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Ada is like one of those Christian symbols of Temperance or Charity or Forgiveness, except that in her case she is Enthus...
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But Ada cannot read my thoughts, and without any thought of her own she spread her drawings across my knees, showing me the workings of what Babbage calls the Analytical Engine. It can be instructed – programmed, she says is the correct term – by using the card-punch system of the jacquard loom. Whereas the loom-cards instruct on the design of flower patterns on the cloth, the machine-cards are a mathematical language. But essentially this works as does a loom.
desideratum,
I took her hand. Your father, Byron, and my husband, Shelley, were remarkable men, my own father, William Godwin, was a remarkable man (she nodded), yet, my dear, being remarkable is no guarantee of human feeling.
Oh, yes, she said, though do you know that I was forbidden by Byron, expressly, in his written wishes, to read poetry or be influenced by the life of the imagination in any way, shape or form? My mother was herself a talented mathematician, and she engaged a mathematics tutor for me at an early age. It was
hoped that numbers would tame the Byronic blood in my veins.
The machine, once built – could it think? I said. No! No, she replied, but it could retrieve any amount of information in any combination on any subject. I wrote a paper suggesting that the machine might also make music – that is where the joke of the Patent Novel-Writer began. The music would not be inspirational but it would be made of what exists already. Only the human mind can accomplish the leap of thought that is a leap of genius. But let us be clear, the majority of human minds are not geniuses and have no need of genius. They have need of instruction and information. That is what this
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Your own books, no, replied Ada, but you cannot have every book, or even many books, and does not the word LIBER in Latin mean ‘free’ as well as ‘book’?
Any butcher will sell you one. I have bought them often enough when we had little money. The thing most prized in humans is the cheapest meat: The heart.
