Dangerous experiments in comics

As the ancient saying goes, “Audiences are like monkeys.  Give them a grape a day, not a whole bucket of bananas at once!” Sadly I am so constructed that buckets of bananas are my natural production unit.  And they don’t get much more bananas than this here.   It’s been a while, GOD KNOWS, so a summary of how we have reached our present state:

NOTES NOTES NOTES! PIPING HOT NOTES!

–Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Engineer. Genius.  Coffee connoisseur and Master of Sarcasm:

Brunel to the Swindon rail station coffee shop proprietor, who had heard Mr Brunel had a complaint:

Dear Sir,
I assure you that Mr Player was wrong in supposing that I thought you purchased inferior coffee. I thought I said to him that I was surprised you should buy such bad roasted corn. I did not believe you had coffee in the place: I am certain that I never tasted any. I have long ceased to make complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.

Brunel also gave as a principal reason for his pursuance of the broad-gauge rail the smoothness of the ride enabling him to drink his coffee.  I’m guessing caffine had a part to play in his only sleeping four hours a night.  I’m trying to figure out how he had a hand free to draw, seeing as he was BOTH continually smoking cigars and continually drinking coffee.

– The Coffee House was a fixture of both high and low Victorian London, ever as much as it is today.  Finding decent coffee was notoriously difficult; if you find yourself wandering around Victorian London looking for a cup, you may consult this excellent guide.

– Every once in a while, a piece of evidence is found which utterly overturns the foundations of an understanding we once thought unshakably sound;  evidence which forces a humble confession of the inability of our puny constructions to hold up before the awesome weight and complexity of Truth.  Such  epoch-birthing evidence is found in this painting, from which I drew the coffee shop interior– before you click I warn you– it contains a SHOCKING IMAGE.

They are all wearing hats.  INSIDE.

My inside/outside no-hat/hat paradigm is utterly shattered.  Is it because there are no ladies?  As usual with everything cool in Victorian England, women were not admitted to Respectable Coffeshops… in any case I need to go and lie down for a while before I recover from this shock.

– I honestly have no idea at all what impact an actually Analytical Engine would have had on the course of Victorian Science.  They did pretty good without it!

– Here is a period Organ Grinder and monkey:

– Although we pride ourselves on our meticulous research here at 2dgoggles, there is no evidence that Charles Babbage was ever kidnapped by an army of capuchin monkeys.  He did have troubles with mobs, sadly, as can be found in the following anecdote (warning:  in this anecdote, the human race kind of sucks):

A German band was in the habit of annexing a position before his house, and treating him to its music. .. Babbage got tired of this sort of thing, and ordered them go and play somewhere else.  They refused, and he, worn out by their music, left his study to seek a policeman and have them moved on.  Like Carlyle, he dressed quaintly, and moreover, at the moment, he was bareheaded… Babbage’s dispute with the band soon collected a small crowd, eager to witness the fun.

Hatless!  In the streets!  At least some things I KNOW are wrong.

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This is a totally self-indulgent episode that has nothing to do with anything.

What’s the use of Pictures and Conversations without NOTES?

This episode is dedicated to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, which I read until it fell apart; more recently I’ve been hugely enjoying Lewis Carroll in Numberland, a highly recommend little book, from whence this episode has sprung.

Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There) was published in 1871, the year of Babbage’s death, and much too late for Lovelace who would have loved it I think. Charles Babbage, I am THRILLED to report, did once meet Lewis Carroll, in 1867:

“Then I called on Mr. Babbage, to ask whether any of his calculating machines are to be had. I find they are not. He received me most kindly, and I spent a very pleasant three-quarters of an hour with him, while he showed me over his workshops etc.”

I have to wonder if Charles Dodgson (as we should call his name, in his Mathematical Incarnation) is kidding here; it seems impossible to me that he didn’t know the most famous thing about the Engines being that they didn’t exist. How sad that they didn’t have a longer acquaintance!

It’s even sadder that he never met Lovelace- he would have been about 20 when she died, and there’s more than a touch of the kindred spirit there; at least so it seems to me. Their ‘voices’ at least sound very similar– here’s Lovelace for instance, writing to her informal tutor August de Morgan:

Dear Mr De Morgan-

I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected & to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalising are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for the in works of Fiction..

and Dodgson, on trying to find a proof–

“Like the goblin ‘Puck’, it has led me “up and down, up and down,” through many a wakeful night: but always, just as I thought I had it, some unforeseen fallacy was sure to trip me up, and the tricksy sprite would “leap out, laughing, ho ho ho!”"

Lovelace and Dodgson both loved Euclid (Lovelace: “It is a very pretty little Theorem– so neat and tidy! the various parts dovetail so nicely!”) and the emerging field of symbolic logic, and both stumbled through the Nameless Wood of calculus– Lovelace wrote to De Morgan “these Functional Equations are complete Will-o-the-wisps to me’, and Dodgson, after four years (!) of studying Mathematics at Oxford and despite coming at the top of his class, writes “talked over the Calculus of Variations with Price today; I see no prospect of understanding the subject at all.” You may need to recalibrate your judgements of people’s math by the way– Carroll was already lecturing in mathematics at Oxford when he described the end of Differential Calculus as ‘new to me’ as late as the 1850s!

Look at me, rambling on.. MORE NOTES!

–Zero, a subject fascinating to ‘non-mathematical minds’ I have been informed, is both real and imaginary– Leibniz calls it “a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit – almost an amphibian between being and non-being.”

–Lovelace’s sums are correct if done in binary.
–A gloriously simple and clever binary counter
–A handsome Rube-Golbergian binary adding machine.
–For a truly awesome introduction to the history of binary, I refer you to this concise paper with loads of interesting docs (PDF), including this lovely passage from Liebniz:

One of the main points of the Christian Faith, and among those points that have penetrated least into the minds of the worldly-wise and that are difficult to make with the heathen is the creation of all things out of nothing through God’s omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing.

I love the bit about publishing this discovery in the form of a large medal.. talk about cumbersome notation!

– `Too much mathematics!” — Here is an Alice-in-Wonderland conundrum for you: as we all know, Lovelace’s mother attempted to curtail the inherited Poetical Disorder of Ada’s mind through rigorous mathematical study. On the other hand, her tutor Augustus de Morgan worried about the well-known fact that studying mathematics damaged women’s brains, as he expressed in this extraordinary letter to Lovelace’s mother. If she did NOT go mad through not ENOUGH mathematics, she was bound to go mad by studying TOO MUCH. It’s heartbreaking to read the letter to De Morgan’s wife Sophia that I quoted in the last episode–

”There has been no end to the manias & whims I have been subject to, & which nothing but the most resolute determination on my part could have mastered. The disorder had been a Hydra-headed monster; — no sooner vanquished in one shape, than it has sprung up in another.[…] Many causes have contributed to the past derangement; & I shall in future avoid them. One ingredient, (but only one among many) had been too much Mathematics.”

Yikes. Anyways, to happier subjects–

– It’s My Own Invention!

– It was Lovelace, not Babbage, who invented a steam-powered horse, but as she was 13 at the time she was unable to secure government funding.

– Charles Babbage’s horsemanship cannot be accurately assessed from the available documents, except for the unbearably awesome fact that Ada Lovelace lent Babbage a freaking’ pony when he used to visit her estate: “You can have a pony all to yourself, and never have to walk a step except on the terrace, the ‘Philosopher’s Walk’” (1849-ish) I want a pony.

– Lovelace to Babbage, 1848, re his TicTacToe machine: “You say nothing of Tic-tac-toe– in yr. last. I am alarmed lest it should never be accomplished. I want you to complete something; especially if the something is likely to produce silver & golden somethings..” :D

–The delightful image of Ada as Alice and Babbage as The White Knight, which only becomes more apt the more I think about it, is not mine–it’s throwaway line of Lovelace’s first biographer Doris Langley Moore. I’d criticise Moore’s bio but I’m afraid she’d slice me in half with a microscopic lift of one perfectly groomed eyebrow. I’d criticise all the rest of the bios but I’m too chicken to do that too; at least, I’m waiting until I can do it without being really fighty and unpleasant. Instead, I’ll stick to passive-aggressive digs! Soon I shall sink to writing mean reviews on Amazon under a pseudonym, instead of the approved method of elaborately sarcastic letters to the Times Literary Supplement that commence: SIR–

Anyways!! Seriously I could have done Alice episodes forever but I promise, next episode MONKEYS! COFFEE! EVIL SCHEMES! POSSIBLY EVEN A MUSICAL NUMBER!

PS- small query– how is the size of the comic working for you? Too big? To small? How about the size of the text? It’s hard to tell what the best size is, right now I’m doing them 550 px wide with 14 pt text but that seems a bit big.. opinions?

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Too late have I realized this series should be called “Lovelace and Babbage Vs Organized Crime”. Dang it! For the sountrack to the first part of this comic, press play:

Music is the silence between the notes, they say, just as the comic is the bunch of drawings between these NOTES:

– Obviously the most historically problematic part of the comic is the inclusion of Brunhilde among The Sopranos. This ultimate iconic role wasn’t performed until 1876- ALTHOUGH, it was created in the 1850s, so it’s not as silly as it may have initially seemed.

– the Lair of the Organist is located in St Louis, Missouri.

– The Assorted Musical Miscreants, otherwise known as the Clockwork Quartet, feed me exquisite chocolates and and are here to raise the fashion tone around this comic.

– The Organist bears a suspicious, and yet Entirely Coincidental resemblance to Mr Bruce of The Correspondents, because every time I see that guy I think, ‘that guy NEEDS to be a Super-villain’. Um, I hope that’s okay.

Street Organists do in fact seem to have been a bit of a mafia. Babbage was not the only one to claim the organ grinders were a protection racket (“nice quiet street you got here. Shame if someone started playing a really loud organ.”). Mostly the organs were owned by a central depot and rented out to hacks, somewhat like taxicabs. According to the Museum of Self-Playing Instruments in Kew, an automatic street-piano would cost 2/6d to rent per day in the 1890s from the Tomasso and Sons company- here’s one from that very same nefarious organisation, enjoy!

Business idea: create virus that will autoplay barrel-organ music, with handy pop-up explaining music will stop with a donation to an untraceable account. Include cute monkey icon!

– Charles Wheatstone! So, I knew I wanted him in the comic for various reasons but I have to say he’s given me a hard time. It turns out I’ve been spoiled rotten on the fantastic wealth of entertaining primary documents around Babbage and Lovelace, because would you believe it all I keep getting for this guy is a bunch of interesting scientific papers! What the heck is up with that? The one spark I’m trying to fan into a flame is that, while an inexhaustible talker in private, he was so terrified of public speaking that Michael Faraday used to have to give his lectures for him at the Royal Society. Also, I’m not sure if Babbage ever forgave Wheatstone for inventing the concertina.

With historical basis however is that he was given to Cunning Plans, one of which it involved our very own Lady Lovelace. From a late 1844 letter from Lovelace to her husband:

“I have had Wheatstone with me the last 5 hours.. he has given me much important information, & still more important advice. He is anxious I should take such a position as may enable me to influence Prince Albert, who is, he knows, a very clever young man.”

The gist of the Plan was that Lovelace should get close to the Prince Consort and replace him with an evil automaton replica serve him as “a sensible adviser and suggester, to indicate to him the channels for his exercising a scientific influence.” A large component of this long-range plan involved slowly building Lovelace’s reputation by having her write translations and compendia of scientific papers from the Continent. It was in fact Wheatstone and not Babbage who had first suggested, nearly two years before this meeting, that she publish something on the Analytical Engine. To me it looks like Wheatstone was one of several who was looking to Lovelace as the successor to Mary Somerville, who had been writing similar translations and elucidations a decade or so earlier but had permanently moved to Italy in 1838. Victorian Science being run on the Smurfette principle of gender balance, there was a gap in the market.

Wheatstone’s plans were to be cut short by Lovelace’s untimely death, but slowed down by other more ambiguous problems, which brings us to:

The Demon Poetry

– That’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning slamming The Soul’s Expression there– Here she is rocking a hella goth look. Poetry slams can be very dangerous things, I’m here to tell you. I met my husband at one so let that be a terrible warning to you all.

– Here is a very important historical document about dangerous poets.

–A fear of Lovelace developing a ‘poetic’ temperament was expressed even by Byron- “I hope the Gods have made her anything save poetical– it is enough to have one such fool in the family.” I’m reasonably sure this was a euphemism, and the concern was centred more around the alarming history of what we’d now call mental illness in the Byron line, which was to become something of an obsession for Ada’s mother.

It’s hard to write anything of medium-blog length about Lovelace, as I’m either forced to handwave or go on for pages.. I wish I could recommend a biography but although there are several, they range from the adequate to the not-adequate, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. Oh well!

Diagnosing long-dead people is a harmless and futile hobby (for the five people reading this to whom this means anything, the bipolar thing is pretty much the only thing I agree with in the Stein biography). So, to use technically neutral language, there is a widening streak of weird that starts showing up periodically in Lovelace’s letters in her mid-twenties. I have to say if you’ve ever had a friend with a bipolar disorder these set off the same “Oh, geeeez..” alarm bells as an extremely lengthy and odd email from an otherwise charming friend. I could quote you some stuff but that seems like kind of a jerky thing to do, so, I won’t.

In late ’43, shortly after she finished the Notes on Babbage’s engine, Lovelace’s doctor began to attempt to treat an ‘illness’ of what Lovelace termed ‘whims and manias’ with a mixture of opium, morphine, and gin. Did it work? Amazingly, no. Noooo, it didn’t. Lovelace’s history enters an extremely murky period at this point.

A powerful faith in Self-Improvement was pretty much the only Victorian thing about Ada Lovelace– as she wrote: “There has been no end to the manias and whims I have been subject to, & which nothing but the most resolute determination on my part could have mastered.” It sure seems like a few years later the weird patches in the letters vanished as mysteriously as they came, not to return at least in the few years she had left to her. She attributes this to the elimination of ’1. extravagant stimulating 2. extravagant dosing’ and ‘the judicious management of a very susceptible temperament’. Pocket-universe Lovelace continues the struggle against her ‘hydra-headed monster’.

Anyways, better wind this down! One last note:

- ‘that’s Tuesdays, man’ — Lovelace’s attitude to her father fluctuated a fair bit during her life, but we’ll go into that in a later comic!

(Incidentally if anyone wants to spend five hours outlining a plan whereby I would gradually ascend to Total Comics Domination I would be delighted to listen, but bring sandwiches. Five hours!)

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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.

On to The Organist Part 4!

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:

I have been much amused with an account I have received of the wars of Don Roderick & Babbage— what a grievous pity it is that the latter should be so implacable, & if one might so call the calculating machine, so very silly.

The only possible response to that is, :D!!!!!!

– 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:

On to The Organist Part 4!

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