Yesterday's post focused on voluminous sleeves: you can actually find amazing examples of exaggerated sleeves not just in costume archives and fashion museums, but also in paintings. British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter portrayed for example Ada Lovelace in 1836 wearing a long gown with gargantuan sleeves.
You can admire the painting in a tiny exhibition currently on at London's Science Museum that focuses on Ada Lovelace. While you're there, leave the sleeve obsession behind and focus on this extraordinary character, remembered as Analyst, Metaphysician and founder of Scientific Computing.
Born in London in 1815 Ada was the daughter of Romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), Lady Wentworth. The couple separated a month after Ada was born; four months later, Byron left England forever.
Ada never met her father and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron, nicknamed by her estranged husband as his "princess of parallelograms" for her studies in classical literature, philosophy, science and mathematics.
Since her mother wanted her to be unlike Lord Byron, Ada received an education in music, logic and mathematics, yet Ada seemed to combine poetical imagination and reason from an early age and, in 1828, she produced the design for a flying machine. As the years passed she became acquainted with scientists Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the author Charles Dickens.
In 1833 Ada met Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences. They became friends and started a correspondence focused on topics such as mathematics and logic.
In 1834 Babbage had made plans for a new calculating machine - the Analytical Engine. As the Difference Engine wasn't finished yet, Babbage was refused support for his researches in Britain, but aroused interest in Italian mathematician and military engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, who published an article in French for a Swiss journal on the subject of the Analytical Engine.
Ada - who had in the meantime married William King and acquired the title of Countess of Lovelace - worked on the translation of this article for nine months in 1842-43, and then wrote a set of Notes that were published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism "A.A.L." (Augusta Ada Lovelace).
In his biography Charles Babbage writes about Lovelace: "I (...) suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process."
Ada saw the potential and the future of the machine, that she deemed capable of going beyond mere calculating (Babbage himself mainly focused instead on the calculating aspects of the machine...) and she understood that the computer was suited for "developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever".
In her notes, Lovelace emphasised the difference between the Analytical Engine and previous calculating machines, suggesting that a machine could even make music, and claiming: "[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Ada's Notes on the engine, three times longer than the article she translated, include in Section G (Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G) an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason (while Babbage is remembered as "the father of computers"). Ada, who suffered from ill healthy throughout her life, died of cancer in 1852, and was buried beside Lord Byron.
It's not possible to take pictures of the letters, notes and models featured in the exhibition at London's Science Museum and, to be honest, the event is rather limited and confined to a small room (the Second Floor Studio; by the way, the event it's on until the end of March), yet Lovelace - dubbed by Babbage the "Enchantress of Numbers" - can still be a great inspiration for many working in computer sciences and in creative subjects as well.
Lovelace combined indeed in her researches mathematical analysis and imagination, and this method could be applied to develop innovative ideas in various fields, fashion included.
If you want a stronger connection between fashion and Ada Lovelace, well, read more about her and you will discover that she developed her insights on the application of computing to any process based on logical symbols after seeing the mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns (Babbage's engine used punched cards to make calculations).
The exhibition actually features a portrait of French weaver and merchant Joseph-Marie Jacquard who developed the mechanical Jacquard loom, and a model of a ribbon loom (designed and made by James Heywood in 1870) juxtaposed to a model of the Analytical Engine.
In 1834, Lovelace and her mother toured the industrial north and midlands of Britain, including a ribbon factory in Coventry. Lovelace was interested in the machines, which reminded her of Babbage's Difference Engine. One quote included in the Science Museum exhibition is taken from a letter Lovelace wrote to Babbage in 1843, stating: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
It looks like computer science and textiles have therefore got a lot in common, and that the current experiments in fabrics that often see weavers creating innovative designs with the help of computers have more than one link not just with the jacquard loom but with Ada Lovelace as well.
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