A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age by James Essinger Page A

a cogwheel allows the transmission of energy in defined, incremental steps. It’s precisely this attribute which makes cogwheels essential in ‘counting time’ in mechanical clocks. They are an essential part of the escapement: the device in a clock or watch that alternately checks and releases the train (i.e. the connected elements of the mechanism) by a fixed amount and transmits a periodic impulse from the spring to the balance wheel or pendulum.
    Thus the machine had all the ingredients that excited Ada, here was a machine that showed how one could one day fly through mathematical formulas. Despite their many differences, not least their age, class and wealth, Ada and Babbage were fascinated by the same problems but approached them from different angles.
    Babbage, like many of the intellectuals of his time, was fascinated by ideas of fate and predestination. He was also intrigued by the puzzle of how to reconcile the increasingly important influence of machines, who did what man wanted, with a belief in a God who, according to the theology adhered to by many people at the time, was supposed to look down on the human world like a sort of senior judge and intervene on occasions when he saw fit.
    He was especially intrigued by their regularity and reliability and he got a deep satisfaction from watching properly calibrated ones going about their paces, their mechanism invariably reaching the same point in the cycle after precisely the same interval as the previous time. Unlike Ada, he saw machines essentially as mechanised servants of mankind rather than as a new area of discovery with its own mysteries. Hisscientific imagination was ultimately more prosaic and less incandescent than hers.
    While gregarious like Ada, Babbage could also be singularly eccentric, and had a tendency to be gruff, morose and occasionally a show-off and know-it-all. In addition to this, he had a bizarre habit of talking about the most commonplace events as if they were mathematical phenomena. It made him a guaranteed attraction for fashionable society, who delighted in having Babbage in its midst. Hosts and hostesses were always delighted to be able to inform their prospective guests that Mr Babbage would be attending. In an age when much social chit-chat involved exchanging mere superficial pleasantries, a lunch, supper or soirée with Babbage present was certainly never boring.
    One could never guess just what Babbage would say next. If the evolution of technology had been a little speedier and given television to the early nineteenth century, Babbage might easily have become a ‘mad scientist’ TV personality, popular on talkshows, and hired to host documentaries about technological innovations.
    He had the advantage over Ada in that, as he was a man, scientists enjoyed his company, too, and respected him. In January 1832, the geologist Charles Lyell had travelled to Hendon, at that time a village north of London, and visited his friends and fellow geologists Dr William Fitton and William Conybeare.
    We have had great fun in laughing at Babbage, who unconsciously jokes and reasons in high mathematics, talks of the ‘algebraic equation’ of such a one’s character in regard to the truth of his stories etc. I remarked that the paint of Fitton’s house would not stand, on which Babbage said, ‘no: painting a house outside is calculating by the index minus one,’ or some such phrase, which made us stare; so that he said gravely by way of explanation, ‘That is to say, I am assuming revenue to be a function.’ All this without pedantry, and he bears well being well quizzed by it. He says that when the reform is carried he hopes to be secularised Bishop of Winchester. They were speculating on what we should do if we were suddenly put down on Saturn. Babbage said: ‘You Mr Leudon (the clergyman there, and schoolmaster, and a scholar), would set about persuading them that some language disused in Saturn for 2,000 years was the only thing