#and ada lovelace but i have to do less on her because im already reading abt her

[oysters-aint-for-me]

if i were a better playwright id write a one-acter in which lord byron and ada lovelace, having been buried next to each other, confront each other as father and daughter in the afterlife

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Magical Machines In RoL: A short Round-Up

Shortening because this is long.

There’s a surprising number of  magical or mysterious devices we keep encountering:

The Pin in one of the Cat-Girls temple in Moon Over Soho

The Cunning Device in A Rare Book of Cunning Device

Lesley’s Phone-Bomb in The Hanging Tree

“Mary Engine”, (Might be related to Ada Lovelace’s design, as per Peter’s observations, might be some type of early calculator?)

“Some Type of Device” Babbage (Who worked with Lovelace) was working on for the Folly, according to Nightingale

And then there’s Lady Helena’s insistence that her tradition’s Magic Salons go back to Caroline from Ansbach, who, Peter notes, also hung about with one Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (Who was – hopefully – not a machine, though he did write like he was running out of time and was generally low-key bonkers)

First three are kind of ??? so let’s look at the last three (+) instead

Why the fuck is Leibniz relevant for us?

Now, I’m not one for Great-Man-Histroy, but even I have to admit that Leibniz was, again, kind of off-the-Weird-Genius-charts. If you, say, want a literary or historical counterweight to Isaac Newton in Allsasser-Excentric-Genuis-Bullshit, he’s the man. Literally. Anygays. There are five(ish) things that connect Leibniz to the rest of the RoL Universe;

He’s connected with Caroline from Ansbach, as stated above

He dabbled in alchemy (well, he dabbled in everything)

He got into an academic bitch fight with Isaac Newton (Because either on of them plagiarized the other or they just invented the same Important Math Thing at roughtly the same time – we will never know ~~~)

He either  invented the binary code*  (aka thing that makes Computers go be-bop) or greatly improved it/anticipated a bunch of logic-probelms with it, depending on who you ask

He revolutionized early calculators by inventing the Leibniz Wheel (aka, the things that made Calculators go shrrrrrrrrrr for 200 years before things got funky and analytical)

(All of this is somewhere between the late 1660s – 1716s) (* same problem of the )

Early Calculators and Leibniz Wheels

(Aka a long and rambly part that you can skip if you don’t want to learn about Fancy Early Tech)

Early Calculators where mostly stuff like fancy modefied Abaci, but in the 1640s this french dude Pascal build an Arithmetic Machine, which used interlockign wheels to do what it says on the tin crunch numbers. This machine was both very cool and very suck-tastic; it could do math for you (yay); But it was also super expensive, hard to transport, harder to build, even harder to opperate and therefore prone to human error (boo). It was also limited to addition an subtraction. It didn’t really catch on.

Along comes Leibniz and designes the Leibniz Wheel (which, unlike the A.M.’s wheels, which needed 10 rotations per single digit, only needed a single rotation for any operation involving a single-digit number and could, in conjunction with other Leibniz wheels, carry over into higher digits more easily. He used it to build the first really usable Calculator(s). This Stepped Reckoner (which is what you get when you badly translate Stufenrechner) was easier to operate and it could perform all four basic operations. You could actually use it. Or, as this book puts it:

“The demand for Leibniz’s machines was largely for it’s help in calculating tables of common mathematical functions. In the seventeenth century producing one of these tables might have been a lifes’s work.”

Just, in case you wanted to know how rad people thought this was.

Here’s a link to a video of an animated Leibniz Wheel in use.

Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine

Babbage’s Difference Engine (1820s/30s) and Analytical Engine (1830s), genreally considered the ‘first computer’ if they’d actually build it, was basically the attempt to stack as many Leibniz Wheel-ish Wheels (they used a variation, btu it‘s afaik the same concept) as possible on top of each other and operate them all simultaneously by using the technology of Joseph Marie Jacquard’s “programmable” Loom (invented around 1800, uses Punchcards to weave different & complex patterns) to brute-force complex mathematical problems.

The Difference Engine was supposed to use this system to calculate and print mathematical tables. It was supposed to be able to calculate polynoms and use sinus and cosinus and such (!!! I know that sounds easy when we all have a graphical calculator lying around at home like a useless math brick, but this is so cool!)

The Analytical Engine was a step up from this, as it should have functioned without human intervention and was upposed to be fully programmable. It even had something like 10 kB memory space. It was a computer, is what it is.

Now, Ada Lovelace took one long look at that and went “well, clearly this isn’t cool enough yet” because she was born a Byron and Just That Extra. She was also apparently called the Enchantress of Numbers by Babbage ... just ... like ... maybe ... okay.

Anyways, Ada, while trying to explain what the fuck this thing was supposed to do to the general science public, casually invented the analytical computer program. As you do. As you fucking do.

(Still using this book as well as this book btw) 

To make this clear: Babbage is that one kid who’s always finished first in Math Class because he actually knows how to make tht Unloved Math Brick Of Ugh do what he wants; Ada is that kid who wrote her own game for her Math Brick, hasn’t payed attention since Grade 6 and is currently reading a college-level informatic book under the table. In the first row, Isaac and Gottfried are throwing chalk at each other. Well, you get what I mean.

The Mary Engine

The Mary Engine is produced in the 1840s and is small enough to fit into the store room’s shelves. It’s not a Differentiation or an Analytical Engine, and probably also not a Stepped Reckoner.

But. This thing is actually incredible. The Mary Engine is TINY.

Babbage never finished either Engine. They only build on around 1900 iirr. Second off, the Engines where fuck off huge. Things the size of the Mary Engine really only came around in the early 1900 or so. ‘Enigmas’ (aka Rotor-Crypto-Machines, which are way less complex then actual calculators), while ‘invented’ shortly after WWI all over the world, only became small enough to be moved comfortably on-person during WWII. How the fuck did they get the Mary Engine that small in the 1840s?

If there’s anything I’m missing (or that I’ve gotten horribly wrong, because I’m a computer noob in the end) hit me up so that I can amend this thing. I don’t really have a Grand Fandom Theory or anything. This is just a list (+ minor explanations) of Cool Stuff. A lot of people probably already know this stuff, but I had fun writing this and it might bring people who weren’t raised in Leibniz-Central up to speed somewhat.

Now, another thing, because someone pointed it out a while ago (and I can’t! Believe! I didn’t make that connection!); Linden-Limmer. I really should have seen that one: I fucking live here. So: Hannover, Germany is kind of a bonkers town.