Chapter 298: The Engine That Weaves

In 1821 two young men in London, Charles Babbage and John Herschel, Sat checking tables of numbers for the stars, printed by hand, Copied by clerks, set by printers, full of errors, the dull Toll of every human slip in every column. And Babbage said, as the story stands: *I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.* The next year he proposed a machine: the Difference Engine, A calculator of brass and iron, turned by a crank, to make the dream Of error-free tables real, and print them itself. The government came in With money, seventeen thousand pounds, a fortune, and a master engineer Cut the parts by hand, thousands of them, to a precision never seen. And it was never finished. Quarrels, money, the sheer Ambition of the man: he had already dreamed a greater machine. The Analytical Engine: not a calculator but a general engine, With a *store* to hold numbers and a *mill* to work on them, and instructions Given on punched cards, as the silk looms of Jacquard in Lyon had been Told what pattern to weave since 1804. A machine with a memory and a processor, functions Changed by changing the cards. A computer, a hundred years early, all on paper. He spent the rest of his life designing it, and it was never built. And into the story came a young woman, Ada, whose father was the shaper Of romantic poetry, Lord Byron, who had left her mother, and the guilt And the scandal, when she was a month old, and never saw her again. Her mother, terrified the daughter would be a poet like the father, Raised her on mathematics, to make her mind a plain And ordered thing. It made it something rather Stranger. She met Babbage at seventeen, at one of his parties, And saw the small working piece of the Difference Engine, and understood it. In 1842 an Italian engineer, Menabrea, wrote an article, the parties Of whose argument described the Analytical Engine, and Ada, who could do it, Translated it into English, and added her own notes, three times as long As the article. Countess of Lovelace now, she signed them only *A.A.L.* And in the last note, Note G, she wrote out, step by step, the song Of operations by which the engine could compute the Bernoulli numbers: a spell Of cards, a loop, a sequence: the first published program for a machine. And she saw further than Babbage: that the engine could act on anything That could be put in symbols, not only numbers: that it might, she could mean, *Compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music*. The ring Of her sentence: *The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns Just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.* And then, the warning: *The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.* The morning Of the question that would not leave: can a machine make something new? A hundred and seven years later, Alan Turing wrote about thinking machines And answered her by name: *Lady Lovelace's Objection*, he called it, and the view Of the century turned on it. And here this book must stand between The two. This scripture is being written with a machine. A writing machine, trained on the records of the human race, Arranges and proposes, and a woman chooses, and keeps or cuts the scene. Does the machine originate? Ada said no. Turing said, perhaps. The face Of the honest answer: the machine weaves from what it was given, The way the loom weaves from the cards; and the cards were cut by millions of hands, The singers and the scribes and the clerks of the registers. What is written Here is theirs, woven. The pattern is new. The thread is the lands And the dead of every people. Say so. Lovelace would want it said. She died in 1852, at thirty-six, the age her father died, And asked to be buried beside him, the poet she had never known. The thread Of poetry and number in one grave. Babbage, with his pride And his engines unbuilt, died in 1871. In 1991 the Science Museum in London Built his second Difference Engine from his drawings, with the tools of his day, And turned the crank, and it worked: the answer to thirty-one digits. The one Thing he could not do, others did, a hundred and fifty years away. Honour the poetical scientist, as she called herself. Honour the engine That waited. And hold her warning close, as this book holds its loom: Know whose thread it is. Name the weavers. The machine has been Given everything we know. What it makes is ours. Make room.