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Pursuing her interest in things mechanical and analytical, in the following year Ada Byron and her mother toured English factories, including cloth factories using punched cards to manufacture elaborate patterns in fabric and lace.²⁰⁶ The mechanical loom had also been an interest of her father’s, though of a different kind. In his maiden speech to the house of Lords in 1812, three years before Ada was born, Lord Byron had taken the opportunity to protest a bill that would have made the wave of machine-breaking a capital crime.²⁰⁷

“By the adoption” of such machines, he said, “one man performed the work of many, and the superfluous labourers were thrown out of employment, [being] … left in consequence to starve.” It would seem that “the maintenance and well doing of the industrious poor, were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals,” the owners of the mechanical looms. The protestors were left “liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty.”²⁰⁸

Ada, now married to the Earl of Lovelace, pursued her mathematical studies over the decade following her first meeting with Babbage, met him frequently, and corresponded with him at length.²⁰⁹ By 1842, his work was at a crossroads. Despite substantial government funding, he had failed to produce a complete Difference Engine. To the annoyance of his sponsors his plans had moved on to a seemingly more fanciful and never-to-be-built Analytical Engine. Babbage even met British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel in person in a failed attempt to appeal for further funding.²¹⁰ “What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating Machine?” Peel asked in desperation.²¹¹

Hopes dashed in England, Babbage visited Italy. There his proposed Analytical Engine attracted the attention of Luigi Menabrea, Professor of Mechanics in the Military Academy of the University of Turin, later to be Prime Minister of Italy. Menabrea was sufficiently impressed with Babbage’s plan for the Analytical Engine to write an article about it in French.

Upset and annoyed by Babbage’s partly self-inflicted failures to secure support for the project – when he met Prime Minister Peel, instead of showing gratitude for past support, he complained that his work had been unappreciated – Lovelace offered to translate Menebrea’s article, and add some explanatory notes. Perhaps this would breathe life back into the project.

The translated article, “Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, By L. F. Menabrea, with Notes upon the Memoir by the Translator,” was published in 1843. The translated part is just over 10,000 words; Lovelace’s notes, simply signed A.A.L., run to over 22,000 words.²¹²

In the notes, Lovelace goes far beyond Babbage in addressing what is for us a critical question, the transposability of meanings by machines of calculation. Today we call such machines “computers.” Where Babbage saw his machines as primarily mathematical, Lovelace saw broader potentials.

Lovelace makes a distinction between what would today be called software and data: “In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which in all mathematical analysis belong to operations, as distinguished from the objects operated upon and from the results of the operations performed upon those objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.”²¹³

However, Lovelace casts the net of “operation” far wider than mathematics in the abstract, to any calculable meanings in the world: “It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may. This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe.” By mathematical representation and calculation, it may be possible to “express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst.”²¹⁴

The model for such mechanical possibility, Lovelace went on, was “the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.” The Analytical Engine was also designed to run on the same kinds of punched cards she and her mother had seen at work in the factories they had toured. “[T]he Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In these ways, “not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.”²¹⁵

However, Lovelace adds an important proviso: “to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine … It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.” Any such machine’s capacity is limited to “devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use.” To this extent and no more its contribution is “extensions of human power, or additions to human knowledge.”²¹⁶

We rephrase: the limits of calculated meaning were to be the limits of calculability, its affordances in terms of the constraints as well as the potentials for transposing other meaning functions (such as instances, concepts, qualities) into quantities, and quantities into other meaning functions.

A.A.L.’s translation and its notes were received to great acclaim, and congratulations poured in. Babbage signed off a letter of appreciation to her, “Ever my fair Interpretess, Your faithful slave.”²¹⁷

Then the paper was forgotten for the best part of a century.

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²⁰³ James Essinger, 2014, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter, Ada Lovelace, Launched the Digital Age, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, p. 6.

²⁰⁴ Charles Babbage, 1889 [2010], Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to Them; Their History, and Construction, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Charles Babbage, 1864 [1994], Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; Bruce Collier, 1970, “The Little Engines That Could’ve: The Calculating Machines of Charles Babbage,” Ph.D., Department of History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Bruce Collier and James MacLachlan, 1998, Charles Babbage and the Engines of Perfection, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

²⁰⁵ Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice, 2018, Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, Oxford, UK: Bodleian Library, p. 45.

²⁰⁶ James Essinger, 2004, Jacquard’s Web: How the Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

²⁰⁷ Sadie Plant, 1997, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture, New York, NY: Doubleday, p. 15.

²⁰⁸ https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill

²⁰⁹ Dorothy Stein, 1985, Ada: A Life and a Legacy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 41ff.; James Essinger, 2014, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter, Ada Lovelace, Launched the Digital Age, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, pp. 95ff.

²¹⁰ James Essinger, 2014, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter, Ada Lovelace, Launched the Digital Age, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, pp. 156–61; Maboth Moseley, 1964 [1970], Irascible Genius: The Life of Charles Babbage, Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company; Doron Swade, 2000, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, New York, NY: Viking.

²¹¹ John Fuegi and Jo Francis, 2003, “Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes’,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25(4):16–26, p. 16.

²¹² A.A. Lovelace, 1843, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, by L.F. Menabrea, with Notes Upon the Memoir by the Translator,” pp. 666–731 in Scientific Memoirs Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, Volume 3, edited by R. Taylor, London, UK: Richard and John E. Taylor.

²¹³ Ibid., p. 692.

²¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 693, 696.

²¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 696–97.

²¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 722–23.

²¹⁷ John Fuegi and Jo Francis, 2003, “Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes’,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25(4):16–26, p. 24; Betty Alexandra Toole, ed., 1992, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer, Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 156-159. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Ada Lovelace’s Notes on the Analytical Engine §MS1.3.2a