The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The Book

March 19, 2015 Terry Freedman

If, like me, you enjoy reading comics and graphic novels, and are interested in Computing, you may already be familiar with the blog called 2D Goggles Or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. This relates the story of the development of the Difference Engine and other aspects of the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. Their adventures are based on (mostly) real events and episodes, with a lot of poetic licence thrown in! I thoroughly recommend reading the adventures, and I suggest encouraging your students to do so too. It will help them learn about the development of computing and computer programming in an enjoyable way.

A screenshot of two of the panels on the 2D Goggles website

I was delighted to learn yesterday that the long-awaited book is due to be published next month. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua is available for pre-order on Amazon (see link below).

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

Screenshot of the American version of the book's cover

Here’s what the blurb says:

Meet two of Victorian London's greatest geniuses... Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron: mathematician, gambler, and proto-programmer, whose writings contained the first ever appearance of general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. And Charles Babbage, eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, an enormous clockwork calculating machine that would have been the first computer, if he had ever finished it.

But what if things had been different? The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a delightful alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and use it to create runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wider realms of mathematics and, of course, fight crime - for the sake of both London and science. Extremely funny and utterly unusual, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage comes complete with historical curiosities, extensive footnotes and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered computer. And ray guns.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

It’s published by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin, on 21st April 2015.

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