The Terms of the Engine
1843 · Ada Lovelace, 27, having finished her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine, a machine still unbuilt
The notes are finished and they are three times longer than the paper they were meant to annotate. Somewhere in the middle of them she stopped being a translator: if the machine can work on numbers, and anything can be represented by numbers (music, for instance), then the machine can work on that too. Nobody had written that down before. Not even the man who designed it.
The machine will never be built at this rate. He is brilliant and he is impossible: he has fallen out with the government, fallen out with his engineer, and spends his energy on grievances instead of funding.
She is twenty-seven. She has an idea of what this thing actually is that he does not seem to have, and she is prepared to run the campaign for it (the money, the politics, the public case), and she is going to put that in a letter.
The letter will say that she takes it on only if he agrees to leave those matters entirely to her judgement. She is asking a famous man twice her age to hand over control of his life's work to a woman who has never published anything.
Send the letter
Stay the translatorOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Ada Lovelace sent it. Babbage refused the terms, there was a furious exchange, and the partnership never recovered: they were reconciled but never worked together like that again. The Analytical Engine was never built. Note G of her published Notes contains a step-by-step method for it to compute Bernoulli numbers, generally called the first published computer program, and also the first clear statement that such a machine could never originate anything, an objection Turing was still answering by name a hundred years later. She died of uterine cancer in 1852 at thirty-six, the same age at which her father Byron had died, and asked to be buried beside the man she had never met.
The philosophers weigh in
Send it"She was raised in mathematics specifically so that nothing of her father would show, and then asked for command of the only machine of the age. Both of those are the same education working."
Stay"The relationship was the instrument. She was right about the machine and she broke the one hand that could have built it, and being right did not put a single gear in place."