Page 12 - HISTORY ANGKOR

P R O F I L E S

HORSLEY TOWERS, a mock-Tudor
mansion in Surrey, southern
England, was begun in 1820. Ada
Lovelace’s husband acquired it in
1840 and added a great hall and
towers to the complex.
ALAN SPENCER PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY

Babbage. On an evening together in 1834, steam, and its spinning wheels would take In essence, this machine would not just
Babbage explained to Ada and her moth- up as much space as a locomotive. calculate; it would compute.

er an idea he had for another invention. He called the imagined machine the Fascinated with the invention and
Although the Difference Engine—that Analytical Engine, and it would be able its potential, Lovelace stayed in close
clanging, hand-cranked machine he had to do more than simple math; instead, communication with Babbage as he de-
demonstrated for Ada the previous year— it would be able to “[eat] its own tail,” in veloped the machine’s schematics. In
remained unfinished, Babbage was already Babbage’s words, which meant that the 1842 Italian mathematician (and future
envisioning a machine more complicated machine could store its outputs and prime minister) Luigi Federico Menabrea
and more capable. It would be powered by then employ them in other equations. published a paper on Babbage’s proposed
machine, which Lovelace eagerly trans-
lated into English, in hopes of drum-
ming up more support for the invention
FATHER OF COMPUTING in England. She signed her translation
only as “A.A.L.”

ENGLISH MATHEMATICIAN and inventor Charles Along with the translated article,
Babbage was born in 1791. Devoted to math and Lovelace submitted her own notes on
science, he helped found the Analytical Society in the Analytical Engine. Her “Translator’s
1812 to introduce European innovations in mathe- Note” dwarfed the translated article
matics to England. His Analytical Engine — though itself, clocking in at well over double
never fully realized — is often considered to be the Menabrea’s word count. In the notes,
first modern computer. Lovelace included her own explanation

of how the hypothetical machine would
CHARLES BABBAGE, PHOTOGRAPHED CIRCA 1860
ALAMY work, expressed in considerably greater
detail than Menabrea’s original paper.

10 MARCH/APRIL 2022