The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

"I absolutely love this book. Sydney Padua creates a complete alternate reality where Lovelace stays healthy, Babbage builds the engine, and they use it to fight crime and have adventures: the Duke of Wellington, George Eliot, Brunel, Dickens, Boole and Lewis Carroll all get involved. So in one sequence Wellington turns up in their workshop, on his horse, to ask them to fix the economic crisis; they build a steam-powered economic model, which smashes through the wall of the workshop, does a dead-cat bounce, and then runs amok in London while chased —in a splendid two page spread—by Lovelace on a horse before crashing into the Bank of England. There are lots of jokes at the expense of quants, bank crashes, and the Black-Scholes equation. Underpinning it all is a huge amount of research, and an appendix with an articulate, readable and clear explanation of the engineering of the engine, with jokes and footnotes for good measure. I use some of Padua’s illustrations and animations in lectures, because it’s so nicely done. What she wrote was that if you could find a mathematical formula to represent musical composition, then the engine could “compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. The idea appears in Babbage’s notebooks as well: Sydney Padua uses Babbage’s notorious hatred of barrel-organs to make a joke at his expense about the engine being turned into a giant barrel-organ."

"The unusual story of this Victorian power-duo is what graphic artists and animator Sydney Padua explores in the immensely delightful and illuminating The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer ( public library ), itself a masterwork of combinatorial genius and a poetic analog to its subject matter — rigorously researched, it has approximately the same footnote-to-comic ratio as Lovelace’s trailblazing paper."