Engines

NY Times reports on the efforts of the Science Museum in London to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine for solving mathematical problems through a series of small steps prgogrammed by punch cards:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/science/computer-experts-building-1830s-babbage-analytical-engine.html?ref=science&gwh=6D33E46F90DF48EA42A1B46497EAF539 

This is the machine that would have made Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's Victorian computer world possible, rather than the simpler Difference Engine (already built by the Science Museum and curator Doron Swade).  But of course the earlier machine had by far the more resonant name.  This is the one for which Ada Byron wrote her brief algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers, in a translation and expansion of an Italian account of the Analytical,  The Times article says her notes "were signed only with her initials because at the time women were not thought to be authors," a somewhat knee-jerk reaction, or maybe a scientist-writes-history take -- of course Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mrs. Gaskell, etc., were pretty open about being authors; Ada was being modest, as merely an annotator of someone else's work, and because she was not only a woman but a Countess, and the wife of a Lord:  that's a better (though not a universal) reason to avoid having your name in print.