the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage by sydney padua

It’s hard to walk the straight and narrow and follow the perfect path, which 19th-century women had to do. How does Ada Lovelace’s story relate to women in science today? But by having a day where you just flood the Internet with blog posts about women doing cool stuff, you create a perceptual shift: There are tons of women doing all sorts of stuff, so, “I’m not the weirdo.” I’m not connected to Lovelace Day in any formal way. From there, it just took on a life of its own. I then became fascinated with the story and completely fell in love with Lovelace and Babbage. I did a very short biographical comic in a couple of evenings, and then it got so much pickup. I didn’t really think of myself as a woman in tech-I worked on computers, but very reluctantly. I was in a pub with my friend Suw Charman, who started Lovelace Day, when she suggested I do a blog post.

What drew you to the story of Lovelace and Babbage? Scientific American spoke to Padua about the importance of Ada Lovelace Day-celebrated every second Tuesday of October-and Padua’s own experience as a woman working in the technological field of digital animation. In Padua’s story the two friends complete the gargantuan engine and become an eccentric, techy crime-fighting duo.

Lovelace died early on into her friendship with Babbage, and the Analytical Engine was never built-except for in the pages of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Pantheon, April 2015), a graphic novel by artist and animator Sydney Padua. In these notes she not only explained the engine more clearly than Babbage had been able to, but she also described an algorithm it could carry out that is often considered to be the world’s first computer program. The daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lovelace was a gifted mathematician and intellectual who translated an Italian article on the Analytical Engine and supplemented it with extensive notes on the machine’s capabilities. Whereas Babbage is credited with the machine’s conception, it was perhaps his friend Ada Lovelace who best understood its promise and the potential that computers would one day fulfill. That was the vision for Analytical Engine devised by British inventor Charles Babbage in 1837. The first programmable computer-if it were built-would have been a gigantic, mechanical thing clunking along with gears and levers and punch cards.

The thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage by sydney padua