I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.

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The Internet was originally built to facilitate collaboration. By contrast, personal computers, especially those meant to be used at home, were devised as tools for individual creativity. For more than a decade, beginning in the early 1970s, the development of networks and that of home computers proceeded separately from one another. They finally began coming together in the late 1980s with the advent of modems, online services, and the Web. Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

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I began work on this book more than a decade ago. It grew out of my fascination with the digital-age advances I had witnessed and also from my biography of Benjamin Franklin, who was an innovator, inventor, publisher, postal service pioneer, and all-around information networker and entrepreneur.

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Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences. They believed that beauty mattered. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

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The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, Ada had inherited her father’s romantic spirit, a trait that her mother tried to temper by having her tutored in mathematics. The combination produced in Ada a love for what she took to calling “poetical science,” which linked her rebellious imagination to her enchantment with numbers. For many, including her father, the rarefied sensibilities of the Romantic era clashed with the techno-excitement of the Industrial Revolution. But Ada was comfortable at the intersection of both eras.

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Babbage’s galvanizing weekly salons, which included up to three hundred guests, brought together lords in swallow-tail coats and ladies in brocade gowns with writers, industrialists, poets, actors, statesmen, explorers, botanists, and other “scientists,” a word that Babbage’s friends had recently coined.3 By bringing scientific scholars into this exalted realm, said one noted geologist, Babbage “successfully asserted the rank in society due to science.”4 The evenings featured dancing, readings, games, and lectures accompanied by an assortment of seafood, meat, fowl, exotic drinks, and iced desserts. The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings. Astronomers set up telescopes, researchers displayed their electrical and magnetic contrivances, and Babbage allowed guests to play with his mechanical dolls. The centerpiece of the evenings—and one of Babbage’s many motives for hosting them—was his demonstration of a model portion of his Difference Engine, a mammoth mechanical calculating contraption that he was building in a fireproof structure adjacent to his home. Babbage would display the model with great drama, cranking its arm as it calculated a sequence of numbers and, just as the audience began to get bored, showed how the pattern could suddenly change based on instructions that had been coded into the machine.5 Those who were especially intrigued would be invited through the yard to the former stables, where the complete machine was being constructed.

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Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, marveled that it was a “thinking machine.” As for Ada, who would later famously note that machines could never truly think, a friend who went with them to the demonstration reported, “Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”

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She was an exemplar of the era of Romantic science, which was characterized by a lyrical enthusiasm for invention and discovery. It was a period that brought “imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work,” Richard Holmes wrote in The Age of Wonder. “It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.”8

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At the heart of both eras were innovators who combined imagination and passion with wondrous technology, a mix that produced Ada’s poetical science and what the twentieth-century poet Richard Brautigan would call “machines of loving grace.”

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Ada inherited her poetic and insubordinate temperament from her father, but he was not the source of her love for machinery. He was, in fact, a Luddite. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, given in February 1812 when he was twenty-four, Byron defended the followers of Ned Ludd, who were rampaging against mechanical weaving machines.

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Annabella had been tutored in mathematics, which amused Lord Byron, and during their courtship he had joked about his own disdain for the exactitude of numbers. “I know that two and two make four—and should be glad to prove it too if I could,” he wrote, “though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert two and two into five it would give me much greater pleasure.” Early on, he affectionately dubbed her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” But when the marriage began to sour, he refined that mathematical image: “We are two parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet.” Later, in the first canto of his epic poem Don Juan, he would mock her: “Her favourite science was the mathematical. . . . She was a walking calculation.”

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When Lady Byron became convinced of her husband’s perfidy, she thereafter called her daughter by her middle name. Five weeks later she packed her belongings into a carriage and fled to her parents’ country home with the infant Ada. Ada never saw her father again. Lord Byron left the country that April after Lady Byron, in letters so calculating that she earned his sobriquet of “Mathematical Medea,” threatened to expose his alleged incestuous and homosexual affairs as a way to secure a separation agreement that gave her custody of their child.13 The opening of canto 3 of Childe Harold, written a few weeks later, invokes Ada as his muse: Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child! Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart? When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, And then we parted. Byron wrote these lines in a villa by Lake Geneva, where he was staying with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife, Mary. It rained relentlessly. Trapped inside for days, Byron suggested they write horror stories. He produced a fragment of a tale about a vampire, one of the first literary efforts on that subject, but Mary’s story was the one that became a classic: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Playing on the ancient Greek myth of the hero who crafted a living man out of clay and snatched fire from the gods for human use, Frankenstein was the story of a scientist who galvanized a man-made assemblage into a thinking human. It was a cautionary tale about technology and science. It also raised the question that would become associated with Ada: Can man-made machines ever truly think?

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Lord Byron, by contrast, kept a picture of Ada on his desk wherever he wandered, and his letters often requested news or portraits of her. When she was seven, he wrote to Augusta, “I wish you would obtain from Lady B some accounts of Ada’s disposition. . . . Is the girl imaginative? . . . Is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in the family.” Lady Byron…

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Byron, who had been wandering through Italy, writing and having an assortment of affairs, grew bored and decided to enlist in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. He sailed for Missolonghi, where he took command of part of the rebel army and prepared to attack a Turkish fortress. But before he could engage in battle, he caught a violent cold that was made worse by his doctor’s decision to treat him by bloodletting. On April 19, 1824, he died. According to his…

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Lady Byron wanted to make sure that Ada did not turn out like her father, and part of her strategy was to have the girl rigorously study math, as if it were an antidote to poetic imagination. When Ada, at age five, showed a preference for geography, Lady Byron ordered that the subject be replaced by additional arithmetic lessons, and her governess soon proudly reported, “She adds up sums of five or six rows of figures with accuracy.” Despite these efforts, Ada developed some of her father’s propensities. She had an affair as a young teenager with one of her tutors, and when they were caught and the tutor banished, she tried to run away from home to…

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After her dangerous liaison with her tutor, and inspired by Babbage’s Difference Engine, she decided on her own, at eighteen, to begin a new series of lessons. “I must cease to think of living for pleasure or self-gratification,” she wrote her new tutor. “I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems to keep my imagination from running wild. . . . It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics.” He agreed with the prescription: “You are right in supposing that your chief resource and safeguard at the present is in a course of severe intellectual study. For this purpose there is no subject to be compared to Mathematics.”…

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her mother took her on a trip through the British industrial midlands to see the new factories and machinery. Ada was particularly impressed with an automated weaving loom that used punch cards to direct the creation of the desired fabric patterns, and she drew a sketch of how it worked. Her father’s famous speech in the House of Lords had defended the Luddites who had smashed such looms because of their fear of what technology might inflict on humanity. But Ada waxed poetical about them and saw the…

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Somerville had just finished writing one of her great works, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, in which she tied together developments in astronomy, optics, electricity, chemistry, physics, botany, and geology.I Emblematic of the time, it provided a unified sense of the extraordinary endeavors of discovery that were under way. She proclaimed in her opening sentence, “The progress of modern science, especially within the last five years, has…

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“Gracious God, who has so mercifully given you an opportunity of turning aside from the dangerous paths, has given you a friend and guardian,” Lady Byron wrote her daughter, adding that she should use this opportunity to “bid adieu” to all of her “peculiarities, caprices, and self-seeking.”

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Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times. Despite her mother’s efforts, she remained her father’s daughter, with a poetic sensibility that allowed her to view an equation as a brushstroke that painted an aspect of nature’s physical splendor, just as she could visualize the “wine-dark sea” or a woman who “walks in beauty, like the night.” But math’s appeal went even deeper; it was spiritual. Math “constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world,” she said, and it allows us to portray the “changes of mutual relationship” that unfold in creation. It is “the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works.”

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ability to apply imagination to science characterized the Industrial Revolution as well as the computer revolution, for which Ada was to become a patron saint. She was able, as she told Babbage, to understand the connection between poetry and analysis in ways that transcended her father’s talents. “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; for with me the two go together indissolubly,” she wrote.23

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reengagement with math, she told her mother, spurred her creativity and led to an “immense development of imagination, so much so that I feel no doubt if I continue my studies I shall in due time be a Poet.”24 The whole concept of imagination, especially as it was applied to technology, intrigued her. “What is imagination?” she asked in an 1841 essay. “It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless,…

Note: [r] find this essay

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Ada believed she possessed special, even supernatural abilities, what she called “an intuitive perception of hidden things.” Her exalted view of her talents led her to pursue aspirations that were unusual for an aristocratic woman and mother in the early Victorian age. “I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature,” she explained…

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When he was a child, his mother took him to many of the exhibition halls and museums of wonder that were springing up in London in the early 1800s. At one in Hanover Square, a proprietor aptly named Merlin invited him up to the attic workshop where there was a variety of mechanical dolls, known as “automata.” One was a silver female dancer, about a foot tall, whose arms moved with grace and who held in her hand a bird that could wag its tail, flap its wings, and open its beak. The Silver Lady’s ability to display feelings and personality captured the boy’s fancy. “Her eyes were full of imagination,” he recalled. Years later he…

Note: Silver Lady as falling for a machine [e]

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One day Babbage was in the Analytical Society’s room working on a table of logarithms that was littered with discrepancies. Herschel asked him what he was thinking. “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” Babbage answered. To this idea of a mechanical method for tabulating logarithms Herschel replied, “It is quite possible.”28 In 1821 Babbage turned his attention to building such a machine.

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In the 1640s, Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, created a mechanical calculator to reduce the drudgery of his father’s work as a tax supervisor. It had spoked metal wheels with the digits 0 through 9 on their circumference. To add or subtract numbers, the operator used a stylus to dial a number, as if using a rotary phone, then dialed in the next number; an armature carried or borrowed a 1 when necessary. It became the first calculator to be patented and sold commercially. Thirty years later, Gottfried Leibniz, the German mathematician and philosopher, tried to improve upon Pascal’s contraption with a “stepped reckoner” that had the capacity to multiply and divide. It had a hand-cranked cylinder with a set of teeth that meshed with counting wheels. But Leibniz ran into a problem that would be a recurring theme of the digital age. Unlike Pascal, an adroit engineer who could combine scientific theories with mechanical genius, Leibniz had little engineering skill and did not surround himself with those who did. So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he was unable to produce reliably working versions of his device. Nevertheless, his core concept, known as the Leibniz wheel, would influence calculator design through the time of Babbage. Babbage knew of the devices of Pascal and Leibniz, but he was trying to do something more complex. He wanted to construct a mechanical method for tabulating logarithms, sines, cosines, and tangents.II To do so, he adapted an idea that the French mathematician Gaspard de Prony came up with in the 1790s. In order to create logarithm and trigonometry tables, de Prony broke down the operations into very simple steps that involved only addition and subtraction. Then he provided easy instructions so that scores of human laborers, who knew little math, could perform these simple tasks and pass along their answers to the next set of laborers. In other words, he created an assembly line, the great industrial-age innovation that was memorably analyzed by Adam Smith in his description of the division of labor in a pin-making factory. After a trip to Paris in which he heard of de Prony’s method, Babbage wrote, “I conceived all of a sudden the idea of applying the same method to the immense work with which I had been burdened, and to manufacture logarithms as one manufactures pins.”29

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How did it work? The Difference Engine used vertical shafts with disks that could be turned to any numeral. These were attached to cogs that could be cranked in order to add that numeral to (or subtract it from) a disk on an adjacent shaft. The contraption could even “store” the interim results on another shaft. The main complexity was how to “carry” or “borrow” when necessary, as we do with pencils when we calculate 36 + 19 or 42 − 17. Drawing on Pascal’s devices, Babbage came up with a few ingenious contrivances that allowed the cogs and shafts to handle the calculation. The machine was, in concept, a true marvel. Babbage even figured out a way to get it to create a table of prime numbers up to 10 million. The British government was impressed, at least initially. In 1823 it gave him seed money of £1,700 and would eventually sink more than £17,000, twice the cost of a warship, into the device during the decade Babbage spent trying to build it. But the project ran into two problems. First, Babbage and his hired engineer did not quite have the skills to get the device working. Second, he began dreaming up something

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Babbage’s new idea, which he conceived in 1834, was a general-purpose computer that could carry out a variety of different operations based on programming instructions given to it. It could perform one task, then be made to switch and perform another. It could even tell itself to switch tasks—or alter its “pattern of action,” as Babbage explained—based on its own interim calculations. Babbage named this proposed machine the Analytical Engine. He was one hundred years ahead of his time. The Analytical Engine was the product of what Ada Lovelace, in her essay on imagination, had called “the Combining Faculty.”

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Ada Lovelace fully appreciated the concept of a general-purpose machine. More important, she envisioned an attribute that might make it truly amazing: it could potentially process not only numbers but any symbolic notations, including musical and artistic ones. She saw the poetry in such an idea, and she set out to encourage others to see it as well. She barraged Babbage with letters, some of which verged on cheeky, even though he was twenty-four years her senior. In one, she described the solitaire game using twenty-six marbles, where the goal is to execute jumps so that only one marble remains. She had mastered it but was trying to derive a “mathematical formula . . . on which the solution depends, and which can be put into symbolic language.” Then she asked, “Am I too imaginative for you? I think not.”32 Her goal was to work with Babbage as his publicist and partner in trying to get support to build the Analytical Engine. “I am very anxious to talk to you,” she wrote in early 1841. “I will give you a hint on what. It strikes me that at some future time . . . my head may be made by you subservient to some of your purposes and plans. If so, if ever I could be worthy or capable of being used by you, my head will be yours.”33

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One of Ada’s friends suggested that she produce a translation of Menabrea’s piece for Scientific Memoirs, a periodical devoted to scientific papers. This was her opportunity to serve Babbage and show her talents. When she finished, she informed Babbage, who was pleased but also somewhat surprised. “I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted,” Babbage said.34 She replied that the thought had not occurred to her. Back then, women generally did not publish scientific papers. Babbage suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir, a project that she embraced with enthusiasm. She began working on a section she called “Notes by the Translator” that ended up totaling 19,136 words, more than twice the length of Menabrea’s original article. Signed “A.A.L.,” for Augusta Ada Lovelace, her “Notes” became more famous than the article and were destined to make her an iconic figure in the history of computing.35

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In her “Notes,” Ada explored four concepts that would have historical resonance a century later when the computer was finally born. The first was that of a general-purpose machine, one that could not only perform a preset task but could be programmed and reprogrammed to do a limitless and changeable array of tasks. In other words, she envisioned the modern computer. This concept was at the core of her “Note A,” which emphasized the distinction between Babbage’s original Difference Engine and his proposed new Analytical Engine. “The particular function whose integral the Difference Engine was constructed to tabulate is Δ7ux = 0,” she began, explaining that its purpose was the computation of nautical tables. “The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever.” This was done, she wrote, by “the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.” Even more than Babbage, Ada realized the significance of this. It meant that the machine could be like the type of computer we now take for granted: one that does not merely do a specific arithmetic task but can be a general-purpose machine. She explained: The bounds of arithmetic were outstepped the moment the idea of applying cards had occurred. The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere “calculating machines.” It holds a position wholly its own. In enabling a mechanism to combine together general symbols, in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes.37 Those sentences are somewhat clotted, but they are worth reading carefully. They describe the essence of modern computers.

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Ada’s second noteworthy concept sprang from this description of a general-purpose machine. Its operations, she realized, did not need to be limited to math and numbers. Drawing on De Morgan’s extension of algebra into a formal logic, she noted that a machine such as the Analytical Engine could store, manipulate, process, and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols: words and logic and music and anything else we might use symbols to convey.

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“It may be desirable to explain that by the word ‘operation,’ we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may.” A computer operation, she noted, could alter the relationship not just between numbers but between any symbols that were logically related. “It 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.” The Analytical Engine could, in theory, even perform operations on musical notations: “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…

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This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data, or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines. Even Babbage failed to see this fully; he focused on numbers. But Ada realized that the digits on the cogs could represent things other than mathematical quantities. Thus did she make the conceptual leap from machines that were mere calculators to ones that we now call computers. Doron Swade, a computer historian who specializes in studying Babbage’s engines, has declared this one of Ada’s…

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To show how the Analytical Engine could generate Bernoulli numbers, Ada described a sequence of operations and then made a chart showing how each would be coded into the machine. Along the way, she helped to devise the concepts of subroutines (a sequence of instructions that performs a specific task, such as computing a cosine or calculating compound interest, and can be dropped into larger programs as needed) and a recursive loop (a sequence of instructions that repeats itself).IV These were made possible by the punch-card mechanism. Seventy-five cards were needed to generate each number, she explained, and then the process became iterative as that number was fed back into the process to generate the next one. “It will be obvious that the very same seventy-five variable cards may be repeated for the computation of every succeeding number,” she wrote. She envisioned a library of commonly used subroutines, something that her intellectual heirs, including women such as Grace Hopper at Harvard and Kay McNulty and Jean Jennings at the University of Pennsylvania, would create a century later. In addition, because…

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When it got worked out, she added a contribution that was primarily her own: a table and diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step, including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any C++ coder today. “I have worked incessantly and most successfully all day,” she wrote Babbage. “You will admire the Table and Diagram extremely. They have been made out with extreme care.” From all of the letters it is clear that she did the table herself; the only help came from her husband, who did not understand the math but was willing to methodically trace in ink what she had done in pencil. “Lord L is at this moment kindly inking it all over for me,” she wrote Babbage. “I had to do it in pencil.”

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There was one other significant concept that she introduced in her “Notes,” which harked back to the Frankenstein story produced by Mary Shelley after that weekend with Lord Byron. It raised what is still the most fascinating metaphysical topic involving computers, that of artificial intelligence: Can machines think? Ada believed not. A machine such as Babbage’s could perform operations as instructed, she asserted, but it could not come up with ideas or intentions of its own. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in her “Notes.” “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” A century later this assertion would be dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” by the computer pioneer Alan Turing (see chapter

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Ada’s response to the dispute was a bizarre sixteen-page letter to Babbage, poured forth in a frenzy, that vividly displayed her moodiness, exultations, delusions, and passions. She cajoled and berated him, praised and denigrated him. At one point she contrasted their motives. “My own uncompromising principle is to endeavour to love truth and God before fame and glory,” she claimed. “Yours is to love truth and God; but to love fame, glory, honours yet more.” She proclaimed that she saw her own inevitable fame as being of an exalted nature: “I wish to add my might toward expounding and interpreting the Almighty and his laws. . . . I should feel it no small glory if I were able to be one of his most noted prophets.”44 Having laid that groundwork, she offered him a deal: they should forge a business and political partnership. She would apply her connections and persuasive pen to his endeavor to build his Analytical Engine if—and only if—he would let her have control over his business decisions. “I give you the first choice and offer of my services and my intellect,” she wrote. “Do not lightly reject them.” The letter read in parts like a venture capital term sheet or a prenuptial agreement, complete with the possibility of arbitrators. “You will undertake to abide wholly by the judgment of myself (or of any persons whom you may now please to name as referees, whenever we may differ) on all practical matters,” she declared. In return, she promised, she would “lay before you in the course of a year or two explicit and honorable propositions for executing your engine.”45

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As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper. Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates. She had an affair with a gambling partner who then blackmailed her, forcing her to pawn her family jewels. During the final year of her life, she fought an exceedingly painful battle with uterine cancer accompanied by constant hemorrhaging. When she died in 1852, at age thirty-six, she was buried, in accordance with one of her last requests, in a country grave next to the poet father she never knew, who had died at the same age.

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The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.

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