The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

If you're not familiar with Lovelace and Babbage, Sydney Padua's delight-filled webcomic, rejoice! It has now made the transition to print. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.) Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage’s mechanical, steam-powered computer, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is wonderfully whimsical, utterly unusual, and, above all, entirely irresistible. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines.īut do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime-for the sake of both London and science. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage’s plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Meet Victorian London’s most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron.

in which Sydney Padua transforms one of the most compelling scientific collaborations into a hilarious series of adventures. THE THRILLING ADVENTURES OF LOVELACE AND BABBAGE.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua