So here’s a little tale for you.  As it features ME, it is of course a gripping, hair-raising story of FUN and COOL and… okay, it’s a tale of.. LIBRARIES.

So I’ve been tromping all over London in search of a few bits and bobs of books on Babbage, and a public library catalogue search for “The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage” took me down to the fine Upper Norwood Public Library (additional  geek note: I have a map of London in my head that consists of locations of Sherlock Holmes stories).

I couldn’t find the book on the shelves, so I asked the librarians; and one of them went down into the basement to see if it might be there.  The other librarian told me they used to have quite a few Babbage books there because he was born right around the corner, and had I seen the plaque?

I had not seen the plaque, so I ran out and looked at the Blue Plaque (it was blue! and a plaque!) and when I came back the librarian was emerging from the basement looking downcast and apologetic.  “I’m really sorry– I can’t find the books you’re looking for; we must have cleared them out.  This is the only book we have on Charles Babbage.”  And she hands me this:

“Huh!”  I said, “It’s Babbage’s autobiography, Passages From the Life of a Philosopher! I had no idea there was a modern reprint!”  So I start flipping through it and then I say “Waaaaiit a minute.. I don’t think this IS a modern reprint..”

Call me crazy, but I think this is a first edition:

Click for larger, and to read the wildly inappropriate quotation from Byron’s “Don Juan”.

I could be wrong of course, but it certainly feels old, and there’s no other copyright in there.  Hilariously, inside that criminal modern binding it’s got the traditional little library flag with all the stamps.  It was last let out in 1972.

So I grabbed it and fled to Panama!

No no, of course not, I checked it out like a civilized person and THEN I fled to Panama.

Actually, it’s probably not worth THAT much, even if it is the real thing– copies in fair condition still in the original binding go for around 2000 pounds, so this one is… I dunno, a few hundred?  It’s pretty beat up, sadly. Anyways I figure if it IS a first edition, and if the library is cool with it, I might take a little whip-round here on the site and see if I can get it re-bound properly and maybe put on display or something, I don’t know… it seems wrong to just put it back in the basement.

addendum for those burning with anxiety: I did finally track down The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage in another libarary.. so far I haven’t gotten even one good gag out of it, can you believe it!

My purpose in this episode is get all the computer gags out of the way.

This episode is dedicated to my husband, who keeps asking, “When are they going to FIGHT CRIME?”

Notes Bonanza!!

-Queen Victoria: totally took over the world!

-Charles Babbage: totally fought crime!

-Ada Lovelace: totally swore while debugging: “.. for it is damnably troublesome work, and plagues me.” Can I agree with the opinion of several biographers, that at the very least the Babbage-Lovelace letters during the writing of the Notes ought to be online, not least for its exceptional entertainment value?

-Did Charles Babbage actually design an error pop-up for the Analytical Engine that said ‘WRONG’? Come on I couldn’t make up something that funny in a MILLION YEARS! In the later description in his autobiography he adds a ‘loud and continuous’ bell for the full user experience.

-The punchline to the cheese story is, in fact, a chart.

-The Victorians invented cute pictures of kittens but it was up to the Edwardians to add the LOL caption.

-Charles Babbage once refused a knighthood unless it was specifically given for his work on the calculating engines. Babbage had a very strange streak of what looks like self-destruction; although he was famous for craving public honours and recognition, he tended to shoot them down when they were offered. Here’s a couple of anecdotes that give you, as it were, the Alpha and Omega of Babbage– the charming, entrancing genius, and the bitter, destructive egoist.

- Babbage’s speech is extracted from Reflections On the Decline of Science in England. Like everything Babbage wrote it’s extremely worth reading and still relevant, provided you are ready to skim the WTF? bits.

-The HAL gag (‘Just what do you think you are doing Lovelace’) is a reference to what Turing called “The Lovelace Objection”, denying the possibility of artificial intelligence.

I’m afraid that gag might be an instance of my having done way too much research, to the point that the jokes are getting a little obscure, and I’m definitely getting waaay too caught up in biography. It’s a convoluted, contentious, and ambiguous tale that really ought to consist of half-history, half-historiography; I’m trying to triangulate my way to an understanding here from a variety of sources none of which I find entirely satisfactory. I started to write out a little potted version, however it was turning out three times longer than the comic itself; and though it may have secured me Lasting Fame, I’ll spare you, except for what you need to get the gag:

Babbage and Lovelace’s spat there is quoted from their one-and-only relationship meltdown. From a letter from Lovelace to her mother:

“I am sorry to have to come to the conclusion that he is one of the most impracticable, selfish, & intemperate persons one can have to do with.”

(Lovelace had a habit of underlining words that I find either annoying or endearing depending on my mood.)

The spat was caused by Babbage trying to sneak in, at the last minute, one of what I’m starting call his ‘fund my difference engine you bastards!!’ essays as a preface to the Notes Lovelace was writing on the Analytical Engine– unsigned, which would give the impression that it had been written by same person who wrote the notes. Lovelace freaked, writing to him: “Be assured that I am your best friend; but that I never can or will support you in acting on principles which I conceive to be not only wrong in themselves, but suicidal.” Babbage was, quote, “furious”. Babbage published the essay himself anonymously (‘who could possibly have written this?’ the public asked themselves, ‘It’s so mysterious!!’) a month later- you can read it for yourself here. I report, you decide!

Babbage ‘refused all conditions’ in response to a gigantic and occasionally unhinged letter Lovelace sent him, saying, A- You’re the most annoying person in the world and no one could work with you in a million years, and B- Hey! Let’s work together to build an Analytical Engine, on condition that 1. I handle all public relations (she actually says, “relations with any fellow-creature or fellow-creatures”, LOL) 2. You become my Sen-Sei (give me your ‘intellectual assistance and supervision’), and 3. Myself and a board appointed by you take over the business side, leaving you to focus on that inventing thing you do so well. Babbage wrote “Saw A.A.L. and refused all conditions” in the margin.

I have to say as a personal note that while Babbage needed a business manager more desperately than anyone else in history, and few people besides Lovelace would have had enough obsession with the Engines to see the project through the inevitable calamities, Lovelace had problems of her own which would have hampered the achievement of the steam-powered information age. To the ‘Byron Devil’ I believe we can give the name of ‘manic-depression’, and immediately after the Notes thing she turned her attention with personal urgency to the field of brain chemistry. I have to say, respect to Ada for recognizing it as a neurological problem; one, however, that she really needed to be born 150 years later to study.

Anyways– this breach lasted for all of a couple of weeks, because they seem to be closer friends than ever after this- her husband describes him as “her constant intellectual companion” in the last years of her life and certainly their letters are trusting, affectionate, and sometimes cryptic in a way that provides a happy and fact-free field for speculation (although twenty years later, Babbage is still mad about the Notes thing.. I’m starting to get an inkling that Babbage had kind of an issue with not Letting Things Go).

After that.. well, Babbage kept tinkering with the designs for the Analytical Engine and went to war with the street musicians. Ada both tinkered, and went to war with, her own brain chemistry. Babbage had 28 years to live, Ada only 9; for the most part, they became more and more miserable, didn’t accomplish much else, and then they DIED. They fought crime and had adventures and LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER, DAMN IT!!

It may be a while before the next episode, and I have to devote myself to drawing up my Spectacular Spectacular for the ultra-cool Museum of the History of Science!!! However, I can guarantee that Babbage and Lovelace will fight crime..

Long renders and an itchy Google finger turn up a strange, sudden little window into the past:

So, what DID Babbage talk about when he talked about Ada? WHOA.

I found that little story amazing for a few reasons-

-I’m kind of staggered by the fact that Babbage is telling this stuff to a complete stranger, less than two years, I think it would be, after Ada’s death.

- Mere interrelated symbols in the form of ‘words’ are insufficient to convey how madly I love that Babbage thought Lovelace was the too-logical one. Through the comic I am Channeling the Higher Truths of the Universe!!

- Oh God, the image of Babbage teasing Lovelace with shaggy-dog stories is so overwhelmingly adorable it’s kind of choking me up a little.

I have a policy here of linking only to primary sources, and mainly stuff that’s funny; this automatically means I can link to pretty much nothing about Lovelace. She lived in the realm of private letters and private gossip, lots of which is contradictory and none of which is online. She herself had a personality that I still find, after reading her collected letters and three four! different biographies, incredibly opaque (certainly compared to Babbage!). Frankly Babbage’s view of her- a little over-thinkie, a little gullible, and with a lot of the ‘Byron Devil’- accords the closest to mine!

Ghu. Too much history! This is supposed to be my ‘learning comics’ blog!

So I think my main issue from the last episode was, as usual, panel flow.  I think I’ll have to drop Victoria’s font, or find a more legible substitute, because it’s massively disrupting the pacing is my feeling. The other big difficulty I ran into here was juggling so many characters and keeping a clear sense of space. Probably I should have staged this shot differently:

If I had Babbage on the far side of Wellington to begin with, that cut would work better I think. I’m slowly figuring out that comics are different from storyboards in that you can effectively collapse several actions into one panel- my instinct, coming from film, is to think I need to draw all kinds of stuff that isn’t necessary– you can go from point A to point C without drawing in B, provided you compose A and C correctly.

Still depressed over Ada so to end on a lighter note:

You know you’ve arrived when some random sports mag calls somone “the Babbage of coursing writers”.

OMG BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE STOP STEALING MY GAGS!! I mean, I like my jokes to be extensively safety-tested, but a giant, crashy Difference Engine in 1851?! Now I’m worried about this material being fatigued…

It’s actually taken this long for Minion to get through all of Queen Victoria’s titles..

On to The Client Part 3!

So historically accurate IT’S PRACTICALLY A DOCUMENTARY!

-Babbage lists some of the annoying questions he got asked about his engines here.  He ascribes the question about the wrong numbers sometimes to ‘ladies’ and sometimes to ‘members of Parliament’;  having lost count of the number of times I’ve explained to people that I can still be an animator even  though ‘it’s all done with computers now’ I have no problem believing this was asked more than once.

- Charles Babbage’s many friends spent a lot of time kicking him in the shins, because every once in a while he seems to have enjoyed setting his career on fire in order to watch the pretty flames. His friend Herschel said he should be ‘slapped in the face’ for Dear Royal Society of Really Important People: You Are All Corrupt Idiots!; I particularly like the dedication- “I was going to dedicate this to some guy but now he’s frantically backpedalling for some reason!”

Oh Babbage. Babbage! What are you doing? You are CAUSING PAIN to even your devoted friends at The Chemical Record! By the way that review is excellent (I say that as a devoted Babbage fanatic), read in conjunction with Babbage’s Guide to the Exposition of 1851 it gives a good overview of the state of scientific societies at the time. If you’re into that sort of thing, I don’t know. It also gives a glimpse into what the placards in the Science Museum call Babbage’s ‘personality issues’.

- “The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.” I know Victoria’s font is really annoying but it’s actually called “The King and Queen Font” so I had to use it. Just this once.

- The debugging crowbar is the actual crowbar used to debug the Difference Engine rebuild!

-You can see the woven portrait of Jacquard in the background there, whose punchcard loom inspired Babbage with the idea for the Analytical Engine.

- Ladies and Gentlemen, The Cheese Story. It’s kiiind of like Flatland, but with.. more… cheese. Charles Babbage, what is that doing in your autobiography? As Babbage was a famous raconteur, and his autobiography is full of his greatest hits, I guess he had a good reaction to it at some point.. maybe it’s all in the timing.

I’ve got a lot more notes, but they’ll go on part 3.. I’ve drawn most of it so should it shouldn’t too long coming. Apologies are despicable and excuses more so, but in addition to the whole Giant Monsters thing I’ve been concurrently working on another commission. You may ask yourself, “what could possibly equal BBC Techlab in coolness?” OMG I’m not worthy!!

On to The Client Part 3!

Did I say two weeks?  Erm… here!  Look at some process art!

Please understand that at present my priories are necessarily:  1. Job 2. Pub 3. Comic 4. Food, laundry, etc.

I tend to do roughs while waiting for renders (that invaluable source of idleness in the visual effects industry).  Something else I do is Scholarship.  Some scholars search for Truth; here at 2dgoggles we search for Entertainment.  Something I was surprised to discover was that Charles Babbage was really, REALLY famous, back in the day, if by famous you mean, useful as a punchline in popular comedy.   A few highlights of my researches:

- Celebrity Chef fears Babbage’s army of steam-automota line-cooks!

- ‘Charles Babbage’ as useful shorthand for ‘really smart person’.  Nowadays you’d use Stephen Hawking for that kind of gag, who oddly enough holds Babbage’s old position of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge.

-Babbage the logarithmetical Frankenstein! :D

- How was Babbage’s autobiography received by his peers?  Yeeeeaahh.. that’s about right.

And I’m not even touching on the street music thing, which was HUGE.

Ada coverage from the period is far fewer and farther between, as a Lady only appears in the papers on her birth, her wedding, and her death, and that time they publish a huge paper on computer programming.  I did find an interesting entry in an 1860 encyclopedia (about 9 years after her death), which gets in the ever-popular horse-racing but also remarks on her as excelling in chess.   She turns up as a footnote in Hereditary Genius (with special section on Oarsmen, which are no insignificant part of the community!) under her father’s footnote of “strange, proud, passionate, and half-mad.”

Babbage AND Lovelace miscellany:

- Great little bunch of anecdotes about both them– she’s too mathematical for one guys taste, but Babbage ‘loved to talk of her’; kids made fun of Babbage at school– you just wait till I get my time machine you little bastards!

Babbage to Michael Faraday: Ada Lovelace is an enchanted math fairy! I can’t cope with the whole Enchantress thing, which is why I needed a stiff drink or twenty to get through much of her correspondence.

- The  motherlode of Babbage anecdotes! with special Lovelace cameo! A ‘Babbage’ search turns up, among plenty else, “Charles Babbage: Hot or Not?”, Babbage taking some ladies up to his place to see his etchings Ada Lovelace’s math, and proof that I’m PSYCHIC as his place is described as “crammed with books, papers, and apparatus in apparent confusion.”  Stereotypes: never wrong!

Man, when I read too much about Lovelace and Babbage’s unhappy ends I get so depressed I can hardly carry on with the comic.  However, I shall RESCUE THEM and keep them safe in a pocket dimension, where they will have a giant difference engine to play with in exchange for being made to do funny things.

Anyways– not too many more days until the Client Pt2, depending on how many gags I can throw overboard to lighten the load..

Posting something, so that it is understood that this has not been the haughty silence of one who is Too Famous to Respond to Comments, but rather the awkward, paralyzed muteness of one opening a door to a broom closet and finding a large expectant audience in there waiting for her to say something funny.

The Client Pt 2 is proceeding apace, or as apacey as it can get whilst I battle giant monsters by day, Twitter draw comics by night.  The Giant Monsters care not for my fame, they want to be made to appear to be biting people’s legs, and they want it YESTERDAY.

Just so there’s a footnotey point to this post: the BBC Techlab comic, as a Sunday colour supplement, I did as an homage to Milton Caniff and Terry and the Pirates, the greatest comic in the history of the universe:

I know what you all come here for:  timewasting links.  You can read all of Caniff’s racy Terry spin-off Male Call strips online– they were done for military magazines, and although obviously more Prurient than his regular comic, show the same 1940s flair for female characters who could be sexy, strong, funny, and flawed.

By the way, OMG, I’ve been shouted out by Forbidden Planet!! Ahaha, you guys have so much of my money…

OH FAME THOU GAUDY BAUBLE! Charles Babbage Foresees the Future on BBC’s Techlab! When they asked me to do this I read their little intro where it says it’s a forum for “The World’s Leading Thinkers” to speculate about the future, and I thought, if that’s me, boy are we in trouble.

There’s footnotes (of course!!) on the comic but of NOT ENOUGH FOOTNOTES FOR ME!! So–

The expression on the front page comes from this drawing (scroll down). The pose on page 2 is based on my least favorite portrait of Babbage, where he conspires with Samuel Laurence to make himself look like a pompous ass. Not that he couldn’t be a pompous ass, but when I saw the ‘Laurence’ I momentarily thought it was Thomas Lawrence, and was like, “Geez, way to phone that one in, Lawrence!”.

For the record, my favorite image of Babbage is this one. He looks downright hot there. Well, kind of. As a rule, Babbage looks way happier in photographs than he does in portraits, I guess because there’s a gadget in the room.

Took me a while but.. prepare for A TALE OF TERROR! DRAWN FROM LIFE!!!

On to The Client Part 2!

Notes! Beautiful notes!

–Footmen were selected for their fine physiques, so that drawing of Minion is of historical, not prurient interest, or course!

–Speaking tubes! Babbage advocates for them in Machines and Manufactures, along with his proto-twitter signal lights and steeple-borne message zip-lines. Prolific letter writer and relentless socializer Babbage was almost as interested in rapid communication as he was with computation, but his unfortunate location in the time-stream was just as against him there. He died the same year Meucci patented the first telephone. *sigh*

–Did Charles Babbage really try a decimal calendar? Of course not.. he was a perfectly sensible supporter of decimal currency (but if you want to see a truly awesome mechanical calendar have a look at this baby!) I’m also needlessly promulgating absent-minded-professor stereotypes here, as I have a feeling Babbage would actually have been a super-organized neat freak. True though is Babbage’s famous and expensive habit of continually improving his inventions halfway through and abandoning the old model.

–That’s Canaletto saving me a heck of a lot of annoying drawing there. Thanks Canaletto!

–Ada’s Byronic Containment Field– I wasn’t making that up in The Origin, about her mother’s experiment in using Mathematics to contain poetry. A glance over Lovelace’s biography shows this to have been a pretty epic fail. Byron himself, though he never saw his daughter, took a great interest in her and writes the following:

“Her temper is said to be extremely violent– is it so? it is not unlikely considering her parentage– my temper is what it is– as you may perhaps divine.”

It’s unfortunate that Lady Byron tried this experiment before the genetics work of Mendel, because then this outcome could easily have been predicted. Byron being obviously a dominant trait, we can make the following chart:

Byron X Mathematics produces:

2 x Mad Scientists
1 x Dangerously Repressed Mathematician
1 x Poet Using Experimental Meters

Can’t argue with Science! In the pocket dimension in which this comic takes place (thanks Justin in the comments for the proper technical term!) the Ada Experiment may react differently to the allohistorical conditions.. time will tell!! Stay tuned!

Speaking of Rational Explanations, I’ve discovered why exactly the Difference Engine is that big:

The pocket dimension actually operates on a kind of inverse Moore’s law, whereby computers double in size every few years. It is fortunate that the Difference Engine facilitated rapid technological expansion, as when it reached the time parallel to our own they had to colonize the moon just for storage!

In administrative news– By day I’m battling giant monsters (no, really!), so I’m trying to figure out the feasibility of these hijinks. I THINK I can keep a pretty steady pace of an episode every two weeks. I dunno. We’ll see what the giant monsters think.

By the way– I’m painfully aware of the navigational mess that is this semi-comic-ish thing… anyone have any bright ideas for organizing this stuff better?

On to The Client Pt 2!

I’m currently holed up in my hidden mountain base in the wilds of Canada, where I’m enjoying being chased into lakes by enraged elk. In my devotion to this proto-comic, I am nobly forgoing 20-mile hikes through bear- and elk-infested trackless wastes to dedicate myself to curling up on the couch and drawing.

The temporal discontinuity problem of the Person from Porlock episode has been profoundly troubling to me. Strict adherence to truthiness is my watchword here, so a gag, however irresistible, that depends on a 40-year piece of ahistoricity is hard for me to endure.  My husband suggested the Difference Engine could have been used to tear a hole in the space-time continuum. I’m sorry, but we here at 2dgoggles do not indulge in such fancies. The Difference Engine prints large tables of numbers without error. If that is not cool enough for you, you are reading the wrong comic my friends. It does battle vampires at some point but it has its own way of doing that thank you very much.

To my enormous relief I was able to come up with a Rational Scientific Explanation for the Porlock Episode:

Sorted! This is especially convenient as for Important Comedy Reasons I may need to bring some people in from slightly incorrect areas in the Timestream. Heck this may even explain the Salamander-people.

In other random news, my attention is brought to this: How To Maintain a Difference Engine. I can add from inside information that some issues are cleared up by hitting it with a crowbar, something I intend to try out on Maya next chance I get.

The comments are interesting, and I’m glad some people point out the important (unimportant… important.. unimportant…) distinction between the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Babbage designed two machines:

–One that COULD possibly theoretically have been built in the period, that WASN’T a computer (if you define a computer as something that could be programmed), called the Difference Engine. EDITED TO ADD: …for some reason a mass-amnesia has developed over the fact that a working Difference Engine was actually built in Babbage’s lifetime and put to use.  Weirdly the Smithsonian Magazine has two articles on Babbage, one about how the Difference Engine was never built until 1991, and one about the Difference Engine that was built in 1853 that they actually have right there in the Smithsonian.  WTF?

and,

–One that COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BUILT IN A MILLION YEARS (EDITED TO ADD:  IN MY HUMBLE YET IGNORANT OPINION) but that WAS a computer, as it could be programmed with punchcards, called the Analytical Engine.  It was (in the imaginary space where it existed) powerful enough that Babbage calculated that it could play a game of chess. A little thing called “physics” is the reason no one is trying to build a replica of this one (again, I’m only an imaginary physicist so grain of salt here). 2DGOGGLES CONTEST!  Build a working Analytical Engine to Babbage’s designs, win a tshirt!!  Deadline: One million years from today.

EDITED TO ADD:  Fantastic piece explaining the difference between the, er, Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, and why the 19th century wasn’t taken over by cyborg cuckoo-clocks.

What else.. just so no one is thinking I’m using my last days of freedom idly, proof that 2dgoggles takes meticulous research extremely seriously:

Babbage has his Harmonic-Disruptor-Ray; but how exactly does one go about destroying poetry?

Okay, salamander-people are within the realm of possibility but this episode is merely fanciful, as Kubla Kahn’s interrupted composition happened in 1797, over a decade before Lovelace was even born. Crazily enough though Lovelace’s husband had an estate near Porlock, which I swear I didn’t know about when I started this gag. Freaky.  Stoned!Coleridge courtesy of Nick Harkaway, with a good list of the Evils of Poetry and Why It Must Be Destroyed (that’s what you were going for, right?)

There’s a largish queue of Persons from Porlock outside of poor Coleridge’s door. 2dgoggles: No Gag Too Old! As I haven’t the smallest compunction in resurrecting 150-year-old Babbage-vs-street-musician gags from Punch (this one gets in street music, statistics, and difference engine… trifecta!) the lack of originality here doesn’t worry me a bit . I felt I needed a bit more practice in composing these black-and-white panels, so consider this an etude.

Charles Babbage was to develop a highly-targeted poetry-destroying method in what is one of his most famous quotations, in this Helpful Letter he wrote to Tennyson about his poem “The Vision of Sin” :

In your otherwise beautiful poem,one verse reads, “”Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born;”

I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”

When I was young in Babbage studies (like, a month ago) I thought this was apocryphal, but nope, this is an actual letter. In Babbage’s defense I should say that it’s often extremely difficult to tell when he’s joking. On the other hand his actual jokes are pretty much never this funny.

Life Insurance: not a random gag! My zeal from Primary sources is such that I’m currently reading (okay, currently skimming) Babbage’s piece on actuarial tables. I notice he can’t even write about freakin’ life insurance without opening with a please-tell-me-you-didn’t-hit-publish career-torching rant.

My own Person From Porlock has come knocking in the form of my Day Job (as in, Don’t Quit Your), which resumes in a couple of weeks. There’s a few things I’ll get out before then. After that obviously production will slow, but if you think this will merely be dropped you clearly have NO IDEA how obsessive I am.