his work suffered because instead of finishing projects, he was onto the next one. I identify with that. That's a little bit of a direct hit. Well, the next line in my script is that motherfucker should have just gotten into podcasting because then you can deep dive a new subject every week.
I was gonna say, I think somebody should do like a analysis of eight people who have ADHD and also became podcasters.
There's gonna be a big overlap. I know. I was actually worried when I was first got this job, and I was like, I was talking to one of my friends and I was like, I'm I'm really good at starting projects. I'm pretty good at seeing projects through, but but I always need to be onto the next thing. And my friend was like, every time I talk to you, you are in a one month research hole about a different thing. That never changes. The fact that you want to be in a research hole does not change. I was like, so, and here we are, insightful friend. I know, he was really into math, and he was really into astronomy, Charles Babbage. He gave lectures and wrote papers, which is kind of like podcasting, to be honest, and he was supported by his dad and his wife's family because there wasn't a lot of money in this science stuff. And so I'm I want to try this line of work as well. Anyone who is rich and trying to get married and wants to finance weird projects, hit me up, especially if you're landed nobility. I'm going to change my tune about titles and all that nonsense. If you can make me a baroness just putting that out there, baroness Margaret kills you, right, Yeah, but probably not. Actually, I'm really picky. Probably don't actually DM me about this. I was like, Oh, I'm gonna make this clever joke, and I was like, oh, I'm going to destroy my DMS. So at one point I wrote in the early nineteen twenties, but I meant the eighteen twenties. He goes to France, and when he's in France, he learns that the French government is pouring a ton of money and energy into math. Not theoretical math, although that's cool too, but they are hiring computers, like the job description, people who do computing. And if people want to hear more about that, they can go back and listen to me and Bridget talking about that and the black woman who put us on the moon and all that cool shit. And so France is hiring computers to do logarithm and trigonometry tables, which were used for navigation and engineering, so instead of having to sit down and do really complicated math, you can look at the table. Charles saw this and was like oh, doing stuff for the social good is good, and we should have more of that. Specifically, I want that for astronomy. I wish the British government would hire me to do that. And he also said, quote I wish to God these tables had been made by steam. Because he was just looking at how much work is involved in computing all these things. So he was like, all right, I'm gonna figure how to do that, because at the end of the day, what he was building wasn't a general computer, it certainly not. At first. He wanted to build machines that could produce mathematical charts. It was Ada who saw what it could actually really become, but he hadn't met her yet. This is eighteen twenty three. He meets her ten years later. She's like seven. She probably still could have figured this out. She was a smart kid. Eighteen twenty three, he convinces the British government to give him a bunch of money, about two million dollars in modern dollars, to try and build one of these things. It would have twenty five thousand moving parts, which eventually he gets down to about eight thousand moving parts. He never finishes it. Instead, he spent his life becoming increasingly bitter and grouchy, and he spends all of his time complaining that the British government doesn't finance the sciences, in particular him enough, Like, this is another guy that I've met, you know, Oh.
If you are in the sciences, technology, you know this guy academia. You know this guy who won't stop complaining about how his stuff never gets funded.
You know him. And he's like, I'm a visionary, and you're like, okay, Chuck, but like he actually is a visionary. You just don't know it, you know, And he's sort of insufferable. Later, he's going to go to war against street musicians because they keep him awake. That I'm on board with. Actually, oh no, I mean fair enough. As a former street musician. He now he is complaining about street musicians at six in the morning. And I can't imagine when I was a street musician, I did not live in a life. If I was awake at six in the morning, it's because I hadn't gotten home.
Yet, you know.
Yeah, nobody like six am street musicians. That's a different level.
Yeah. Yeah. So in eighteen twenty four, the year after he gets a bunch of money to work on the difference engine. He takes a job making tables for a life insurance company instead, And honestly, that's a good reminder of what would have happened if he had built the difference engine. It wouldn't have been like now we're mapping the stars. It would have been like the British Empire got computers one hundred years early, and like life insurance gets computers one hundred years early. In eighteen twenty seven he published a table of logarithms that would go on to be reprinted for one hundred years. And this is just stuff he did the math of and so his big famous book is called Table of Logarithms of the Natural Numbers from one to one hundred eight thousand. That's his big book. Also in eighteen twenty seven, his dad died, leaving him about one hundred thousand pounds sterling, which is about fourteen million dollars in modern money. Then his wife died. He also lost five of his eight kids. This man was not having a good time.
Rich.
Yes, happy, No, there's that study that money buys happiness up to about like at the time it was about seventy thousand dollars a year, and then after that it just levels off. The new number is probably almost twice thought. But he also wrote a book with the catchy title Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on some of its causes, which was his big like why won't the British government give me more money? Like a whole book about that one complaint basically, but it's actually, I mean, it's like probably true. It argues for more public investment in the sciences and better STEM education, you know, and especially since like I actually wonder if that comes out of him not being a noble right, because the people who have access to science are rich people, and so if you don't have to work for a living, you can study sit around and study things at this time, and so like actually trying to teach more people more broadly STEM like that's cool. In eighteen thirty two, he finished a small prototype of his difference engine. In eighteen thirty three, shows it to Ata and her mother. Meanwhile going with her mom to see the textile mills and the terrible working conditions there, and her takeaway wasn't these people are being treated terrible. I don't know how she felt about that. Actually I was really annoyed that I couln't find outw she felt out about that. But certainly part of our takeaway was these machines are fucking cool, and the history of automation and machinery and therefore computing comes back to textiles, which we talked about on our recent Light eight episodes about the automation of these things. Was like, one of the first things that steam power is being used for automation was ruining the lives of workers when it could have been improving their lives except for this new thing sweeping the country called capitalism. But in the abstract, people are figuring out cool shit the machines can do. And it's a shame that the cool ideas for what those machines can do are the reason that it's this spring was too hot and we've had the hottest hero on record for several years in a row. Anyway, it's always in the back of my mind whenever I'm like because I still think computers and technology are cool, but I'm always like, oh thing, Yeah, it's a love hate. It's a complicated relationship. It is it is. In eighteen oh four, there was this machine invented that called the Jacquarde loom, which uses a series of punched cards chained together in a continuous sequence to remember textile patterns for weaving. And I would argue that the first piece of computer art predates the computer by one hundred years because the inventor of this loom, whose name is Jacquardes imagine that is, he has his portrait woven from silk, and this requires twenty four thousand punched cards to produce. And this is like a commercially available product, like it's on order, you have to like they're made to order. But Charles Babbage, for example, has one of these tapestries and you could call it a print. It still has humans involved, but it is like a machine that is programmed to make a thing. Such an interesting perspective. I just I find it neat because the thing we're talking about like stem and like, oh, what can you do with computers? And they're like, well, the first thing you can do is you can make a portrait of a rich asshole. It's kind of cool. You know, it would have been like memes and like it's like you know now it's like whenever someone invents a new instrument, the first thing they do is like play the Mario brother brothers, you know, like, all right, that's fine. So Ada sees the textile machines and she's really into it. She's also really into math like her mother, and soon she is teaching younger women math and she's corresponding with Babbage about his machines. And then she makes a pretty good call. Rarely when on the show, when I talk about someone getting married, is it a good call if it's a woman. She marries a wife guy. And this guy is named William Lord King. Lord is in his middle name. His title is Lord King because king is his last name. That fucking Britain. Soon enough, he gets promoted by someone dying and he becomes the Earl of Lovelace. So Ad Ada gets the name Ada Lovelace, the Countess of Lovelace. And how did him to becoming an earl? Makeer accountess? Who knows? Don't want to know? If you do, If you know it, keep it to yourself. Yeah, it's all a weird soap opera, only in this case, it's a soap opera that, instead of entertaining people, kills entire cultures and extracts resources from around the world. But her husband is a pretty good guy. He's really supportive of her. He's really into math and science and shit, but he's not as good at it as she is, and he doesn't care. He just supports her in doing it, Like he leverages his credibility as a nobleman emphasis on the dash men to get her into spaces that are closed to women. There's like a she joins the society for like scientists or whatever, and they have this big library and she like can't go in and use the books even though she's a member of the society because she doesn't have a dick, and that annoys me and it annoyed her. The other thing about her husband, mister the King, he is a huge lord Byron fan and so is Ada Lovelace. The both of them are obsessed with the poetry of dead rockstar Dad and like, one, what are the odds that he turned into like this like perfectly nice husband based on his interests. You know, this is like the person who's like, oh, all of my interests are the following literature is just red flag after red flag and then like perfectly sweet man, and I would bet a moderate amount of money that the pair swung together. I wouldn't bet all my money. But that's like my vibe I'm picking up.
So I guess that green curtain to make sure that she never became a libertine poet did not work.
Oh no, she is absolutely, that's the thing, Like she's gambling or we'll talk about what she gets up to. She now is in the prime of her life, being a rich bit she's just like married up, even though she was already up. You know, she has three kids, so she's busy running the household. I put that in quotes because she is hiring people to do the work of running her house sold Well. Call this class bitterness with Margaret kilj that's the name of this episode. She spends her time riding horses, playing harp and studying really complex math and hiring the best mathematicians in the world to tutor her, who're willing to not just because of the money, but because her dad is famous as hell. And she's really into music too. She wants to be a professional singer. And her friends are like, ah, you should like stick to the harp and math, man, you're so good at the harp and math. It's before I have honest friends, maybe or maybe not you know, maybe this should have encouraged her. Meanwhile, her mom, in classic form of good at politics not the best at being a mom, is controlling as hell, yelling at her about how she handles herself in society because I think she's kind of being a bit of a libertine, and also how she's like raising her kids and shit. Ada meanwhile is gambling on horses, drinking and I think fucking around. She is her father's daughter. And all the while she's talking to Babbage about them machines. Much like our sponsor, the extinct store, Babbages, if you build a time machine, you can go back, and I recommend buying anything where you have to get a bunch of floppy discs to install it and then swap out the floppy discs at the end of different scenes, and then sometimes you have to go back and forth Wizardry. You could be playing Wizardry right now from our sponsor Babbages, and we're back. So Charles Babbage is working on these machines, but he has a problem. Well, his real problem is that everyone he loves is dead and he's sad. But his other problem is that he isn't good at finishing projects. And his ability to be productive and make a world changing machine is hampered by his inability to finish things. Meanwhile, the writing books of titles like on the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers about how to efficiently run factories, and he starts writing sciencey theology or what was called natural theology. And this is kind of before I mean, there's atheist at this time, right, He's always been atheists as soon. But there's this thing that's happening now that people are really into science where people are like, oh, well, like I don't know, it's like all complicated, and God made all the complicated and it's like kind of interesting. He was the potentially the first person to basically suggest that God is a programmer creating a complex system. Therefore is responsible for the fact that we now have that thing where some people believe we're all living in a simulation. I am one of those people. I can't say it's wrong.
I watched a documentary and I've walked away from that documentary thinking it's more likely than not.
I know it sounds absurd.
I know it sounds like it is like a massive bonng rip, but like I do believe it.
I believe it. My equivalent level of wacky belief is equantum immortality. I like, I'm like kind of sold on it.
You should do a bonus episode that's just like cool Zone team, what's your wackieth but deeply held belief?
Yeah, totally, totally Okay, Well, so you might like his natural theology. He says that the repeating patterns found all throughout the natural world are evidence of the fact that this is a programmed thing, and that miracles aren't breaking natural laws but were instead, quote, the exact fulfillment of much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist. Oh, it is that kind of like because as a kid, we'd always be like, if someone believed in ghosts, you'd have to figure how to reconcile with science. And the answer is like, well, science doesn't understand it yet, right, Like, that's not a I don't disagree with that assessment. You know, that does not specifically my setup of beliefs, but like makes sense to me. It makes sense. Yeah, And meanwhile he's like throwing huge soares that Darwin and Dickens and people like that come to He ran for office on a yay actories and computers platform, but did not win. He wasn't popular because people thought he squandered all the public money, because he got a lot of money from the government to build a machine and then he didn't so kind of fair. He didn't finish the difference engine in part because making it was too took too long, and it was also it wasn't just like him carving the brass pieces. He's like hiring people and working with engineers and stuff. Right, But soon he already invented something better than the difference Engine. He invented the analytical engine. And this one would use punched cards to store data like the looms did, and just to reiterate that modern computing developed out of art instead of the other way around, this analytical machine would basically be a universal computer. All but he still mostly he's still seen it as a way to compute tables and charts and shit, just like more efficiently, with like less user intervention, like less programming each individual setup. Right. In eighteen four he goes to Italy and he gives a lecture about this analytical engine. An Italian Army engineer who decades later is going to become a center right Prime Minister of Italy. Is a guy named Luigi because he's Italian. That actually is his name, and he's into it. And in eighteen forty two he wrote about the analytical engine in French. Aida translated it into English for publication. The original was about eight thousand words or so. She added a ton of shit. Her translation was about twenty thousand words because of all the notes. This is her thing. This is the thing that she wrote that cements her in history, which is so wild that it's like a translation of a thing. But that's actually a fairly normal way for people to break into sciences and stuff at the time is to add notes to existing work by translating it. So while she's writing this, this is the thing that have you run across the like, Oh, Aida didn't really do it. Babbage did all the work.
Oh yes, many many times. That's something that tech bros love to trot out.
Yeah you know who didn't believe that? Who Charles Babbage. He wrote explicitly about the fact that it was Ada's work. Take that, tech bros. Yeah, listen to your own fucking hero. She corresponded with him about it all the time. Mail in London was like texting. It was six times a day, and so people just like so she just wrote him and was like, hey, I'm working on this part of it and stuff, and they correspond about it. But it was her ideas. And I rarely say things are like history has a consensus about a thing on this show, because like usually they don't. Like Charles Babbage feels this way, and so does everyone who actually studies it, as best as I can tell, and like he was there, y'all, he would know, yeah, and he's like, I mean, he's supportive of her work, but he's not like the hero of like progressiveness and feminism or something either. But oh and then meanwhile, her dutiful husband is inching over her pencil, like it's like the equivalent of like he's like typing it up, which is like fucking cool.
Yeah, we don't get to do a lot of I imagine you don't get to do a lot of stories about the supportive helphol men in the orbit of a talented woman.
I know the men quietly in the background. They do come up and I make they make me very happy, like secretly my favorite kind of person to cover on the show as a wife guy, which is annoying. It should be the cool wife or the cool unmarried woman. But in some ways, I'm just like, oh, look at the guy. He's so nice.
I mean, not to give unsolicited romantic advice, but somebody once told me that if you are an ambitious woman that and you are going to like align yourself with a man, that man could either be an anchor or a springboard.
There is no in between. So she's very wisely, yeah, that makes some sense. If people don't support the projects you're doing, it's not worth it, not worth it. And so the thing that Babbage did try to write for this piece, this translation, he wanted to write an anonymous preface about how the government wasn't sponsoring science enough and now let you get more money, and Ada is like, no, I'm good. I don't want to bet in my book, which is more evidence of the fact that he didn't. Fucking like she controlled this thing. It was her project. And it comes out and her dutiful husband is giving away copies to all his friends, being like, look how fucking cool my wife is. And it's the notes in this in which she basically writes the first computer programs. She writes out hypothetical programs that this computer could be used for And so there's the like, you know, is she a diversity inclusion or whatever? Is she overrated? And She's only overrated in the same way that so is Charles Babbage. Neither of them made computers. Both of them thought about computers. You know. He in a cool I like the idea that people are able to like come up with an imaginary thing and then develop it and build it all in their minds. And I'm impressed by that. In terms of what they actually hypothesized. Lovelace is as important as Babbage. There's no doubt in my mind. Babbage did hardware, love Lace did software. Babbage figured out how to make a thing. Lovelace figured out what you could do with it. In this work she invented loops and nested loops. In programming, she talked about a hypothetical thing that could have taken three hundred and thirty cards, but then instead figured out how to do it with only three cards. She dreamed about what computers could do beyond numbers, and hypothesized writing music on them. She wrote that quote the fundamental relations of pitch sound in the Science of Harmony could be used in order to quote compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. She also predicted, I think accurately that computers will never be able to think that AI itself is sort of an illusion. She wrote, quote, the analytical engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to in order to perform, and essentially later, the way that Babbage comes back into fame is that Alan Turing finds Ada's writing and famously I don't remember what episode we covered him on, but he was a persecutive for homosexuality, inventor of computers who also defeated the Nazis. Alan Turing that guy, okay again, annoying thing on Twitter or right wing people are like now I see all the right wing shit on Twitter ever since Elon must took over and the you know, engagement bait or whatever, but there's this thing where it's like, well, no one from this country's flag ever invented anything, and it's like the trans inclusive rainbow flag, and it's like Alan Turing beat the Nazis. Yeah, like, I mean there's a lot still. Yeah, you're talking about forty percent of the human population is rough LGBT by old studies from one hundred years ago, Like, I have a feeling people did some shit. People did some shit.
And I gotta say that quote that you just read from Lovelace about how computers would only ever be like regurgitating what we know, I cannot believe that that was not written this year about AI because it is so fucking spot on, and it is wild to hear how prescient that.
Was all the way back then. Yeah, when computers were literally a figurement of her and Babbage's imagination. That is like, that is like some mind blowing shit right there. Yeah, because the actual crazy magic is what the human mind can do. And so Alan Turing called this objection Lovelace's objection, and it's like still stands as like a thing in modern computer science or whatever. She was the force that almost brought us to the computer age one hundred years early, because she basically hounded Babbage into letting her take over not building, but like project managing the building thereof. And I think her husband was going to have to be a proxy in order to like make this happen or whatever. But I read one version where it was basically like Babbage was the CTO and she was going to be the CEO, you know, and this is not the kind of thing you can build in your garage. The analytical engine would have been the size of a freight train, or maybe the size of an engine car. I am confused by the thing I read about it. It would have involved at least fifty thousand moving parts, and it would have required government intervention to make it happen. They actually would have had to give more money. And basically she writes all these letters being like, hey, Bud, let me take over. I can actually make this happen. I'm not a bitter old man who everyone's mad at, you know. And he eventually relents and he's like, okay, let's make this happen. And instead she gets sick. She was never particularly healthy, but in her thirty she got way sicker. It was cervical cancer, though she didn't know that for a while, and she's like taking a lot of medication, a lot of laudanum and other stuff for the pain. So instead of fundamentally changing the world, which she absolutely could have done, she died at thirty six, same age that her father died. While she was on her deathbed, she requested that Charles Dickens come to her bedside to read to her about death from one of his books, and she wrote about herself while she died, I begin to understand death, which is going on quietly and gradually every minute, and will never be a thing of one particular moment. And she also, while on her deathbed, made a confession that upset her husband gravely, and we will never know what it was. And I'm so annoyed. My money is on cheating, but I'd rather it was. My father. Lord Byron is alive and he's a vampire and it's going to turn me into a vampire. Sorry, Bud. She let her mother save her soul on her deathbed because her mother's like writing her the same notes like save today, you know, like, hey, how about today? I want Jesus today. And so she religiously converted back to Christianity from people like to argue people like try to own her for whatever their particular religion or lack of religion is scientific atheism. It also could be possible that she was a deist like her father, or a pantheist. She wrote a lot about God as like she seemed to be kind of on a like natural theology page. Somewhere between that and atheism. She talked about science was her religion, but not in a way where it was like, therefore, I don't need religion. I think she meant it. She's just interesting And I have no idea if she accepted Christ in earnest, or if it was to ease her mother's worries, or she just did the like isn't it that that's that logic puzzle of like, well you might as well on your deathbed because there's no harm in not doing it, or yeah, I don't know. I like to think she did it for her mom. I mean whatever, like but like it's like a nice like, oh I don't need to worry about my soul or whatever, you know. I don't know. But she insisted she be buried next to her father. This was the fact that made me then deep dive. Lord Byron, I was just doing mostly Ada and a little bit of Charles, and I was like, man, she was raised to have nothing to do with her father, and she was like, I'm getting buried next to my father. Her memorial was engraved with a sonnet that she wrote called The Rainbow, which is about how despite the miseries and mourning of the world. God gives us rainbow so that we can be soothed. It's actually very sweet. I actually like it more than I like Lord Byron's poetry that I've read, but I've only read a little bit of Lord Byron's poetry. Neither her mother nor Babbage came to her funeral. I am not sure why, especially her mother. It might have been an objection to the location, and the obituaries about her from the time are just discussing now. I know she seemed really masculine, but don't worry, she was still feminine at heart. She liked me music like a proper woman, even though she did all that man's stuff.
How embarrassing that she did so much, and that that's what her obituary was concerned with. Did she hear the traditional gender roles? Don't worry y'all.
She totally did. Yeah, God damn it. She had three kids. Her oldest son and her did not get along. He fucked off to the navy, deserted, and died working in a shipyard at twenty six. Her daughter married a poet and moved to Southwest Asia and became the world's premier breeder of Arabian horses. Her youngest son inherited the title and stayed on the estate and was really not into his parents, but was into his grandma like Lady Byron, and wrote books talking about his grandfather. Lord Byron Babbage lived for another eighteen years, never quite making progress on his analytical machine, just writing a bunch of different shit. He went to war against the street musicians, cranky old Man, and the Pair were largely forgotten for a long time, but eventually there are mechanical computers, then electro mechanical, then electronic. In nineteen forties people started programming. Alan Turing rediscovered the Pair through Ada and her translation and notes, and heavily influenced him, specifically as he was developing the idea of a universal computer instead of the task specific computers that were being developed already. So in the end I would say yes, they influenced modern computing incredibly and directly, even though there's this like skip where they weren't for a minute, you know. And the part that makes me sad. A lot of things make me sad, A lot of things make me very happy. Thing it makes me sad is thinking about how it's probably good that the British didn't develop the computer during the peak of their empire. I want to be happy about cool machines when you add the willingness to treat people as numbers to one of the largest and worst empires the world has ever suffered under. Alan Turing's Lady Lovelace objection is quote an AI can't originate anything. That's the simplification of that. I think about that constantly now, which you're like, and what's cool about that is it's like it's not even a therefore, don't do it, right, you know.
I think, yeah, I completely agree, and it's like it's not a therefore, don't do it, but it's it's an understand this at a fundamental level as you use it.
And I think that's what sort of gets mixed up.
It's so easy for people to think about AI as like hyper aware computer brains that are learning things, and it is just spitting back out at us things that we do and know and the biases that we have, and so yeah, just understand it that way.
Yeah, yeah, it's the same as I mean, the analytical machine I'm sure seemed like magic, you know. And so Lovelace was sitting there being like it's not magic. It's a machine, and it's I think she'd be doing the exact same thing right now if she was alive, you know, I think she'd probably be pushing AI and being like, it doesn't create things, and it's annoying because AI, to me is like a perfect example of this. Like the reason it seems bad is there's a lot of reasons, but it's because of the economic system we live in, because of the systems of control that we live under, you know, I don't know. In the nineteen eighties, the US Department of Defense named its programming language Ada. Apparently it's still sometimes used, but apparently wasn't a particularly successful programming language. I mean, that's this stuff gets beyond me. I don't know as much about all of this. In two thousand and two, people built a difference engine based on Babbage's notes, and only a single correction was necessary to make it work. No one has yet built his analytical engine, so no one knows if it works. And that's Ada Lovelace, child of Vampire who invented programming.
Yeah, if you would have told me that when we started this conversation, you were going to start with VAMPI and effectively loop back around to computers.
I wouldn't have believed you, but kill Joy, you've done it again. Hell yeah, I spend so much money on red yarn. Yeah.
Your your house supposed to be like connections between things that seem someone's gonna come into your house one day and be like.
Is she Oka? Like what's going on with Margaret? It happens already, but that's mostly because of my decor. A lot of it is very medieval?
Aren't you so glad? I really your statement about I'm really glad this wasn't created during this time. I think about that so often. I'm like, what if like a motherfucker like Oswald Mosley had like an algorithm computer?
Like ah yeah, like it's such a it makes me so sad. I want us to just It's like Elon Musk makes Mars seem not cool? How hard do you have to work to make Mars seem not cool? Space is cool, and the reason it's sketchy is because of governments and stuff. But now it's even sketchier because no people who are terrible want to go. And how do you make.
Outer space seem Lamelan.
Musk involved, that's all you gotta do invented a cyberpunk looking truck and made it the worst thing that's ever happened to a car. Have you'll ever seen one in the wild? Yes, dude, I did. I saw one. I did. I think the first time one comes into West Virginia all the rest of us in regular pickups are going to run it off.
The road will descend on it.
Yeah. I saw one like two weeks ago. Be I did. I did? It was? What were your thoughts?
I was like, I was like, ah, I'm programmed to hate this, Like, why is it shaped that way?
What is happening? I grew up, I grew up on I were punk and like, so the only time I saw one that looked right was someone had graffitied one, okay on. I was like, oh, now it looks like it belongs in the cyberpunk dystopia. I was promised. But yeah, instead it's like can't drive through a mud puddle. Yeah.
The only time I see them, it's not doing something cool and cyberpunky.
It's like valeting, yeah, or like getting.
Rusted because it rained something something decidedly not cool.
Yeah. Wow. If people want to know more about the culture of the Internet and the ways in which it has both interesting and bad things. Is there anywhere that they can do that?
Well, I would turn them to my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet. Also, great transition, Margaret, thank.
You, thank you, snaps for Magpie. It's my job's security staying on top of this. Yeah, people should check that out. And if you want to check out more of my stuff, I write a substack I post every week. Half of the posts are free to everyone and are like more political and theoretical or historical or whatever and like on these kinds of subjects. The other half are more personal. And if you want to know more about my personal life, you have to pay me. And I feel fine about that, and that's what I have to plug. Sophie, you got anything tak Any new podcasts from cool Zone Media people could check out?
Yeah, if you want one that's already out, check out Exitron's podcast Better Offline. It is a weekly tech podcast part of the cool Zone Media network and launching in May. We have a new weekly show called sixteenth Minute of Fame hosted by Jamie Loftus, So look out for that one in early May.
All right, well, go forth and listen to podcasts, and then listen to this one next Monday because we'll be back. Bye, Hi everyone.
Cool Poll Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
