If you are new you probably want to start with Lovelace: The Origin. You can then read the episodes/half-baked ideas/pointless ramblings chronologically by clicking on the link to the next post in the upper right of the post pages.
So, this took way too long. Also, it’s very disorganized and I’m not thrilled with a lot of the transitions, but I comfort myself with the thought this is not an actual comic, merely a theoretical comic. Anyways, let us not loose sight of what’s really important, which is, WE WON THE HOCKEY.
TOO MANY NOTES MY DEAR MOZART!
– The tableau of exploding street musicians is a wee tribute to Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, possibly the greatest animated short of all time.. it’s also notable (Babbage includes this important information in some of his little charts of the street music menace) that a large portion, or at least a visible one, of the street musicians of London were foreigners.
With that in mind, a little 2dgoggles soundtrack for you:
Hurdy Gurdy:
Tabla:
Erhu:
– The modest lineup of scientist there waiting for the Difference Engine includes George Airy, Babbage’s real-life nemesis, who I’m happy to say looks suitably Scrooge-like in his caricatures (centre of the 3rd row down). Also Michael Faraday, there’s some sort of thing where he was supposedly bad at math that I’m totally running with, at the very least he told told Babbage that he ‘could not understand his great work’. Next to Faraday is Mary Sommerville, if anyone in the history of science ever screamed ‘KNITTER’ it was she.. she was a good friend of both Lovelace and Babbage and there’s plenty I could write about her but geez these notes are already huge.
And next to her is Darwin (good call on the beard there Darwin), I couldn’t resist that quote of his because it’s the most freaking’ adorable quotation ever:
– You wouldn’t think that quote would be toppable but check out this letter from Brunel to some poor bastard:
“Plain gentlemanly language seems to have no effect upon you. I must try stronger language and stronger measures. You are a cursed, lazy, inattentive, apathetic vagabond, and if you continue to neglect my instructions and to show such infernal laziness, I shall send you about your business. I have frequently told you, amongst other absurd, untidy habits, that that of making drawings on the backs of others was inconvenient; by your cursed neglect of that you have again wasted more of my time than your whole life is worth, in looking for the altered drawings you were to make of the station they won’t do.”
HAHAHA If I worked for Brunel I would be SO FIRED.
– ‘confound you all’ is from source for all goodness in this comic, Babbage’s autobiography, the quotation on the frontsipiece is “I’m a philosopher. Confound them all— Birds, beasts, and men ; but no, not womankind.” From, as fate would have it, Byron’s Don Juan.
– Just a reminder for those using the comic as a source for their history papers, the Prime Minister during the 1830s and 40s was actually Robert Peel, helpfully pre-caricatured for me by various Punch cartoonists (which is good because he’s not very funny looking as Victorians go). Robert Peel is most famous for founding the first (non-mathematical) police force, which is why the London Constabulary are known as “Bobbies” or “Peelers”. I guess Babbage and Lovelace are therefore referred to as “Wellies”.
Wellington’s explanation of being more prominent in this comic on account of being ‘cooler’ shows his rudimentary understanding of the physics of the Pocket Universe– our current advanced understanding of this subject can best be expressed by the well-known equation that applies also to our own universe:
E=mc2
except in the Pocket Universe the ‘E’ represents ‘Entertainment Value’. It is thus not surprising that the massiest objects in the PU are Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, because they are really, REALLY entertaining. Incidentally this provides an explanation for what some of you may be wondering, viz., what has become of Lovelace’s husband, Lord Lovelace. After exhaustive investigations I have determined that his Entertainment Value or E is precisely zero. Hence, according to the above equation, either his mass, or the speed of light, must therefore also be zero, and if the speed of light was zero then you wouldn’t be able to see the comic.
Work is picking back up so comic production remains MOST INEFFICIENT and full of ERRORS, but then you all knew that didn’t you? But at some point, we finally meet The Organist:
So although I finished up on the virtual Giant Monsters a couple of weeks ago, I still had to face ACTUAL Giant Monsters in the form of a live audience at The Story last Friday. A great time was had by all, including even me when I emerged from my haze of terror!
I’ve assembled a slideshow of my talk– with the warning that THIS POWERPOINT CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ORGANSIT! It’s about 15 minutes long; that incoherent high-pitched squeaking you hear is me erming and ahing and forgetting all my brilliant punchlines.
I also did a little comic for their handout newspaper thingie (click for larger):
Footnotes to the comic!
–”Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait” was the motto of Wilkie Collins; he was pretty good at it, as anyone kept up until 3 in the morning by the last chapters of “No Name” can attest. Personally I’ve nailed the ‘Make ‘Em Wait’ part.
–The Classics gag (Latin and Greek) is shamelessly robbed from Alice in Wonderland; Laughing and Grief are amongst the subjects (along with Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils) included in the excellent education of the Mock Turtle.
–In her Notes on the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace speculates that the Engine could potentially “compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”– that is, ” supposing that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations”. Computer-composed music has been achieved; the world still awaits scientific storytelling.
AND, if that’s not enough crazy overexposure, I’m going to be on the ShiftRunStop podcast this week, where they have inexplicably asked me to appear despite having heard my Smooth Dulcet Tones at The Story.
This entry has been heroically posted inbetween hockey periods.
I drew a special comic last week for the upcoming The Story conference, the theme of which was Wilkie Collins’ famous motto, “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry.. and make ‘em wait.” I have the last part NAILED!
Without further ado! ANGST!!! DRAMA!!!!! CHARTS!!!!!!!!
– I am extremely excited to introduce Adolphe Quetelet to this comic. A man after Babbage’s own heart, he began like Babbage in the field of Life Insurance, before expanding his interests to Crime-Fighting. No, really! Although Quetelet lived in Brussels two such twinned souls were bound to be aware of each other and they show up together in plenty of documents. Babbage credits Quetelet with inspiring him to form the Statistical Society, which is I suppose what Quetelet refers to when he schoolgirlishly squees over Babbage’s ‘gigantic plan’ to compile statistics on, uh, EVERYTHING. It was to Quetelet that Babbage seems to have made his first official announcement of his plans for the Analytical Engine, in 1835– although, he must have been talking about it to Lovelace earlier than that, as possibly the first written reference to punchcard computing would be from a letter she wrote when she was still Ada Byron in 1833, when looking upon the Jaquard Loom: “This Machinery reminds me of Babbage and his gem of all mechanism.”
– There was of course no ‘Babbage Act’ proper, but he figures prominently in the events leading up to the “Street Music (Metropolis) Bill”, which I’ve slightly amended to ensure the absolute banning of all street music, not even excluding Punch and Judy shows which the original bill shockingly allowed. In the public’s mind it might as well be the Babbage Act however– nearly every parliamentary debate I can find on the subject has a mention of him:
The Mr Bass arguing for the bill in that debate was the founder of the still-chugging Bass Brewery, and publisher of “Street Music in the Metropolis”.
I feel obliged to reassure everyone that, although I’ll be producing a parade of entertaining documents regarding Babbage and Street Music, there is no need to form a Tragic Picture of Charles Babbage, Unacknowledged Genius, unjustly known by his ungrateful age only as the enemy of street music. Babbage himself might have indulged himself with such a picture, but in my opinion the Victorians on the whole did themselves credit here. At least going by the popular press, the contemporary view of Babbage seems to have been, “Charles Babbage, that super-genius who invented some sort of amazing calculating machine, that has unfortunately run into technical and financial difficulties, but still! super-genius!” Even I, who have become accustomed to running across his name everywhere, was taken aback the other day to see someone refer to him as more famous than Newton!
Anyways, just in case that’s been keeping anyone up at night. Worrying about Babbage I mean.
– The lengthy section in which Lovelace discusses the potential for the Analytical Engine to manipulate symbols as well as numbers (Note A) uses the example of music as such an application:
Given that she was well aware that Babbage couldn’t stand music (he ‘tolerated it in its exquisite form’ is the best he can claim), and given that the both of them had a lamentable habit of joking around in their private correspondence, I have feeling she put that in to kind of yank his chain a little bit– especially from the use of that otherwise mysterious word ‘extent’. If a cartoonist may be allowed an opinion.
– That’s actually a map of Manchester in 1843 that Babbage is looming over; I couldn’t find a public-domain one of London. Curses!
Well I don’t know about you but I’m STARVING. Enjoy the comic!
EDITED TO ADD:
Oh geez I can’t believe I forgot a Most Important Note!!!
Ada Lovelace did indeed once tell Babbage that she would make her brain subservient to his plans– well, what she actually wrote (in 1841, at a guess, she hardly ever dated her letters) was:
“It strikes me that at some future time (it might be even within 3 or 4 years, or it might be many years hence), my head may be made by you subservient to some of your purposes & plans. If so, if ever I could be worthy or capable of being used by you, my head shall be yours. And it is on this that I wish to speak most seriously to you. You have always been a kind and real & most invaluable friend to me; & I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare so exalt myself as to hope however humbly, that I can be intellectually worth to attempt serving you.”
It’s always helpful when people already talk like comic books, so their dialogue is much easier to write! That is quoted by the way from the most invaluable source of Babbage/Lovelace correspondence, the lengthy 1980 article Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage. It crams loads of primary documents into 30 pages, has a minimum of the Helpful Editorializing that so wearisomely burdens this subject, is refreshingly capable of admitting to ambiguity and downright unknowability, and has the additional interest of being written by computer pioneer Harry Huskey and his wife Velma. I’ve found this more useful than all the books on the subject of Lovelace put together, to be absolutely honest for a fraction of a second. Unfortunately you have to cough up 19 bucks for it, unless you belong to a subscribing institution. The things I do for this comic!
The wisest and best of men- nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be made ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke. Most unfortunately for Charles Babbage, I just so happen to be such a person.
Man, I have so many primary documents to attest to this important historical fact, I don’t even know where to start. I could demonstrate its ubiquity in popular culture, with a page from a random novel in which a Babbage-vs-organ-grinder skirmish comes with the stock report as a typical Times news story. I could verify this with a “Babbage” search of the Times archive between 1855 and 1870 (you’ll have do DIY search, no permalink I’m afraid). Or maybe you’d like your notes in the form of dramatic verse? Or if you’re hardcore you could read the anti-street-music pamphlet by the most aptly named Mr MegaBass, “Street Music in the Metropolis”, featuring the immortal lines:
“… we could scarcely vote for inflicting on [Mr Babbage] the smallest punishment, if he were with his own hands to hang a street musician every day.”
Although that might be going a little far, basically the problem with street music could be summed up by this:
The Harmonic Disruptor would TOTALLY WORK– I ran the idea past an actual acoustical engineer and he said ‘Sure it would’, and if you remove the irrelevant pitch information from the way he said it I’m going to take it as a full endorsement. Destructive interference is why when you wear noise-cancelling headphones, your skull explodes. Man there’s so many great sciency claptrap words in acoustics! Of course the first thing you’re wondering if it would be able to produce a wave of sufficient pressure; if I had supplied further diagrams this would obviously not be an issue as the Disruptor is furnished with sympathetically vibrating grids. The reel-to-reel punchcard system I guess comes from the fact that I’m ancientobsolete mature enough to have edited my student films with tape on a movieola; the whole punchcard thing puts me irrestistibly in mind of our vanishing friend celluloid film.
Here’s a famous resonance disaster for you:
And finally: I’m sure someone in the comments can identify the very slightly modified lengthy equation for the elimination of C in Lovelace’s notes. First person gets.. uh.. the satisfaction of knowing obscure math jokes!
Millions of thanks by the way to everyone who comments. I know I’m not very good at prompt replies but I’m here for the glory warm fuzzies. And the jokes.
I know, I KNOW! This site is like half excuses, half actual content. If anyone is wondering what my lazy ass is doing instead of drawing comics.. I’m wrestling Giant Monsters all the live-long day– teaser trailer is out!
In grovelling recompense, I give you: Wallpapers!
Click on any of those to pick them up in 3 sizes over at 2dgoggles drop.io spot. Babbage is in colour because I lurves him best.
Also, you wore me down… new Brunel tshirt! Click on the pic to go to the zazzle store (aside: preparing my report to Babbage as to whether he could have funded the Analytical Engine via tshirt sales. Short answer: no.)
News, news… if you’re in London on February 19th you can come watch me flail helplessly effortlessly spellbind a fascinated audience with a presentation on graphic storytelling; or better still, go catch one of the actually cool people at The Story, a one-day conference about stories and story-telling!
As you can see from the following chart, the organizers may have the FULLEST CONFIDENCE in my masterful, nay, guru-esque command of the story process:
But a little thing like not having a plot will not stand in the way of progress here at 2dgoggles! Part 1 teaser:
And, because it’s been AGES without a Primary Document of Interest.. just to whet your appetite, spot Babbage in this Shocking Scene of Musical Violence! Note the check trousers why babbage why??! You think you know all about Babbage and street music? Oh, my friends, you have no idea…
I make one extremely contraversial statement in that interview that is bound to set off a firestorm. That is: the fashion of the 1830s is hideous. Here at 2dgoggles we pride ourselves on our strict historical accuracy on all points save one. And on that one point, I feel myself entirely justified. There is just no way I’m going to draw clothes like these:
As you can see from the following chart, the comic unfortunately coincides with the absolute nadir of western fashion in the last 500 years.. what are the odds! Babbage, seriously, you’re a statistician– what are the odds??! Ghastly proportions, nasty pointless detail, huge lapels.. I swear to god, it wants only polyester.
Further proof: spot the point at which fashion FALLS OFF A CLIFF (Alfred Roller drawings courtesy of Wikimedia):
I’m doing what I can to keep the clothes bearable. This means going for a generic-olde-fashioned-dress for lovelace, with a vague nod to the bizarre lozenge-shape bodices. No power on earth can save the men’s jackets of this period but anyone can look good in a poofy shirt and a waistcoat (can we bring those back? because they’re stylin’).
Mind you, much of the time I’m just going to have to throw everything out the window and put Lovelace in trousers, not only because she would totally have worn them if given half a chance, but as Marian Halcombe puts it in “The Woman in White”- “In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least.”
Yeah, no kidding, Wilkie Collins. You try composing a comic panel with three women having a conversation in skirts five feet in diameter. By the way– it seems like everybody knew everybody else in Victorian England, but sadly there is only the slimmest of connections between Wilkie Collins and Ada Lovelace– his father met her once and described her as delightful and simple-minded. It’s a shame they never met as I have a feeling they would have gotten on like a HOUSE ON FIRE.
We do have some info on both Babbage and Lovelace’s dress sense: in true geek fashion, it seems to have been terrible. Sources:
Babbage: the waistcoast story. I darkly suspect Babbage would have been a Hawaiian-shirt-wearer.. not to throw a cloud over his memory or anything.
Ada Lovelace: awkward, badly dressed geek. -this is a recollection of Lovelace’s visit to her father’s old estate the year before she died; it is typical of her in this anectode that she goes through two entirely different personalities in the course of three days (speaking of clouds over memory, I should say that the actual extent of Ada’s racing losses were around 3000 pounds, as far as scholarship can determine.). There are surprisingly few contemporary descriptions of her; see seems to have been rather reclusive. You can see everything I’ve found regarding her from the period online here (the entire list of my primary sources is here). From “bouyant and hearty” to “melancholic” to “haughty and arrogant” or was she “without an atom of pride”? “She had, indeed, a most variable personality”, wrote her first biographer Doris Langley Moore.. indeed!
Anyways, doodling away on “The Organist” but won’t make any promises as to time.. Giant Monsters being what they are and all. In the meantime, any nagging questions re the comic, I’ll make this an ‘any questions’ post.
Published at: 10:10 pm - Wednesday October 21 2009
Here’s something I’m sure we’d all like to see– an Ada Lovelace documentary! In order to afford the visual effects necessary for the action-packed Salamander People sequence (addendum: JOKE), the filmmakers are undertaking a spot of the old fund-raising, for which your help is needed– no, they don’t need you to throw cash at them, they need you to get large foundations to throw cash at them!
Rosemarie says, “I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American.”
I’m informed that the National Science Foundation also likes letterhead, so if you have letterhead, even better. Personally the last time I put a letter on actual paper might have been around 5 years ago.. I have designed special 2dgoggles letterhead for this purpose, and possibly will find some sealing wax while I’m at it.
There’s a lot of great reasons to get this film made; I of course am in it for the VFX action sequences. Someday when I’m feeling more angst-ridden I’ll share the Tragic Tale of why I didn’t pursue math and science, and thus wound up as a vile cartoonist useless to Society; a lack of what is termed ‘role models’ was a big part of it. I think if I’d known there was a such a thing as a mathematician who galloped around on her own freakin’ stallion I may have weathered my difficulties more gracefully. Anyways, another reason I’m jonesing for this film is because one of their consultants is Joan Baum, who wrote easily my favorite of all the Lovelace biographies, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron –sadly out of print, I suppose because there’s less scandal, more math; to it I owe the ENCHANTING information that one of Ada’s tutors, William Frend, once wrote a play ridiculing the concept of imaginary numbers, starring his future son-in-law and also tutor to Ada, Augustus de Morgan. This little book gets fifty million additional points for having as one of its consultants Martin Gardner, who turns 95 today, WHOO!!! I’ve suddenly realized that my own literary style of footnoting was probably born from dozens of readings of The Annotated Alice… I’ll prevent myself with difficulty from turning this already lengthy post into an Ode To Martin Gardener..
Speaking of angst… have decided the comic needs more of that, because Lovelace did not have superpowers; rather, she was driven by inner demons, LIKE BATMAN. So, starting in on doodles from the upcoming “The Organist”:
1.The best way to see the comic online is at Tor.com, the Sci Fi Supersite! which has kindly up it up in a way that you can, like, actually see it clearly.
2. Also, until Saturday, you can download the print resolution here (it’s 600dpi, so seriously, they’re big files). Get it while it’s hot! I was going to keep it up there, but that turns out to be expensive..
3. Last but not least! you can download the PDF of the Broadsheet from the Museum (link at the bottom), which includes the comic in the context for which it was drawn and also comes with beautiful photographs of the exhibits.
With all these viewing options, surely we need a gadget to go with this. Here at 2D Goggles we like to keep up with the very latest technology, and we hear there is a great deal of excitement over the ‘3D experience’. I fail to see the thrill of this, as our mundane existence is already carried out in 3 dimensions. If you really want a Journey Into the Unknown-
KIDS! INSTANT 2D VISION with our exclusive 2D cut-out-and-keep FLATTENING GOGGLES!!* Enter a world you have NEVER SEEN! Requires no steam power! Click to download the PDF! (hirez tiff available at Drop.io until Saturday)
Merely fold down the Dimensional Occluder for INCREDIBLE 2D EFFECT! You won’t believe your eye!
Cheers to old war-buddy Duncan, who suggested, “how about a pair of cut-out-and-keep 2d goggles?”
A few footnotes on the comic..
– In her early teens Ada had an obsession with flying machines, her ambition at 13 being to produce a ‘book of Flyology, illustrated with Plates’. She always loved machines– the first thing she did when she saw the Difference Engine when she was 17, was ask Babbage if she could borrow the diagrams to study!
- My bouncing-off point for the comic (other than just basically cramming as many steampunk tropes into two pages as I could), was Babbage’s reaction the the not-very-prominent placing of the Difference Engine prototype in the Exhibition of 1862:
This is UNCANNILY similar to the way the same fragments of the Engine are normally displayed in the MHS, and I would like to take this opportunity to suggest how much the Old Ashmolean would be Ennobled by the building of a separate wing for their proper display, along with the 800 square feet of diagrams.
By the way, my exhaustive searches of Punch have failed turn up an undisputed Babbage caricature, but this just might possibly be him! Babbage was pretty mad that the Difference Engine wasn’t displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it does bear some resemblance to this portrait.
