Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Do Cool Stuff, your
Speaker 2: weekly podcast about how there's sometimes cool people who did
Speaker 2: cool stuff like me. I'm the host. I'm Margaret Kiljoy
Speaker 2: and I was going to segue into introducing Bridget Todd,
Speaker 2: who's the host of There Are No Girls on the Internet,
Speaker 2: but instead I messed it up. But Hi, Bridget, how
Speaker 2: are you?
Speaker 3: Hi?
Speaker 2: Margaret? You do plenty of cool stuff. That's all you
Speaker 2: do is cool stuff. All I do is read history books.
Speaker 2: But I kind of like it, so I'm not complaining
Speaker 2: about my job. I got the best one I think
Speaker 2: anyone on this earth has. And the person who helps
Speaker 2: me have that job is my producer, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: Sophie, Hi, mag Pie, thanks for producing my podcast. Oh
Speaker 2: that's a privilege. We also have an audio engineer named Daniel.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: Danel Hey, Daniel, Hi, Daniel. Our theme music was written
Speaker 2: for us by Unwoman. And this is part two and
Speaker 2: a two parter about Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace, And
Speaker 2: it was meant to mostly be about Ada Lovelace, and
Speaker 2: then I spent an entire episode talking about the archtypical,
Speaker 2: the original fuck boy, her father, Lord Byron. Usually I
Speaker 2: say you can't listen to part two without listening to
Speaker 2: part one. You could probably listen to part two today.
Speaker 2: But I actually think it's really useful to understand where
Speaker 2: Aida is coming from because she's really into her dad.
Speaker 2: That's my disclaimer. So yeah, in part one we talked
Speaker 2: about an agent of chaos sent straight from hell to
Speaker 2: home wreck, or a misunderstood fuck boy. In part two,
Speaker 2: we're gonna talk about his daughter, Ada. The actual reason
Speaker 2: we're doing these episodes. The person who qualifies as a
Speaker 2: cool person doing cool stuff, Ada Lovelace, who was not
Speaker 2: born Ada Lovelace was born in eighteen fifteen, right before
Speaker 2: her mom left her dad. Her mother, Lady Byron, was
Speaker 2: a dedicated reform activist, And I kind of assumed that
Speaker 2: this was a pretty milk toast and uninteresting thing when
Speaker 2: I read that, like, oh, a dedicated orform activist, that
Speaker 2: just sounds like some rich lady who wants to feel
Speaker 2: better or whatever. She was part of the group that
Speaker 2: ended slavery in the British Empire than freed eight hundred
Speaker 2: thousand people.
Speaker 3: So she was a cool person who or a person
Speaker 3: who was doing cool stuff on her own, right, Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: And she fought for prison reform. I wish I knew
Speaker 3: a little bit more about what that meant, but that's
Speaker 3: still great, especially since England at the time was like,
Speaker 3: let's just hang everyone, right, and she fought for the
Speaker 3: abolition of slavery. She was one of the very few
Speaker 3: women involved very actively in the British abolitionist movement because
Speaker 3: the men wouldn't let women be involved because men, and
Speaker 3: so she was one of like three or so women
Speaker 3: at the eighteen forty World Anti Slavery Convention. This was
Speaker 3: held in England. It was about two hundred Brits, fifty Americans,
Speaker 3: and a few other random folks. Almost all of them
Speaker 3: are white men. There's a handful of white women and
Speaker 3: a handful of black men, is the best I can figure.
Speaker 3: I'm not aware of black women being invited, since women
Speaker 3: weren't invited at all, and it was almost an afterthought. Whatever,
Speaker 3: I'm not impressed by the politics of this particular group
Speaker 3: around identity.
Speaker 2: Issues, not intersectional right. However, this convention came out of
Speaker 2: movement that had just managed to abolish slavery in the
Speaker 2: British Empire in eighteen thirty four, which three day, one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand people like I mentioned the main group behind
Speaker 2: that I never would have thought would have done anything
Speaker 2: worthwhile based on their name. Usually the cool groups have
Speaker 2: like the League of Something or whatever. Right, this was
Speaker 2: the Society for the Mitigation and gradual Abolition of slavery
Speaker 2: throughout the British dominions? Who came up with that name?
Speaker 2: That was not a good name, no, but it it worked.
Speaker 2: I only read so much every now and then. I
Speaker 2: read about the Abolisist movement in the UK, but I
Speaker 2: don't know as much about it as I know about
Speaker 2: the Ablisihist movement in the US. Right, Okay, that said,
Speaker 2: you know how the British Empire can kind of take
Speaker 2: anything that sounds good and make it bad. Abolished slavery
Speaker 2: was the rallying cry that was used in the Scramble
Speaker 2: for Africa. That where like, they colonized Africa and killed
Speaker 2: fuck tons of people and set the content up for
Speaker 2: a pretty economically terrible twentieth and twenty first century. Because
Speaker 2: empire can make anything that's good into a bad thing.
Speaker 2: That's a just get that like tattooed or like put
Speaker 2: on a shirt. I know, I live by it. So
Speaker 2: they had this conference, right, this is forty years before
Speaker 2: the Scramble for Africa really kicks off. So I can't
Speaker 2: say that these people were responsible for that. They were
Speaker 2: in the middle of doing something actually good. The non
Speaker 2: inclusion of women at this conference was on purpose. It
Speaker 2: was for men only. The larger faction there was like
Speaker 2: a big fight about whether or not women should be included,
Speaker 2: and the larger faction won. And then three women showed
Speaker 2: up anyhow, and including Lady By, and they had some
Speaker 2: supporters from within the convention who forced their inclusion. The
Speaker 2: same faction that fought for the inclusion of women actually
Speaker 2: made an effort to bring Oh I don't know, black
Speaker 2: people from America, where slavery was a big problem, including
Speaker 2: this guy who is just really fucking cool. I'd never
Speaker 2: really read about him before, Charles Lennox Remond. He is
Speaker 2: credited as the first black public speaker talking about abolition
Speaker 2: in the United States. Oh wow, I hadn't ordered him either. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: he wasn't a minor figure at the time, but he
Speaker 2: wasn't like the wildest militant. He was born free, so
Speaker 2: he doesn't have the cool escape story. Like, don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, the escape stories are fucking cool, but like
Speaker 2: he just was like putting in the work as an
Speaker 2: orator and as an organizer, and he was the kid
Speaker 2: of two hairdressers. And one of his big things that
Speaker 2: he fought for successfully was that he organized that basically
Speaker 2: like free black people would leave and mass any church
Speaker 2: that didn't let them sit as equals at the communion table.
Speaker 2: And when he made it to England for this convention,
Speaker 2: all the women were denied entry, so he protested and
Speaker 2: walked out alongside of them. He had just traveled across
Speaker 2: the fucking ocean to come to this thing that was
Speaker 2: like for freeing black people. And he was like, well,
Speaker 2: I'm intersectional. Fuck all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's I was joking earlier about how
Speaker 3: the group wasn't intersectional, but it's not like there weren't
Speaker 3: people who were down intersectionality back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's actually it's something that's come up a
Speaker 2: bunch of times, like when you look at for good reason,
Speaker 2: people are critical of the early feminist movement for being racist, right,
Speaker 2: and people look at some of the abolitionist movement and
Speaker 2: see the exclusion of women or whatever. But the thing
Speaker 2: that I actually run across way more is people who
Speaker 2: cared about both, saw them as connected and fought for both.
Speaker 2: Like they're just not as talked about, I mean, especially
Speaker 2: because like once rich people, feminism kicks in and the
Speaker 2: Suffragettes kind of there's some big racism problems and they're
Speaker 2: worth paying attention to, you know. But but yeah, so Charles,
Speaker 2: he's probably the most uncomplicatedly cool person in this week's episode.
Speaker 2: He helped recruit black soldiers to the Union Army. He
Speaker 2: after the war, he worked as a street lamp inspector,
Speaker 2: a clerk, and then ended his life as a farmer.
Speaker 2: So he's just a working class kid, a hairdressers who.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you know if he was like sending his
Speaker 3: pubic hair to people and like sleeping with everyone's partners
Speaker 3: and any of that.
Speaker 2: See, I'm not aware of that. And so that's part
Speaker 2: of like I'm like, maybe he's the uncomplicated character because
Speaker 2: I didn't read a whole book about him, right, you know.
Speaker 3: Because like everyone, he did all that and just didn't
Speaker 3: write it down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. He was like, oh man, you won't believe what
Speaker 2: I got up to in England, you know whatever. As
Speaker 2: long as everyone's into it, I don't care. And Frederick
Speaker 2: Douglass went on to name one of his sons after
Speaker 2: this guy, Charles rem And Douglas was the first black
Speaker 2: man to join the Union Army, and Charles Remon Douglas,
Speaker 2: Douglas's kid was actually too sick to actually wind up
Speaker 2: marching on the Confederacy, but did a lot of work
Speaker 2: and was That's still a pretty fucking cool thing to
Speaker 2: get to say you did, you know.
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons I think about this is
Speaker 2: that I'm like, I'm about to talk about the origin
Speaker 2: of computers and all this stuff, and instead of thinking
Speaker 2: of history as this distinct, unrelated things you need your
Speaker 2: big red yarn board. The same guy who stands up
Speaker 2: for Luddites also fought for Greek independence against the Ottomans
Speaker 2: and was married to a British woman who was directly
Speaker 2: involved in the abolition of slavery in both the UK
Speaker 2: and the US. Like, and that's where computer software comes from.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love how you put that, because it's so easy.
Speaker 3: No one who listened. I don't think anybody who listens
Speaker 3: to this pod thinks this way. But it's very easy
Speaker 3: to think of history as this thing that happened forever ago,
Speaker 3: that was like very distinct, right, and so like we'll
Speaker 3: put black history in one bucket, or like women's history
Speaker 3: in another bucket, or like you know, gender studies or
Speaker 3: sexuality in another bucket, and those and there's this idea
Speaker 3: that those things are not bleeding over and intersecting and
Speaker 3: having connections, and then something else like technology that's in
Speaker 3: a completely separate realm, and it's like, no, it's all
Speaker 3: mixed in.
Speaker 2: It's all history.
Speaker 3: It's all this like very complex, you know, patchwork of
Speaker 3: things that happened and intersected.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my Google history is just full of like person's name,
Speaker 2: religious beliefs, person's names, political views, persons named feminism, person's name, abolitionist,
Speaker 2: just to see what comes up, you know, because there's
Speaker 2: always more to people, because people want to have this
Speaker 2: one dimensional view of everyone, you know. Lady Byron also
Speaker 2: set up England's first cooperative school, basically socialist education. I
Speaker 2: don't know whether she identified as a socialist or not,
Speaker 2: but one of the people who whose work she was
Speaker 2: using to set up this cooperative school was outspokenly a
Speaker 2: socialist and the specific point of it. One of the
Speaker 2: things that I feel like I don't quite understand about England.
Speaker 2: England is a weird thing, you know, I mean, so
Speaker 2: is America. Like white American society is evil too. I'm
Speaker 2: not trying to be like, oh those English so there's
Speaker 2: only bad people. But the educational system there was absolutely
Speaker 2: horrific in terms of bullying kids, forcing them into like
Speaker 2: a fearful environment in which they are hyper competitive of
Speaker 2: each other, right, and that I mean that causes the
Speaker 2: British Empire on some level, right' It's chicken an egg problem.
Speaker 2: But it's like this culture of fear and domination, and
Speaker 2: so Lady Byron tries to stop it by setting up
Speaker 2: a cooperative school. Her quote about this is about talking
Speaker 2: about how students should be treated, is that fear makes
Speaker 2: slaves and the love of distinction leads to bullying and
Speaker 2: the aggressive passions encouraged in England's elite public school systems.
Speaker 3: That's so progressive to be seeing the ways that competition
Speaker 3: and I guess, like the desire to be distinct I
Speaker 3: guess how she put it, how that would fuel all
Speaker 3: these ugly things in society. I can't imagine that was like.
Speaker 2: Well received at the time, I know, and the school
Speaker 2: managed to last about eighty years. They taught the basics.
Speaker 2: They taught kids how to garden and track their income
Speaker 2: and shit. Also in addition to like you know, teaching
Speaker 2: literature and math and all these things, so they actually
Speaker 2: like taught practical life skills, like useful stuff that we
Speaker 2: should have all learned in school. Yeah, exactly. And eventually
Speaker 2: it shut down in nineteen seventeen, but it lasted like
Speaker 2: eighty years. And yeah, like people kind of I think
Speaker 2: there was a little bit the best I can tell,
Speaker 2: I only read so much about her, but I read
Speaker 2: a decent bit about her as best as I can tell.
Speaker 2: People were like, oh, wacky hippie is doing their wacky
Speaker 2: hippie thing. You know. Probably there was a lot of
Speaker 2: culture war stuff about, like, no, it's the it's the
Speaker 2: fighting pits of educational system that makes England the world
Speaker 2: power we are, you know. So Ada's mother was pretty cool,
Speaker 2: at least politically. She used to take Ada around on
Speaker 2: tours of like textile mills to look at the conditions
Speaker 2: that workers were in, which is probably if you are
Speaker 2: raised a noble you should probably have to go see
Speaker 2: how the other half lives, you know. And anything that
Speaker 2: Lady Byron was working on was willing to hire black
Speaker 2: Americans escaping slavery, and that I think was a pretty
Speaker 2: big deal that a lot of people in England were
Speaker 2: like not okay with and she was like, I don't care,
Speaker 2: We're going to do it. And I'm annoyed that she's
Speaker 2: mostly remembered as the wife of Lord Byron.
Speaker 3: Because all of these cool things, Like she was doing
Speaker 3: cool stuff on her own.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not as like sexy, you know. She just kind
Speaker 2: of was like fairly polite and religious and tried to
Speaker 2: make the world better. You know. She stayed in love
Speaker 2: with her husband after their separation because and I think
Speaker 2: it's because she viewed his problems as madness right, not
Speaker 2: as a character flaw. And she was also constantly trying
Speaker 2: to save his soul from damnation. He's like in Greece
Speaker 2: and stuff, and she's like writing letters being like, hey,
Speaker 2: you're gonna repent, like you know that like meme format,
Speaker 2: that's like something something today, Hey babe, like you want
Speaker 2: to do this today? You know, yeah, basically just texting
Speaker 2: him constantly being like, what's up. You wanna you want
Speaker 2: to accept Jesus Christ your personal Lord and savior today.
Speaker 2: This probably didn't endear her to him. But as for
Speaker 2: how she raised Ada, this is messier. She seems like
Speaker 2: maybe not the best mom.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: To be clear, single moms get way more flack than
Speaker 2: they should, and Lord Byron certainly didn't do a very
Speaker 2: good job of fathering her. On the other hand, she
Speaker 2: didn't let Lord Byron have an anything to do with
Speaker 2: their kid as far as I can tell. And basically
Speaker 2: Lady Byron was like, no matter what, I am going
Speaker 2: to make sure my kid does not end up a
Speaker 2: wild libertine like her father. Her father dies when eight
Speaker 2: is eight. And the way that she set about to
Speaker 2: do this was to not let her have an imagination.
Speaker 2: This is the way it gets described, downplayed or outright
Speaker 2: forbade teaching poetry and shit like that, no creativity all Stem,
Speaker 2: except according to other sources, did teach a lot of
Speaker 2: like music, so it might have just been a specific
Speaker 2: like no poetry, right.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it makes sense if she was like,
Speaker 3: I don't want my daughter to end up like her
Speaker 3: libertine poet dad.
Speaker 2: No poetry in this house.
Speaker 3: I was going to say something, though, I do think
Speaker 3: like the idea of STEM only. I know a lot
Speaker 3: of people who think that the only thing worth studying
Speaker 3: it if you're if you're interested in tech or you
Speaker 3: have aspirations to be in tech. The only thing worth
Speaker 3: studying is a hard science or a stem, and that
Speaker 3: humanity's poetry, music, gender studies, literature or all of that
Speaker 3: is just fluff and the only thing that matters is
Speaker 3: a hard tech. And those people I feel like they,
Speaker 3: even if they are like gifted engineers or something, I
Speaker 3: think that they might have trouble understanding what it is
Speaker 3: that people who are going to go on to use
Speaker 3: the technology that you build are using it for, which
Speaker 3: is often culture or you know, something that is not
Speaker 3: a hard tech.
Speaker 2: And so I guess I would.
Speaker 3: Say like I say that to say that you need
Speaker 3: all the things to be a well rounded technologist. I
Speaker 3: don't like it when people poo poo the humanities because
Speaker 3: they're like only focusing on programming or whatever. I think
Speaker 3: it's I think it's a really myopic way of seeing technology.
Speaker 2: No, totally. And that's Ada's gift to computing and technology
Speaker 2: is that it's the reason that she's seen is so
Speaker 2: important or is so important, is that she bridged the
Speaker 2: world between math and creativity and this became like her
Speaker 2: whole fucking thing because she was both her parents' kid.
Speaker 2: You know, like exactly everything that you're saying about it
Speaker 2: is the thing that she was about, and like why
Speaker 2: I got really excited about her as I was reading
Speaker 2: all this stuff, you know, And so it didn't work,
Speaker 2: this attempt to stifle the creative spirit, which might be
Speaker 2: an unkind reading of Lady Byron. It's hard to tell.
Speaker 2: Everyone who's writing these things feels really strongly about Lord Byron.
Speaker 2: No one gives a shit about Ada. No one gives
Speaker 2: a shit about Lady Byron. Everyone either fucking loves or
Speaker 2: hates Lord Byron. So everything revolves around him. And I
Speaker 2: know that some of it does, and I had to
Speaker 2: start with him, but it's so hard to tell. It's
Speaker 2: so hard to tell exactly because some of the people saying, oh,
Speaker 2: she was a terrible mother are Byron apologists or Lord
Speaker 2: Byron apologists. Anyway, there are definitely versions where the mother's
Speaker 2: pretty monstrous. She's a rich kid, so she has all
Speaker 2: these private tutors and shit, right, apparently any of them again,
Speaker 2: according to this reading, any of them got too close
Speaker 2: emotionally to Ada were fired, so she's like not allowed
Speaker 2: to care about her teachers or have like affection. And
Speaker 2: there's a portrait of her dad, Lord Byron, hanging in
Speaker 2: her grandmother's house, but she's not allowed to see it.
Speaker 2: It is behind green velvet curtains. Like, what a way
Speaker 2: to make a kid obsessed with their dad?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I mean, first of all, that's like put
Speaker 3: anything behind big velvet green curtains and tell a child
Speaker 3: you must never.
Speaker 2: Look behind these curtains.
Speaker 3: Of course they're going to like fixate on what's behind
Speaker 3: those curtains.
Speaker 2: I of course I know what's her obsession with the
Speaker 2: forbidden box of forbiddenness? Kid, Why can't you just forget
Speaker 2: about the forbidden box of forbiddenness? Yeah. So when she's
Speaker 2: eleven and her father is like safely dead in the ground,
Speaker 2: her mother takes her tour around Europe for a year
Speaker 2: because that's like a normal rich people thing to do.
Speaker 2: But they couldn't do it when she was younger because
Speaker 2: they didn't want to accidentally run into Lord Byron. Young
Speaker 2: Ada came back with her imagination on fire. She was like,
Speaker 2: holy shit, there's a world out there, and she became
Speaker 2: obsessed with trying to invent a flying machine. She studied birds,
Speaker 2: she tried to get every book she could about birds
Speaker 2: so that she could build a steam powered ornithopter. I
Speaker 2: don't think the word ornithopter existed yet, but this is
Speaker 2: what she wanted to build. Is before people figured out
Speaker 2: fixed wing aircraft, and so everyone's into ornithopters, which are
Speaker 2: like the fly he wants. I guess everyone knows what
Speaker 2: it is now because Dune's out, but some of us
Speaker 2: just have a terrible background in steampunk. And so I've
Speaker 2: known about this for a long time. And it makes
Speaker 2: sense that people thought about flapping wings instead of fixed
Speaker 2: wing aircraft, right, because if you look around and you
Speaker 2: see the stuff that's flying, it flaps its wings, you know.
Speaker 2: So she spends years trying to invent this thing. It
Speaker 2: wasn't until the eighteen seventies that the first ornithopters were built,
Speaker 2: and they used rubber bands, and so like rubber kind
Speaker 2: of successfully invented the ornithopter to some degree. So she's
Speaker 2: into the shit. She is the world's for steampunk. I
Speaker 2: would argue, much like our sponsor subcultures that seem promising
Speaker 2: and have some good elements but also some cringey stuff.
Speaker 2: Are we sponsored by that? Are you sponsored by? Big
Speaker 2: top hat and goggles. Who know, well, it's better than
Speaker 2: a fifth helmet. I guess anything's better than a fifth helmet.
Speaker 2: Steambug is the greatest subcultural betrayal of my life. I
Speaker 2: was like, what, we're all obsessed with punk and also
Speaker 2: where the industrial revolution and colonization really got going and
Speaker 2: started destroying the world, And so we're really interested in
Speaker 2: the people who are perfectly positioned to fight against it,
Speaker 2: and we're making alliances across the world to destroy empire.
Speaker 2: And then I went to the conventions and it was
Speaker 2: all top hats and goggles, and I was like, I think,
Speaker 2: I think I'm at the wrong convention. Anyway, maybe your
Speaker 2: next big disappointment is here in these ads. So we're
Speaker 2: back and Ada Lovelace is back from Europe and decides
Speaker 2: to do the one thing that you should not do
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth century, which is get sick. She is
Speaker 2: bedridden for about three years. Some folks, of course, chalk
Speaker 2: it up to psychosomatic stuff, like, oh, she has hysteria,
Speaker 2: she's just stressed. Why doesn't she try yoga? You know
Speaker 2: girls just do that. Sometimes it was probably measles and encephalitis,
Speaker 2: which I had to look it up at inflammation of
Speaker 2: the brain.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, my roommate got that from a hot
Speaker 3: tub at beach Week when we were in college.
Speaker 2: It was like crazy, Yeah, the wages of sin. Yes,
Speaker 2: that's terrible.
Speaker 3: She all right, Oh she was fine, but like you
Speaker 3: just needed I mean, luckily this happened in like, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: two thousand and four and not back when Ada was living.
Speaker 3: But yeah, she does have to get antibiotics and it
Speaker 3: ruined beach Week, but she was fine.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, okay, cool. Yeah. Ada spent three years lying
Speaker 2: in bed a little different. Yeah, from like roughly thirteen
Speaker 2: to sixteen or so. She gets better, but she's never
Speaker 2: going to be in the most robust health at any
Speaker 2: point in her life. And she goes off to London
Speaker 2: to join that bullshit society of five thousand rich assholes
Speaker 2: who run the world. She is presented at court and
Speaker 2: meets the King and all that shit and the whole
Speaker 2: like her whole life, she's a little bit like, she
Speaker 2: doesn't really play this game that much. She's like dresses
Speaker 2: as an intellectual instead of dressing as like a proper
Speaker 2: lady or whatever, because she's cool. I mean, dressing is
Speaker 2: a proper lady is cool too, but it's also cool
Speaker 2: when you flout all about. On June fifth, eighteen thirty three,
Speaker 2: she's seventeen years old. She meets the man who will
Speaker 2: change her life forever in cement her place in history,
Speaker 2: and thank god this is not a romantic story. She
Speaker 2: meets the forty one year old Charles Babbage, who is
Speaker 2: generally credited as inventing the first computer. Obviously that's more
Speaker 2: or less true.
Speaker 3: Actually, did you ever go to the store babbage Is
Speaker 3: in the mall when you were a kid?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: My god, I did, and I would buy little I
Speaker 2: would buy video games that on three and a half
Speaker 2: inch three and a quarter inch floppy disks. I love.
Speaker 2: That's that's why I know who Charles Babbage Is've been
Speaker 2: like a figure in my life. Yeah cool. Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I actually thought about including that in a script, and
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I'm just gonna date me. I know.
Speaker 2: People are like, what are they talking about? Like, we're
Speaker 2: old y'all like that.
Speaker 3: That's like where you where you got your janky ass
Speaker 3: video games? While your mom was shopping at Talbot's or whatever.
Speaker 3: You would go to Babbages?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, I like this one has a dragon on
Speaker 2: the cover. I want it so bad. Dragon War that
Speaker 2: was my favorite. I don't even remember what. Yeah, my
Speaker 2: dad was an early adopter and like spent all his
Speaker 2: like spent a lot of money on computers back when
Speaker 2: that was a hard thing to do. You know. That's
Speaker 2: like how he chose to spend the little money had
Speaker 2: or whatever. So she meets Charles Babbage and instead of
Speaker 2: at a mall, it's at a soiree at his house.
Speaker 2: And some people like to conjecture that they were sleeping together.
Speaker 2: Usually I am the first person to believe rumors of
Speaker 2: people fucking in history. I think that they had a
Speaker 2: platonic intellectual friendship. She meets Charles Babbage at a soiree
Speaker 2: at his house. He's got these like little automaton toys
Speaker 2: like everyone does to impress people at the time. I
Speaker 2: think he built them. He has like a silver lady
Speaker 2: with a turban on. It's a little wind up toy
Speaker 2: or whatever, you know. And her mother's nickname is the
Speaker 2: Princess of Parallelograms. This is what Lord Byron called her
Speaker 2: to make fun of her. But I think she's just
Speaker 2: kind of into it. So Ada and her mom are
Speaker 2: like not impressed by a little automaton. So he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: you want to see the real shit, and he takes
Speaker 2: them back to like back of the house. This thing
Speaker 2: he's been working on, a fucking difference engine, is a
Speaker 2: mechanical calculator, more ambitious than anyone has ever dreamed at
Speaker 2: this point that I'm aware of. He has a working
Speaker 2: fragment of it. It is about two feet tall, It
Speaker 2: has two thousand brass parts, and it is hand cranked.
Speaker 2: It can do basic math, including exponents and extract the
Speaker 2: root of a quadratic equation, which is a math thing
Speaker 2: that I looked up for this and then was like, yep,
Speaker 2: that's a math thing because I was a computer nerd
Speaker 2: and not a math nerd. Were you a math nerd? No, God,
Speaker 2: not at all. You dropped out of a PhD for literature. No,
Speaker 2: no no.
Speaker 3: And like I was at a conversation with somebody where
Speaker 3: they were like, oh, I did TRIG in school. What
Speaker 3: was your math? And I was like, yeah, my math
Speaker 3: was just called math any of those names.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I did real well at a level of math
Speaker 2: up where I didn't have to pay attention, And so
Speaker 2: I was like in the like gifted smart math until
Speaker 2: about PRECALC. And then I was like barely graduated high
Speaker 2: school because I almost didn't pass PRECALC because I didn't
Speaker 2: ever learn the tools with which to study because I
Speaker 2: had undiagnosed ADHD. I mean, because I was so smart.
Speaker 2: This is going to come up as related as Charles
Speaker 2: Charles Babbage actually, and so this two foot tall, two
Speaker 2: thousand part piece of a difference engine is all that
Speaker 2: will ever be built of his math machines until more
Speaker 2: than one hundred years after his death. The thing about
Speaker 2: Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace that's so impressive is like
Speaker 2: what they almost did, what they dreamed up, what they
Speaker 2: could have done, and more and more the more I read,
Speaker 2: the more I realized if AIDA's poor health and Charles
Speaker 2: his neurodivergence hadn't gotten in their way, it probably would
Speaker 2: have done like this could have happened. They did manage
Speaker 2: to have a direct influence on modern computing, but it
Speaker 2: wasn't a direct lineage basically the best other people know
Speaker 2: this better than I do. But their work was kind
Speaker 2: of rediscovered early on in computing, rather than it being
Speaker 2: like people like immediately just building off of what they did.
Speaker 2: Don't sorry about Charles Babbage. You heard much about Charles
Speaker 2: Babbage Besides the storm.
Speaker 3: I knew a little bit about him, but most of
Speaker 3: my entry point is the store in them all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fair enough, the real quick version, as he is
Speaker 2: a cranky old man with adhd. Charles Babbage was not nobility,
Speaker 2: but he was rich, which is kind of the same thing.
Speaker 2: His father was a successful goldsmith and banker, and so
Speaker 2: young Chuck. No one called him that besides me right
Speaker 2: now that I'm aware of. He grew up with private tutors,
Speaker 2: and then he went off to Trinity College, where Lord
Speaker 2: Byron had gone and Oscar Wilde, and while he was there, Actually,
Speaker 2: young Charles Babbage seems fun. He formed the Analytical Society
Speaker 2: with some peers, which is what I consider fun. But
Speaker 2: his other stuff is more directly fun. He was part
Speaker 2: of the Ghost Club. They were paranormal investigators. What Yeah.
Speaker 2: They actually both Aida and especially Charles Babbage do some
Speaker 2: interesting like theological science stuff that I'll talk about in
Speaker 2: a minute. He also either joins or starts a group
Speaker 2: called the Extractors Club, which is a group of students
Speaker 2: who swear to help each other escape asylums if any
Speaker 2: of them are ever declared insane honestly, like practical, I know,
Speaker 2: and just like that's like a good that is a
Speaker 2: green flag. It's a little bit of a red flag.
Speaker 2: But I'm not actually colorblind, but this would be the
Speaker 2: kind of thing I'm colorblind on. This would be a
Speaker 2: red flag and a green flag in a relationship for me.
Speaker 3: Like the fact that you think that you might be
Speaker 3: institutionalized against her will not great. The fact that you
Speaker 3: would help if that happened. You were confirming that you'll
Speaker 3: help somebody escape.
Speaker 2: That is that is nice? Yeah, exactly, and again and
Speaker 2: going back in time and being like this person's crazy
Speaker 2: in the following ways is like always fraught. But like
Speaker 2: I Charles Babbage was adhd or like had something that
Speaker 2: I identify with really hard, which was that he he
Speaker 2: was always starting something new. He was always studying some
Speaker 2: new thing, and he like his work suffered because instead
Speaker 2: of finishing projects, he was onto the next one. I
Speaker 2: identify with that. That's a little bit of a direct hit. Well,
Speaker 2: the next line in my script is that motherfucker should
Speaker 2: have just gotten into podcasting because then you can deep
Speaker 2: dive a new subject every week.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, I think somebody should do like
Speaker 3: a analysis of eight people who have ADHD and also
Speaker 3: became podcasters.
Speaker 2: There's gonna be a big overlap. I know. I was
Speaker 2: actually worried when I was first got this job, and
Speaker 2: I was like, I was talking to one of my
Speaker 2: friends and I was like, I'm I'm really good at
Speaker 2: starting projects. I'm pretty good at seeing projects through, but
Speaker 2: but I always need to be onto the next thing.
Speaker 2: And my friend was like, every time I talk to you,
Speaker 2: you are in a one month research hole about a
Speaker 2: different thing. That never changes. The fact that you want
Speaker 2: to be in a research hole does not change. I
Speaker 2: was like, so, and here we are, insightful friend. I know,
Speaker 2: he was really into math, and he was really into astronomy,
Speaker 2: Charles Babbage. He gave lectures and wrote papers, which is
Speaker 2: kind of like podcasting, to be honest, and he was
Speaker 2: supported by his dad and his wife's family because there
Speaker 2: wasn't a lot of money in this science stuff. And
Speaker 2: so I'm I want to try this line of work
Speaker 2: as well. Anyone who is rich and trying to get
Speaker 2: married and wants to finance weird projects, hit me up,
Speaker 2: especially if you're landed nobility. I'm going to change my
Speaker 2: tune about titles and all that nonsense. If you can
Speaker 2: make me a baroness just putting that out there, baroness
Speaker 2: Margaret kills you, right, Yeah, but probably not. Actually, I'm
Speaker 2: really picky. Probably don't actually DM me about this. I
Speaker 2: was like, Oh, I'm gonna make this clever joke, and
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I'm going to destroy my DMS.
Speaker 2: So at one point I wrote in the early nineteen twenties,
Speaker 2: but I meant the eighteen twenties. He goes to France,
Speaker 2: and when he's in France, he learns that the French
Speaker 2: government is pouring a ton of money and energy into math.
Speaker 2: Not theoretical math, although that's cool too, but they are
Speaker 2: hiring computers, like the job description, people who do computing.
Speaker 2: And if people want to hear more about that, they
Speaker 2: can go back and listen to me and Bridget talking
Speaker 2: about that and the black woman who put us on
Speaker 2: the moon and all that cool shit. And so France
Speaker 2: is hiring computers to do logarithm and trigonometry tables, which
Speaker 2: were used for navigation and engineering, so instead of having
Speaker 2: to sit down and do really complicated math, you can
Speaker 2: look at the table. Charles saw this and was like oh,
Speaker 2: doing stuff for the social good is good, and we
Speaker 2: should have more of that. Specifically, I want that for astronomy.
Speaker 2: I wish the British government would hire me to do that.
Speaker 2: And he also said, quote I wish to God these
Speaker 2: tables had been made by steam. Because he was just
Speaker 2: looking at how much work is involved in computing all
Speaker 2: these things. So he was like, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: figure how to do that, because at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, what he was building wasn't a general computer,
Speaker 2: it certainly not. At first. He wanted to build machines
Speaker 2: that could produce mathematical charts. It was Ada who saw
Speaker 2: what it could actually really become, but he hadn't met
Speaker 2: her yet. This is eighteen twenty three. He meets her
Speaker 2: ten years later. She's like seven. She probably still could
Speaker 2: have figured this out. She was a smart kid. Eighteen
Speaker 2: twenty three, he convinces the British government to give him
Speaker 2: a bunch of money, about two million dollars in modern dollars,
Speaker 2: to try and build one of these things. It would
Speaker 2: have twenty five thousand moving parts, which eventually he gets
Speaker 2: down to about eight thousand moving parts. He never finishes it. Instead,
Speaker 2: he spent his life becoming increasingly bitter and grouchy, and
Speaker 2: he spends all of his time complaining that the British
Speaker 2: government doesn't finance the sciences, in particular him enough, Like,
Speaker 2: this is another guy that I've met, you know, Oh.
Speaker 3: If you are in the sciences, technology, you know this
Speaker 3: guy academia. You know this guy who won't stop complaining
Speaker 3: about how his stuff never gets funded.
Speaker 2: You know him. And he's like, I'm a visionary, and
Speaker 2: you're like, okay, Chuck, but like he actually is a visionary.
Speaker 2: You just don't know it, you know, And he's sort
Speaker 2: of insufferable. Later, he's going to go to war against
Speaker 2: street musicians because they keep him awake. That I'm on
Speaker 2: board with. Actually, oh no, I mean fair enough. As
Speaker 2: a former street musician. He now he is complaining about
Speaker 2: street musicians at six in the morning. And I can't
Speaker 2: imagine when I was a street musician, I did not
Speaker 2: live in a life. If I was awake at six
Speaker 2: in the morning, it's because I hadn't gotten home.
Speaker 1: Yet, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody like six am street musicians. That's a different level.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So in eighteen twenty four, the year after
Speaker 2: he gets a bunch of money to work on the
Speaker 2: difference engine. He takes a job making tables for a
Speaker 2: life insurance company instead, And honestly, that's a good reminder
Speaker 2: of what would have happened if he had built the
Speaker 2: difference engine. It wouldn't have been like now we're mapping
Speaker 2: the stars. It would have been like the British Empire
Speaker 2: got computers one hundred years early, and like life insurance
Speaker 2: gets computers one hundred years early. In eighteen twenty seven
Speaker 2: he published a table of logarithms that would go on
Speaker 2: to be reprinted for one hundred years. And this is
Speaker 2: just stuff he did the math of and so his
Speaker 2: big famous book is called Table of Logarithms of the
Speaker 2: Natural Numbers from one to one hundred eight thousand. That's
Speaker 2: his big book. Also in eighteen twenty seven, his dad died,
Speaker 2: leaving him about one hundred thousand pounds sterling, which is
Speaker 2: about fourteen million dollars in modern money. Then his wife died.
Speaker 2: He also lost five of his eight kids. This man
Speaker 2: was not having a good time.
Speaker 3: Rich.
Speaker 2: Yes, happy, No, there's that study that money buys happiness
Speaker 2: up to about like at the time it was about
Speaker 2: seventy thousand dollars a year, and then after that it
Speaker 2: just levels off. The new number is probably almost twice thought.
Speaker 2: But he also wrote a book with the catchy title
Speaker 2: Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on
Speaker 2: some of its causes, which was his big like why
Speaker 2: won't the British government give me more money? Like a
Speaker 2: whole book about that one complaint basically, but it's actually,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's like probably true. It argues for more
Speaker 2: public investment in the sciences and better STEM education, you know,
Speaker 2: and especially since like I actually wonder if that comes
Speaker 2: out of him not being a noble right, because the
Speaker 2: people who have access to science are rich people, and
Speaker 2: so if you don't have to work for a living,
Speaker 2: you can study sit around and study things at this time,
Speaker 2: and so like actually trying to teach more people more
Speaker 2: broadly STEM like that's cool. In eighteen thirty two, he
Speaker 2: finished a small prototype of his difference engine. In eighteen
Speaker 2: thirty three, shows it to Ata and her mother. Meanwhile
Speaker 2: going with her mom to see the textile mills and
Speaker 2: the terrible working conditions there, and her takeaway wasn't these
Speaker 2: people are being treated terrible. I don't know how she
Speaker 2: felt about that. Actually I was really annoyed that I
Speaker 2: couln't find outw she felt out about that. But certainly
Speaker 2: part of our takeaway was these machines are fucking cool,
Speaker 2: and the history of automation and machinery and therefore computing
Speaker 2: comes back to textiles, which we talked about on our
Speaker 2: recent Light eight episodes about the automation of these things.
Speaker 2: Was like, one of the first things that steam power
Speaker 2: is being used for automation was ruining the lives of
Speaker 2: workers when it could have been improving their lives except
Speaker 2: for this new thing sweeping the country called capitalism. But
Speaker 2: in the abstract, people are figuring out cool shit the
Speaker 2: machines can do. And it's a shame that the cool
Speaker 2: ideas for what those machines can do are the reason
Speaker 2: that it's this spring was too hot and we've had
Speaker 2: the hottest hero on record for several years in a row. Anyway,
Speaker 2: it's always in the back of my mind whenever I'm
Speaker 2: like because I still think computers and technology are cool,
Speaker 2: but I'm always like, oh thing, Yeah, it's a love hate.
Speaker 2: It's a complicated relationship. It is it is. In eighteen
Speaker 2: oh four, there was this machine invented that called the
Speaker 2: Jacquarde loom, which uses a series of punched cards chained
Speaker 2: together in a continuous sequence to remember textile patterns for weaving.
Speaker 2: And I would argue that the first piece of computer
Speaker 2: art predates the computer by one hundred years because the
Speaker 2: inventor of this loom, whose name is Jacquardes imagine that is,
Speaker 2: he has his portrait woven from silk, and this requires
Speaker 2: twenty four thousand punched cards to produce. And this is
Speaker 2: like a commercially available product, like it's on order, you
Speaker 2: have to like they're made to order. But Charles Babbage,
Speaker 2: for example, has one of these tapestries and you could
Speaker 2: call it a print. It still has humans involved, but
Speaker 2: it is like a machine that is programmed to make
Speaker 2: a thing. Such an interesting perspective. I just I find
Speaker 2: it neat because the thing we're talking about like stem
Speaker 2: and like, oh, what can you do with computers? And
Speaker 2: they're like, well, the first thing you can do is
Speaker 2: you can make a portrait of a rich asshole. It's
Speaker 2: kind of cool. You know, it would have been like
Speaker 2: memes and like it's like you know now it's like
Speaker 2: whenever someone invents a new instrument, the first thing they
Speaker 2: do is like play the Mario brother brothers, you know, like,
Speaker 2: all right, that's fine. So Ada sees the textile machines
Speaker 2: and she's really into it. She's also really into math
Speaker 2: like her mother, and soon she is teaching younger women
Speaker 2: math and she's corresponding with Babbage about his machines. And
Speaker 2: then she makes a pretty good call. Rarely when on
Speaker 2: the show, when I talk about someone getting married, is
Speaker 2: it a good call if it's a woman. She marries
Speaker 2: a wife guy. And this guy is named William Lord King.
Speaker 2: Lord is in his middle name. His title is Lord
Speaker 2: King because king is his last name. That fucking Britain.
Speaker 2: Soon enough, he gets promoted by someone dying and he
Speaker 2: becomes the Earl of Lovelace. So Ad Ada gets the
Speaker 2: name Ada Lovelace, the Countess of Lovelace. And how did
Speaker 2: him to becoming an earl? Makeer accountess? Who knows? Don't
Speaker 2: want to know? If you do, If you know it,
Speaker 2: keep it to yourself. Yeah, it's all a weird soap opera,
Speaker 2: only in this case, it's a soap opera that, instead
Speaker 2: of entertaining people, kills entire cultures and extracts resources from
Speaker 2: around the world. But her husband is a pretty good guy.
Speaker 2: He's really supportive of her. He's really into math and
Speaker 2: science and shit, but he's not as good at it
Speaker 2: as she is, and he doesn't care. He just supports
Speaker 2: her in doing it, Like he leverages his credibility as
Speaker 2: a nobleman emphasis on the dash men to get her
Speaker 2: into spaces that are closed to women. There's like a
Speaker 2: she joins the society for like scientists or whatever, and
Speaker 2: they have this big library and she like can't go
Speaker 2: in and use the books even though she's a member
Speaker 2: of the society because she doesn't have a dick, and
Speaker 2: that annoys me and it annoyed her. The other thing
Speaker 2: about her husband, mister the King, he is a huge
Speaker 2: lord Byron fan and so is Ada Lovelace. The both
Speaker 2: of them are obsessed with the poetry of dead rockstar
Speaker 2: Dad and like, one, what are the odds that he
Speaker 2: turned into like this like perfectly nice husband based on
Speaker 2: his interests. You know, this is like the person who's like, oh,
Speaker 2: all of my interests are the following literature is just
Speaker 2: red flag after red flag and then like perfectly sweet man,
Speaker 2: and I would bet a moderate amount of money that
Speaker 2: the pair swung together. I wouldn't bet all my money.
Speaker 2: But that's like my vibe I'm picking up.
Speaker 3: So I guess that green curtain to make sure that
Speaker 3: she never became a libertine poet did not work.
Speaker 2: Oh no, she is absolutely, that's the thing, Like she's
Speaker 2: gambling or we'll talk about what she gets up to.
Speaker 2: She now is in the prime of her life, being
Speaker 2: a rich bit she's just like married up, even though
Speaker 2: she was already up. You know, she has three kids,
Speaker 2: so she's busy running the household. I put that in
Speaker 2: quotes because she is hiring people to do the work
Speaker 2: of running her house sold Well. Call this class bitterness
Speaker 2: with Margaret kilj that's the name of this episode. She
Speaker 2: spends her time riding horses, playing harp and studying really
Speaker 2: complex math and hiring the best mathematicians in the world
Speaker 2: to tutor her, who're willing to not just because of
Speaker 2: the money, but because her dad is famous as hell.
Speaker 2: And she's really into music too. She wants to be
Speaker 2: a professional singer. And her friends are like, ah, you
Speaker 2: should like stick to the harp and math, man, you're
Speaker 2: so good at the harp and math. It's before I
Speaker 2: have honest friends, maybe or maybe not you know, maybe
Speaker 2: this should have encouraged her. Meanwhile, her mom, in classic
Speaker 2: form of good at politics not the best at being
Speaker 2: a mom, is controlling as hell, yelling at her about
Speaker 2: how she handles herself in society because I think she's
Speaker 2: kind of being a bit of a libertine, and also
Speaker 2: how she's like raising her kids and shit. Ada meanwhile
Speaker 2: is gambling on horses, drinking and I think fucking around.
Speaker 2: She is her father's daughter. And all the while she's
Speaker 2: talking to Babbage about them machines. Much like our sponsor,
Speaker 2: the extinct store, Babbages, if you build a time machine,
Speaker 2: you can go back, and I recommend buying anything where
Speaker 2: you have to get a bunch of floppy discs to
Speaker 2: install it and then swap out the floppy discs at
Speaker 2: the end of different scenes, and then sometimes you have
Speaker 2: to go back and forth Wizardry. You could be playing
Speaker 2: Wizardry right now from our sponsor Babbages, and we're back.
Speaker 2: So Charles Babbage is working on these machines, but he
Speaker 2: has a problem. Well, his real problem is that everyone
Speaker 2: he loves is dead and he's sad. But his other
Speaker 2: problem is that he isn't good at finishing projects. And
Speaker 2: his ability to be productive and make a world changing
Speaker 2: machine is hampered by his inability to finish things. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: the writing books of titles like on the Economy of
Speaker 2: Machinery and Manufacturers about how to efficiently run factories, and
Speaker 2: he starts writing sciencey theology or what was called natural theology.
Speaker 2: And this is kind of before I mean, there's atheist
Speaker 2: at this time, right, He's always been atheists as soon.
Speaker 2: But there's this thing that's happening now that people are
Speaker 2: really into science where people are like, oh, well, like
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like all complicated, and God made
Speaker 2: all the complicated and it's like kind of interesting. He
Speaker 2: was the potentially the first person to basically suggest that
Speaker 2: God is a programmer creating a complex system. Therefore is
Speaker 2: responsible for the fact that we now have that thing
Speaker 2: where some people believe we're all living in a simulation.
Speaker 2: I am one of those people. I can't say it's wrong.
Speaker 3: I watched a documentary and I've walked away from that
Speaker 3: documentary thinking it's more likely than not.
Speaker 2: I know it sounds absurd.
Speaker 3: I know it sounds like it is like a massive
Speaker 3: bonng rip, but like I do believe it.
Speaker 2: I believe it. My equivalent level of wacky belief is
Speaker 2: equantum immortality. I like, I'm like kind of sold on it.
Speaker 3: You should do a bonus episode that's just like cool
Speaker 3: Zone team, what's your wackieth but deeply held belief?
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, totally Okay, Well, so you might like his
Speaker 2: natural theology. He says that the repeating patterns found all
Speaker 2: throughout the natural world are evidence of the fact that
Speaker 2: this is a programmed thing, and that miracles aren't breaking
Speaker 2: natural laws but were instead, quote, the exact fulfillment of
Speaker 2: much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist. Oh,
Speaker 2: it is that kind of like because as a kid,
Speaker 2: we'd always be like, if someone believed in ghosts, you'd
Speaker 2: have to figure how to reconcile with science. And the
Speaker 2: answer is like, well, science doesn't understand it yet, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's not a I don't disagree with that assessment. You know,
Speaker 2: that does not specifically my setup of beliefs, but like
Speaker 2: makes sense to me. It makes sense. Yeah, And meanwhile
Speaker 2: he's like throwing huge soares that Darwin and Dickens and
Speaker 2: people like that come to He ran for office on
Speaker 2: a yay actories and computers platform, but did not win.
Speaker 2: He wasn't popular because people thought he squandered all the
Speaker 2: public money, because he got a lot of money from
Speaker 2: the government to build a machine and then he didn't
Speaker 2: so kind of fair. He didn't finish the difference engine
Speaker 2: in part because making it was too took too long,
Speaker 2: and it was also it wasn't just like him carving
Speaker 2: the brass pieces. He's like hiring people and working with
Speaker 2: engineers and stuff. Right, But soon he already invented something
Speaker 2: better than the difference Engine. He invented the analytical engine.
Speaker 2: And this one would use punched cards to store data
Speaker 2: like the looms did, and just to reiterate that modern
Speaker 2: computing developed out of art instead of the other way around,
Speaker 2: this analytical machine would basically be a universal computer. All
Speaker 2: but he still mostly he's still seen it as a
Speaker 2: way to compute tables and charts and shit, just like
Speaker 2: more efficiently, with like less user intervention, like less programming
Speaker 2: each individual setup. Right. In eighteen four he goes to
Speaker 2: Italy and he gives a lecture about this analytical engine.
Speaker 2: An Italian Army engineer who decades later is going to
Speaker 2: become a center right Prime Minister of Italy. Is a
Speaker 2: guy named Luigi because he's Italian. That actually is his name,
Speaker 2: and he's into it. And in eighteen forty two he
Speaker 2: wrote about the analytical engine in French. Aida translated it
Speaker 2: into English for publication. The original was about eight thousand
Speaker 2: words or so. She added a ton of shit. Her
Speaker 2: translation was about twenty thousand words because of all the notes.
Speaker 2: This is her thing. This is the thing that she
Speaker 2: wrote that cements her in history, which is so wild
Speaker 2: that it's like a translation of a thing. But that's
Speaker 2: actually a fairly normal way for people to break into
Speaker 2: sciences and stuff at the time is to add notes
Speaker 2: to existing work by translating it. So while she's writing this,
Speaker 2: this is the thing that have you run across the like, Oh,
Speaker 2: Aida didn't really do it. Babbage did all the work.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, many many times. That's something that tech bros
Speaker 3: love to trot out.
Speaker 2: Yeah you know who didn't believe that? Who Charles Babbage.
Speaker 2: He wrote explicitly about the fact that it was Ada's work.
Speaker 2: Take that, tech bros. Yeah, listen to your own fucking hero.
Speaker 2: She corresponded with him about it all the time. Mail
Speaker 2: in London was like texting. It was six times a day,
Speaker 2: and so people just like so she just wrote him
Speaker 2: and was like, hey, I'm working on this part of
Speaker 2: it and stuff, and they correspond about it. But it
Speaker 2: was her ideas. And I rarely say things are like
Speaker 2: history has a consensus about a thing on this show,
Speaker 2: because like usually they don't. Like Charles Babbage feels this way,
Speaker 2: and so does everyone who actually studies it, as best
Speaker 2: as I can tell, and like he was there, y'all,
Speaker 2: he would know, yeah, and he's like, I mean, he's
Speaker 2: supportive of her work, but he's not like the hero
Speaker 2: of like progressiveness and feminism or something either. But oh
Speaker 2: and then meanwhile, her dutiful husband is inching over her pencil,
Speaker 2: like it's like the equivalent of like he's like typing
Speaker 2: it up, which is like fucking cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we don't get to do a lot of I
Speaker 3: imagine you don't get to do a lot of stories
Speaker 3: about the supportive helphol men in the orbit of a
Speaker 3: talented woman.
Speaker 2: I know the men quietly in the background. They do
Speaker 2: come up and I make they make me very happy,
Speaker 2: like secretly my favorite kind of person to cover on
Speaker 2: the show as a wife guy, which is annoying. It
Speaker 2: should be the cool wife or the cool unmarried woman.
Speaker 2: But in some ways, I'm just like, oh, look at
Speaker 2: the guy. He's so nice.
Speaker 3: I mean, not to give unsolicited romantic advice, but somebody
Speaker 3: once told me that if you are an ambitious woman
Speaker 3: that and you are going to like align yourself with
Speaker 3: a man, that man could either be an anchor or
Speaker 3: a springboard.
Speaker 2: There is no in between. So she's very wisely, yeah,
Speaker 2: that makes some sense. If people don't support the projects
Speaker 2: you're doing, it's not worth it, not worth it. And
Speaker 2: so the thing that Babbage did try to write for
Speaker 2: this piece, this translation, he wanted to write an anonymous
Speaker 2: preface about how the government wasn't sponsoring science enough and
Speaker 2: now let you get more money, and Ada is like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm good. I don't want to bet in my book,
Speaker 2: which is more evidence of the fact that he didn't.
Speaker 2: Fucking like she controlled this thing. It was her project.
Speaker 2: And it comes out and her dutiful husband is giving
Speaker 2: away copies to all his friends, being like, look how
Speaker 2: fucking cool my wife is. And it's the notes in
Speaker 2: this in which she basically writes the first computer programs.
Speaker 2: She writes out hypothetical programs that this computer could be
Speaker 2: used for And so there's the like, you know, is
Speaker 2: she a diversity inclusion or whatever? Is she overrated? And
Speaker 2: She's only overrated in the same way that so is
Speaker 2: Charles Babbage. Neither of them made computers. Both of them
Speaker 2: thought about computers. You know. He in a cool I
Speaker 2: like the idea that people are able to like come
Speaker 2: up with an imaginary thing and then develop it and
Speaker 2: build it all in their minds. And I'm impressed by that.
Speaker 2: In terms of what they actually hypothesized. Lovelace is as
Speaker 2: important as Babbage. There's no doubt in my mind. Babbage
Speaker 2: did hardware, love Lace did software. Babbage figured out how
Speaker 2: to make a thing. Lovelace figured out what you could
Speaker 2: do with it. In this work she invented loops and
Speaker 2: nested loops. In programming, she talked about a hypothetical thing
Speaker 2: that could have taken three hundred and thirty cards, but
Speaker 2: then instead figured out how to do it with only
Speaker 2: three cards. She dreamed about what computers could do beyond numbers,
Speaker 2: and hypothesized writing music on them. She wrote that quote
Speaker 2: the fundamental relations of pitch sound in the Science of
Speaker 2: Harmony could be used in order to quote compose elaborate
Speaker 2: and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity
Speaker 2: or extent. She also predicted, I think accurately that computers
Speaker 2: will never be able to think that AI itself is
Speaker 2: sort of an illusion. She wrote, quote, the analytical engine
Speaker 2: has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever
Speaker 2: we know how to in order to perform, and essentially later,
Speaker 2: the way that Babbage comes back into fame is that
Speaker 2: Alan Turing finds Ada's writing and famously I don't remember
Speaker 2: what episode we covered him on, but he was a
Speaker 2: persecutive for homosexuality, inventor of computers who also defeated the Nazis.
Speaker 2: Alan Turing that guy, okay again, annoying thing on Twitter
Speaker 2: or right wing people are like now I see all
Speaker 2: the right wing shit on Twitter ever since Elon must
Speaker 2: took over and the you know, engagement bait or whatever,
Speaker 2: but there's this thing where it's like, well, no one
Speaker 2: from this country's flag ever invented anything, and it's like
Speaker 2: the trans inclusive rainbow flag, and it's like Alan Turing
Speaker 2: beat the Nazis. Yeah, like, I mean there's a lot still. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you're talking about forty percent of the human population is
Speaker 2: rough LGBT by old studies from one hundred years ago, Like,
Speaker 2: I have a feeling people did some shit. People did
Speaker 2: some shit.
Speaker 3: And I gotta say that quote that you just read
Speaker 3: from Lovelace about how computers would only ever be like
Speaker 3: regurgitating what we know, I cannot believe that that was
Speaker 3: not written this year about AI because it is so
Speaker 3: fucking spot on, and it is wild to hear how
Speaker 3: prescient that.
Speaker 2: Was all the way back then. Yeah, when computers were
Speaker 2: literally a figurement of her and Babbage's imagination. That is like,
Speaker 2: that is like some mind blowing shit right there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because the actual crazy magic is what the human mind
Speaker 2: can do. And so Alan Turing called this objection Lovelace's objection,
Speaker 2: and it's like still stands as like a thing in
Speaker 2: modern computer science or whatever. She was the force that
Speaker 2: almost brought us to the computer age one hundred years early,
Speaker 2: because she basically hounded Babbage into letting her take over
Speaker 2: not building, but like project managing the building thereof. And
Speaker 2: I think her husband was going to have to be
Speaker 2: a proxy in order to like make this happen or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I read one version where it was basically like
Speaker 2: Babbage was the CTO and she was going to be
Speaker 2: the CEO, you know, and this is not the kind
Speaker 2: of thing you can build in your garage. The analytical
Speaker 2: engine would have been the size of a freight train,
Speaker 2: or maybe the size of an engine car. I am
Speaker 2: confused by the thing I read about it. It would
Speaker 2: have involved at least fifty thousand moving parts, and it
Speaker 2: would have required government intervention to make it happen. They
Speaker 2: actually would have had to give more money. And basically
Speaker 2: she writes all these letters being like, hey, Bud, let
Speaker 2: me take over. I can actually make this happen. I'm
Speaker 2: not a bitter old man who everyone's mad at, you know.
Speaker 2: And he eventually relents and he's like, okay, let's make
Speaker 2: this happen. And instead she gets sick. She was never
Speaker 2: particularly healthy, but in her thirty she got way sicker.
Speaker 2: It was cervical cancer, though she didn't know that for
Speaker 2: a while, and she's like taking a lot of medication,
Speaker 2: a lot of laudanum and other stuff for the pain.
Speaker 2: So instead of fundamentally changing the world, which she absolutely
Speaker 2: could have done, she died at thirty six, same age
Speaker 2: that her father died. While she was on her deathbed,
Speaker 2: she requested that Charles Dickens come to her bedside to
Speaker 2: read to her about death from one of his books,
Speaker 2: and she wrote about herself while she died, I begin
Speaker 2: to understand death, which is going on quietly and gradually
Speaker 2: every minute, and will never be a thing of one
Speaker 2: particular moment. And she also, while on her deathbed, made
Speaker 2: a confession that upset her husband gravely, and we will
Speaker 2: never know what it was. And I'm so annoyed. My
Speaker 2: money is on cheating, but I'd rather it was. My father.
Speaker 2: Lord Byron is alive and he's a vampire and it's
Speaker 2: going to turn me into a vampire. Sorry, Bud. She
Speaker 2: let her mother save her soul on her deathbed because
Speaker 2: her mother's like writing her the same notes like save today,
Speaker 2: you know, like, hey, how about today? I want Jesus today.
Speaker 2: And so she religiously converted back to Christianity from people
Speaker 2: like to argue people like try to own her for
Speaker 2: whatever their particular religion or lack of religion is scientific atheism.
Speaker 2: It also could be possible that she was a deist
Speaker 2: like her father, or a pantheist. She wrote a lot
Speaker 2: about God as like she seemed to be kind of
Speaker 2: on a like natural theology page. Somewhere between that and atheism.
Speaker 2: She talked about science was her religion, but not in
Speaker 2: a way where it was like, therefore, I don't need religion.
Speaker 2: I think she meant it. She's just interesting And I
Speaker 2: have no idea if she accepted Christ in earnest, or
Speaker 2: if it was to ease her mother's worries, or she
Speaker 2: just did the like isn't it that that's that logic
Speaker 2: puzzle of like, well you might as well on your
Speaker 2: deathbed because there's no harm in not doing it, or yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I like to think she did it
Speaker 2: for her mom. I mean whatever, like but like it's
Speaker 2: like a nice like, oh I don't need to worry
Speaker 2: about my soul or whatever, you know. I don't know.
Speaker 2: But she insisted she be buried next to her father.
Speaker 2: This was the fact that made me then deep dive.
Speaker 2: Lord Byron, I was just doing mostly Ada and a
Speaker 2: little bit of Charles, and I was like, man, she
Speaker 2: was raised to have nothing to do with her father,
Speaker 2: and she was like, I'm getting buried next to my father.
Speaker 2: Her memorial was engraved with a sonnet that she wrote
Speaker 2: called The Rainbow, which is about how despite the miseries
Speaker 2: and mourning of the world. God gives us rainbow so
Speaker 2: that we can be soothed. It's actually very sweet. I
Speaker 2: actually like it more than I like Lord Byron's poetry
Speaker 2: that I've read, but I've only read a little bit
Speaker 2: of Lord Byron's poetry. Neither her mother nor Babbage came
Speaker 2: to her funeral. I am not sure why, especially her mother.
Speaker 2: It might have been an objection to the location, and
Speaker 2: the obituaries about her from the time are just discussing now.
Speaker 2: I know she seemed really masculine, but don't worry, she
Speaker 2: was still feminine at heart. She liked me music like
Speaker 2: a proper woman, even though she did all that man's stuff.
Speaker 3: How embarrassing that she did so much, and that that's
Speaker 3: what her obituary was concerned with. Did she hear the
Speaker 3: traditional gender roles? Don't worry y'all.
Speaker 2: She totally did. Yeah, God damn it. She had three kids.
Speaker 2: Her oldest son and her did not get along. He
Speaker 2: fucked off to the navy, deserted, and died working in
Speaker 2: a shipyard at twenty six. Her daughter married a poet
Speaker 2: and moved to Southwest Asia and became the world's premier
Speaker 2: breeder of Arabian horses. Her youngest son inherited the title
Speaker 2: and stayed on the estate and was really not into
Speaker 2: his parents, but was into his grandma like Lady Byron,
Speaker 2: and wrote books talking about his grandfather. Lord Byron Babbage
Speaker 2: lived for another eighteen years, never quite making progress on
Speaker 2: his analytical machine, just writing a bunch of different shit.
Speaker 2: He went to war against the street musicians, cranky old Man,
Speaker 2: and the Pair were largely forgotten for a long time,
Speaker 2: but eventually there are mechanical computers, then electro mechanical, then electronic.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forties people started programming. Alan Turing rediscovered the
Speaker 2: Pair through Ada and her translation and notes, and heavily
Speaker 2: influenced him, specifically as he was developing the idea of
Speaker 2: a universal computer instead of the task specific computers that
Speaker 2: were being developed already. So in the end I would
Speaker 2: say yes, they influenced modern computing incredibly and directly, even
Speaker 2: though there's this like skip where they weren't for a minute,
Speaker 2: you know. And the part that makes me sad. A
Speaker 2: lot of things make me sad, A lot of things
Speaker 2: make me very happy. Thing it makes me sad is
Speaker 2: thinking about how it's probably good that the British didn't
Speaker 2: develop the computer during the peak of their empire. I
Speaker 2: want to be happy about cool machines when you add
Speaker 2: the willingness to treat people as numbers to one of
Speaker 2: the largest and worst empires the world has ever suffered under.
Speaker 2: Alan Turing's Lady Lovelace objection is quote an AI can't
Speaker 2: originate anything. That's the simplification of that. I think about
Speaker 2: that constantly now, which you're like, and what's cool about
Speaker 2: that is it's like it's not even a therefore, don't
Speaker 2: do it, right, you know.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, I completely agree, and it's like it's
Speaker 3: not a therefore, don't do it, but it's it's an
Speaker 3: understand this at a fundamental level as you use it.
Speaker 2: And I think that's what sort of gets mixed up.
Speaker 3: It's so easy for people to think about AI as
Speaker 3: like hyper aware computer brains that are learning things, and
Speaker 3: it is just spitting back out at us things that
Speaker 3: we do and know and the biases that we have,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, just understand it that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's the same as I mean, the analytical
Speaker 2: machine I'm sure seemed like magic, you know. And so
Speaker 2: Lovelace was sitting there being like it's not magic. It's
Speaker 2: a machine, and it's I think she'd be doing the
Speaker 2: exact same thing right now if she was alive, you know,
Speaker 2: I think she'd probably be pushing AI and being like,
Speaker 2: it doesn't create things, and it's annoying because AI, to
Speaker 2: me is like a perfect example of this. Like the
Speaker 2: reason it seems bad is there's a lot of reasons,
Speaker 2: but it's because of the economic system we live in,
Speaker 2: because of the systems of control that we live under,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know. In the nineteen eighties, the
Speaker 2: US Department of Defense named its programming language Ada. Apparently
Speaker 2: it's still sometimes used, but apparently wasn't a particularly successful
Speaker 2: programming language. I mean, that's this stuff gets beyond me.
Speaker 2: I don't know as much about all of this. In
Speaker 2: two thousand and two, people built a difference engine based
Speaker 2: on Babbage's notes, and only a single correction was necessary
Speaker 2: to make it work. No one has yet built his
Speaker 2: analytical engine, so no one knows if it works. And
Speaker 2: that's Ada Lovelace, child of Vampire who invented programming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you would have told me that when we
Speaker 3: started this conversation, you were going to start with VAMPI
Speaker 3: and effectively loop back around to computers.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have believed you, but kill Joy, you've done
Speaker 2: it again. Hell yeah, I spend so much money on
Speaker 2: red yarn. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Your your house supposed to be like connections between things
Speaker 3: that seem someone's gonna come into your house one day
Speaker 3: and be like.
Speaker 2: Is she Oka? Like what's going on with Margaret? It
Speaker 2: happens already, but that's mostly because of my decor. A
Speaker 2: lot of it is very medieval?
Speaker 1: Aren't you so glad? I really your statement about I'm
Speaker 1: really glad this wasn't created during this time. I think
Speaker 1: about that so often. I'm like, what if like a
Speaker 1: motherfucker like Oswald Mosley had like an algorithm computer?
Speaker 2: Like ah yeah, like it's such a it makes me
Speaker 2: so sad. I want us to just It's like Elon
Speaker 2: Musk makes Mars seem not cool? How hard do you
Speaker 2: have to work to make Mars seem not cool? Space
Speaker 2: is cool, and the reason it's sketchy is because of
Speaker 2: governments and stuff. But now it's even sketchier because no
Speaker 2: people who are terrible want to go. And how do
Speaker 2: you make.
Speaker 1: Outer space seem Lamelan.
Speaker 2: Musk involved, that's all you gotta do invented a cyberpunk
Speaker 2: looking truck and made it the worst thing that's ever
Speaker 2: happened to a car. Have you'll ever seen one in
Speaker 2: the wild? Yes, dude, I did. I saw one. I did.
Speaker 2: I think the first time one comes into West Virginia
Speaker 2: all the rest of us in regular pickups are going
Speaker 2: to run it off.
Speaker 3: The road will descend on it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I saw one like two weeks ago. Be I did.
Speaker 2: I did? It was? What were your thoughts?
Speaker 1: I was like, I was like, ah, I'm programmed to
Speaker 1: hate this, Like, why is it shaped that way?
Speaker 2: What is happening? I grew up, I grew up on
Speaker 2: I were punk and like, so the only time I
Speaker 2: saw one that looked right was someone had graffitied one,
Speaker 2: okay on. I was like, oh, now it looks like
Speaker 2: it belongs in the cyberpunk dystopia. I was promised. But yeah,
Speaker 2: instead it's like can't drive through a mud puddle. Yeah.
Speaker 3: The only time I see them, it's not doing something
Speaker 3: cool and cyberpunky.
Speaker 2: It's like valeting, yeah, or like getting.
Speaker 3: Rusted because it rained something something decidedly not cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow. If people want to know more about the
Speaker 2: culture of the Internet and the ways in which it
Speaker 2: has both interesting and bad things. Is there anywhere that
Speaker 2: they can do that?
Speaker 3: Well, I would turn them to my podcast. There are
Speaker 3: no girls on the Internet. Also, great transition, Margaret, thank.
Speaker 2: You, thank you, snaps for Magpie. It's my job's security
Speaker 2: staying on top of this. Yeah, people should check that out.
Speaker 2: And if you want to check out more of my stuff,
Speaker 2: I write a substack I post every week. Half of
Speaker 2: the posts are free to everyone and are like more
Speaker 2: political and theoretical or historical or whatever and like on
Speaker 2: these kinds of subjects. The other half are more personal.
Speaker 2: And if you want to know more about my personal life,
Speaker 2: you have to pay me. And I feel fine about that,
Speaker 2: and that's what I have to plug. Sophie, you got
Speaker 2: anything tak Any new podcasts from cool Zone Media people
Speaker 2: could check out?
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want one that's already out, check out
Speaker 1: Exitron's podcast Better Offline. It is a weekly tech podcast
Speaker 1: part of the cool Zone Media network and launching in May.
Speaker 1: We have a new weekly show called sixteenth Minute of
Speaker 1: Fame hosted by Jamie Loftus, So look out for that
Speaker 1: one in early May.
Speaker 2: All right, well, go forth and listen to podcasts, and
Speaker 2: then listen to this one next Monday because we'll be back. Bye,
Speaker 2: Hi everyone.
Speaker 1: Cool Poll Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 1: your podcasts.