PLANT, Sadie
Zeros + Ones. Digital Women + the New Technoculture

In 1833, a teenage girl met a machine which she came to regard “as a friend.” It was a futuristic device which seemed to have dropped into her world at least a century before its time. Later to be known as Ada Lovelace, she was then Ada Byron, the only child of Annabella, a mathematician who had herself been dubbed Princess of Parallelograms by her husband, Lord Byron. The machine was the Difference Engine, a calculating
system on which the engineer Charles Babbage had been working for many years. “We both went to see the thinking machine (for such it seems) last Monday,” Annabella wrote in her diary. To the amazement of its onlookers, it “raised several Nos. to the 2nd & 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a quadratic Equation.” While most of the audience gazed in astonishment at the machine, Ada “young as she was, understood tts working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”

Published by Harper, 1998
Literature