From the Archives: Lovelace, Babbage and Steampunk Comics (with a little grumble about Lord Byron)
Today is the 230th birthday of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and bits of his history are popping up here and there all over the internet. There are lots of good (or bad) stories to tell. He was a poet when poets were rock stars of the sex, drugs and iambic pentameter variety. And he was the baddest, bad boy of them all. But I'm not going to spend any time telling them. Byron was one of the central figures in my dissertation, which given that I got my doctorate on the twenty-year plan means he was part of my life for far too long. In my opinion, he was a jerk. But then, I never had a taste for bad boys.
Instead, I'm gone back into the History in the Margins archives for a post about a clever steampunk comic about Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace. Enjoy!
Normally when I use the phrase "comic-book history" here on the Margins I'm referring to the shorthand popular version of history that we learned as children and carry in our hearts as adults: Abraham Lincoln dashing off the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope, the first American Thanksgiving, Marie Antoinette's infamous line "let them eat cake--like that. These historical anecdotes are at best incomplete versions of history and at worst absolutely wrong, but they are emotionally satisfying so they live on no matter how often they are debunked.*
Today, though, I'm going to talk about a real comic book, described by its author as "an imaginary comic about an imaginary computer.": The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer.
Sydney Padua starts out with two real people:
Augusta Ada King (1815-1852) , the Countess of Lovelace, better known as Ada Lovelace. Daughter of the famous (and infamous) Lord Byron, Lovelace was a talented mathematician. Most women with that skill in her time would have had no opportunity to use it. Lucky for her, her mother insisted that she be educated in a rigorous program of math and science well outside the norm for young women of the time, hoping such study would counteract any poetical tendencies she might have inherited from her father. ** (In case you're not up on nineteenth century gossip, it was a spectacularly unhappy marriage.)
Charles Babbage (1791-1857) was an irascible and inventive mathematician and tinkerer who is often called the "father of the computer". He designed two machines intended to automate complex calculations: the difference machine and the later, more complicated analytical engine.
Lovelace was fascinated by his work. When asked to translate an Italian engineer's article on the analytical machine into English, she added her own notes to the piece*** in which she described how code could be written that would expand the use of the machine. Making her the first computer programmer. At least in theory.
Padua tells the history of Lovelace and Babbage in twenty-five smart, snarky, footnoted pages--then revolts against the fact that history gives her characters unhappy endings.**** The rest of the smart, snarky, footnoted comic takes place in an alternative steampunk universe where Lovelace and Babbage "live to complete the analytical engine and use it to have thrilling adventures and fight crime." Padua takes elements of nineteenth century history (Luddites, for example) and historical personages (Queen Victoria among them) and twists them into unhistorical forms that are nonetheless historically illuminating. It's quite a trick and makes me think of Marianne Moore's definition of poetry as the ability to create "real toads in imaginary gardens".
*My apologies to those of you who have heard this rant before, either here or In Real Life.
**This seems to have been based on a fundamental lack of understanding of the poetical properties inherent in higher mathematics and the amount of imagination required to make scientific leaps.
***Three times the length of the original article.
****Lovelace had a drug habit, tried (unsuccessfully) to use her mathematical skills to build a gambling system, and died young of uterine cancer. Babbage, being irascible, was in constant fights with just about everyone and never built his analytical engine. In part because he was in constant fights with just about everyone.
Napoleon on the Art of War
Today I wandered down a research rabbit hole, as I so often do. I would argue that this is not because I am easily distracted but because I am easily focused. I get on the trail of a factoid or an idea and don’t let go. Even would it would make sense to do so.*
Today I was looking for the source of a quotation that is attributed to Napoleon: “The fate of a nation may depend sometimes upon the position of a fortress.” It shows up in lists of Napoleonic aphorisms and as chapter headings in respectable scholarly books. (The earliest use I have found dates from 1916.) And no one says when or where Napoleon said it. This is sloppy scholarship, people. And frustrating. I’d really like to use the quotation, but not without proper provenance. Even if “everyone” does it.
But in the course of flailing about through books on military techniques in the Napoleonic age, and Napoleonic aphorisms, and Google Books, I stumbled on a lovely little gem of military history that I spent far too much of the afternoon browsing through: Napoleon on the Art of War, by Jay Luvaas, who was the first professor of military history at the US Army War College. The book is simply a selection of Napoleon’s writings, arranged by topic, all properly accounted for in time and place. And it reminded me that Napoleon was impressive—something I’m inclined to forget, especially on a day when I’m writing about the siege of Leningrad.** There is a clarity to his thought and his language (though possibly Prof. Luvaas should get the credit for the later)—whether he is writing battle orders, outlining a course of study for the military colleges at Metz and Saint-Cyr, explaining the importance of keeping clear lines of operation, or considering the decisions of his predecessors. I was left with the impression of a man who understood how war works in a fundamental way.
Perhaps he even explained the madness of his march into Russia. Considering the career of Alexander the Great in a discussion of the great captains of antiquity, written in 1809, he said “Unfortunately, when he attained the zenith of his glory and his success, either his head turned him or his heart was spoiled”. Takes one to know one I guess.
And by the way, if you happen to know the source of that quotation, drop me a line at pdtoler@sbcglobal.net
*This is related to the character trait that kept me working on my doctoral dissertation for 20+ years. I like to call it tenacity. Others have suggested alternate terms.
**And yes, I am aware that Napoleon attacked Moscow rather than St. Petersburg, but his Russian campaign haunts any discussion of Hitler’s campaign. Comparative hubris, if you will.
From the Archives: Word with a Past – Silhouette
I'm poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits.
Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I assumed it was the name of a clever scissors-wielding artist who started the new fashion.
Wrong.* The art form, originally called "shades" or "profiles", pre-dated the name.
Étienne de Silhouette was a French attorney with intellectual leanings and political ambitions. He wrote treatises on this and that, translated Alexander Pope into French, made friends with Madame Pompadour, and earned a name as a garçon fort savant** for a book he wrote on the English taxation system. That book would get him in trouble.
In 1759, halfway through the Seven Years War, he was appointed Controller-General of France. The war was expensive and Silhouette had the thankless job of balancing a budget with a shortfall of 217 million livres.*** To make things harder, more than sixty years of almost constant warfare, had left France with a shortage of metal money and a budget crippled by existing debt. Silhouette issued some long-term debts and cut some expenses, but he realized that the long term answer was raising tax income. He took the not-unreasonable position that the easiest people to raise money from were the people who had money--especially true in the Ancién Regime, where the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxes. He took away their tax exemptions and cancelled a range of pensions, sinecures and handouts. With the wealthy and powerful already in an uproar, he then instituted new taxes on luxury goods, from jewelry and carriages to servants and windows. The marquise du Deffand, writing to Voltaire, complained "they are not taxing the air we breathe, but apart from that, I can’t think of anything that's escaped."
Less than nine months after his appointment, Silhouette was out on his ear and the term à la Silhouette was applied to anything cheap, including the profile portraits known as shades.
* In more ways than one, it turned out. Evidently there were two schools of silhouette artists, cutters and painters. The things you find out when you follow a fact down a rabbit hole.
** Bright kid
***Roughly 459 billion dollars today ****
****Very roughly, since I had to work from livres to francs, then calculate it forward to 1800 and convert it into dollars before I could plug it into this currency converter.