"The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." – Ada Lovelace, Note A (1843)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Observatory of the Blazing World, Quarter of Reason SUBJECT: Recovery; the curve The Observatory is named for Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, the book of 1666 in which a woman passes through a portal at the North Pole into another world and becomes its empress. It is a red-brick tower with a copper dome, and the telescope in the dome still points at the sky out of habit. The real work is done at its foot. The ground floor is filled by the Analytical Engine – Charles Babbage's design, never built in his lifetime, finished in the Cité the night Ada Lovelace arrived. No one admits to having built it. It is brass columns of figure-wheels, a store and a mill, a barrel of punched cards on a Jacquard frame, and the sound, which I had not expected, of something thinking aloud. Ada is twenty-seven, fizzing and frequently unwell, and she talks to it more than to most people. She calls what she does poetical science and means both words. The ...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.