Before Lovelace
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace loom large in the history of computing. These famous 19th-century figures are consistently cited as the origin points for the modern day computer: Babbage hailed as the “father of the computer” and Lovelace as the “first computer programmer” Babbage was a mathematician, inventor, and engineer, famous for his lavish parties and his curmudgeonly attitude. Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was a mathematician and scientist, introduced to Babbage when she was a teenager. The two developed a long professional relationship, which included their collaborative work on a machine called the Analytical Engine, a design for the first mechanical, programmable computer.
Much of what we know about the Analytical Engine comes from Lovelace’s paper on the machine. In 1842, she published “A Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes by the Translator,” a translation of an earlier article by mathematician Luigi Menabrea. Lovelace’s English translation of Menabrea’s article included her own extended appendix in which she elaborated on the machine’s design and proposed several early computer programs. Her notes were instrumental for Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computer in the 1930s. His work would later provide the basis for the Colossus computer, the world’s first large-scale programmable, electronic, digital computer, developed to assist with cryptography work during World War II. Machines like the Colossus were the precursors to the computers we carry around today in our pockets and our backpacks.
With Babbage and Lovelace’s work as the foundation and the Turing machine as the next step toward what we now think of as computers, the history of computing seems to belong solely in the realm of mathematics and engineering. Students looking for jobs in Silicon Valley—that global hub of computational innovation—seek out college degrees in Applied Mathematics, Software Engineering, and Computer Science. Our understanding of what computational work looks like has become limited because the history of computing has been dominated by figures in STEM fields. But other figures and stories belong in this history too.
A Jacquard loom showing information punch cards, Stephen C. Dickson, National Museum of Scotland, 2019 (Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0).
One part of the history of computing that is much less familiar is the role the textile industry played in Babbage and Lovelace’s plans for the Analytical Engine. In a key line from Lovelace’s publication, she observes, “we may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” The Jacquard Loom was a mechanical weaving system controlled by a chain of punched cards. The punched cards were fed into the weaving loom and dictated which threads were activated as the machine wove each row. The result was an intricate textile pattern that had been “programmed” by the punch cards.
Impressed by the ingenuity of this automation system, Babbage and Lovelace used punched cards as the processing input for the Analytical Engine. The punched cards, Lovelace explains in her notes, contain “the impress of whatever special function we may desire to develop or to tabulate” using the machine.
If computation and textiles are inextricably linked in Babbage and Lovelace’s computational design, it is possible to establish a wider scope for what fits in the history of computing. It is not just a history of developments in mathematics, technology, and engineering but also a history of art and particular kinds of craft practice. By excavating a longer, deeper history of computing, we also broaden our recognition of who was involved in the development of computers, and we can reconsider our knowledge of women’s roles in this history. In particular, we find many examples of women exploring the relationship among textile, mathematical, and mechanical work in the early days of another important new technology: the printing press.
One such example was Elizabeth Lucar (1510-1537), who was praised on her tombstone for the many skills of her busy hands.
She wrought all Needle workes that women exercise,
With Pen, Frame, or Stoole, all Pictures artificiall,
Curious Knots or Trailes, what fancy would devise,
Beasts, Birds, or Flowers, even as things naturall:
Three manner hands could she write, them faire all.
This epitaph cites several different kinds of work—writing, drawing, and needlework—all skills we might expect to find in the repertoire of an upper-class Englishwoman in the early 1500’s. Most unusually, though, in addition to this list of Lucar’s skills with texts and textiles, the epitaph also notes her exceptional talent for mathematical accounting, referred to as “algorisme,” an earlier form of algorithm.
To speake of Algorisme, or accounts, in every fashion,
Of women, few like (I thinke) in all this Nation.
Today, we associate the word “algorithm” with computer programs, but the mathematical concept of algorithm has been around much longer than computers. In the 16th century, “algorisme” was the term for arithmetic that used Arabic rather than Roman numerals. It was also associated with a particular kind of skill in calculation—a skill related to the crafts of writing, drawing, and needlework referenced on Lucar’s tombstone. One early source describes “algorym” as the “craft of Nombryng [Numbering].” It is only in the 19th century that “algorithm” becomes defined as a procedure or set of rules followed in computer calculations. Based on this contemporary definition, we credit Lovelace with writing the first algorithm. But Lucar’s tombstone prompts us to consider what women’s algorithmic work might have looked like before Lovelace.
“If computation and textiles are inextricably linked in Babbage and Lovelace’s computational design, it is possible to establish a wider scope for what fits in the history of computing.”
Three centuries after Lucar’s death Babbage and Lovelace would use a pattern-making system from mechanical textile work as the foundation for computer programming. If the Jacquard Loom consequently fits into our story about the history of computing, Lucar’s combination of textile and mathematical work also qualifies as an early kind of computational technology. Lucar’s “algorisme” work, particularly given her husband’s connections to the London Merchant Taylor’s Company, would have involved the precise measurements and calculations needed for clothes making and tailoring. It would have involved the study of pattern books and the technical skills necessary to translate a pattern from paper to textile. It would have involved what Rebecca Ortenberg calls the “science” of needlework: “skills like modeling, scaling, and spatial problem solving.”
We can see the importance of Lucar’s computational work more clearly when we think about it as one example of a much larger pattern of early women’s work with texts, textiles, and calculations. Another figure who belongs in this history is Esther Inglis (1571-1624), a highly skilled calligrapher who worked as a scribe and bookmaker for members of the English and Scottish courts. Her calligraphic specialty was imitating printed books. Writing during the first print publication boom in England, Inglis would take books printed on a printing press and recreate the text—every last detail—by hand. A particularly famous example of her work is her self-portrait, handcrafted in its entirety, text and ornamental borders included.
Esther Inglis, self-portrait, ink on paper, produced in Edinburgh, 1599. Courtesy of the Folder Shakespeare Library | CC BY-SA 4.0
In her exploration of the relationship between machine- and hand-made texts, Inglis called attention to the work of her hands as a kind of technology. This is not the explicit link to computational language we saw with Lucar’s work, with the direct reference to “algorisme.” It might be a bit harder to fit Inglis’ work into the history of computation—but that is precisely the point. The history of computing might not always look like computation as we know it today, but examples like Inglis’ handiwork help us think more broadly and creatively about the different kinds of practices that laid the foundations for modern computing. Inglis was a skilled calligrapher—a kind of early word processor—whose vast technical knowledge of writing allowed her to investigate the relationship between her own writing hand and the printing press, a new “writing” technology. Her work involved recognizing and reproducing minute details with an almost un-human eye.
One of Inglis’ contemporaries, scholar and theologian Andrew Melville, praised her hand as a kind of machine. Her “[o]ne hand,” Melville noted, “expresses a thousand figures, animating feeble signs with painted figures.” In Melville’s words, we can hear early echoes of how we now think about the relationship between a computer program and a computer: Like encoded characters in a computer program, “feeble signs” are “animated” by Inglis’ hand—the computer, which makes the encoded characters intelligible for its user.
Textiles also have a place in Inglis’ story. In several of her manuscripts, Inglis experimented with a stitched font—her letters, mimicking a block, serif mechanical type, look as if they are held on the page with stitched thread. When Lovelace and Babbage borrowed from the textile industry to design their computational device, the fields of weaving, mathematics, and engineering collided. Inglis took a needlework technique—the stitch—and incorporated it into her exploration of the relationship between hand and machine. On her manuscript pages, she fused the crafts of needlework, writing, and mechanical print.
What are the stories we tell about the history of computing? When those stories are centered on figures like Babbage, Lovelace, and Turing, we neglect other kinds of work that has informed modern computational practice. When we look to alternative histories and consider unexpected origin points, we find a wider network of people and practices that prompt us to reassess our understanding of what computing looks like. Lucar and Inglis help us begin to establish a longer, richer history of women’s computational work, an important step as we continue to challenge and correct the gender imbalance in computing fields today.
Further Reading
Frye, Susan. Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Harlizius-Klück, Ellen. “Weaving as Binary Art and the Algebra of Patterns.” Textile 15.2 (2017): 176-197.
Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics Manufacture,” American Quarterly 66.4 (December 2014): 919-941.
Ziegler, Georgianna. “Paper Portraits: The Self-Fashioning of Esther Inglis.” Art Herstory, 2020.
Image credit: "Livre de l'Ecclesiaste", An example of decorative borders and calligraphy text in Latin by Esther Inglis, 1601 via Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
