by John Crowley
S
From: “Smith”
To: “Lilith”
Subject: Process
Lilith—
I don’t think it’s exactly fair that you think I am not getting the job done that we decided on. I know the reports I promised you have not been what you expected to see, but I think that what’s really important is that I not do anything to harm the relationship that’s building here with Georgiana. She cc’d me the letter she sent you and you have to admit she’s still fully engaged in the process and considering the things she said about me personally in that letter I think I am doing the right things here to keep her focused and aware of the project and the project’s needs.
I understand that keeping the site moving along without me there is harder, but if you look at some of the old pages, like the Curie pages, you’ll see I’ve been cleaning up and making the changes on your bugs list. It’s not always easy to find a place to work now that I am in Georgiana’s house. The room is kind of small. She talks on the phone a lot, and she likes to wander around the house while she talks. But think of the money we’re saving, and I’m going to the London Museum of Science today and back to Oxford to the Lovelace papers again on Monday. And speaking of which, is there anybody in the office, is Caitlin still working, who could go look at something for me in the NY Public Library? They have a bunch of Ada stuff too.
Lilith, I really am trying to do what I can here to keep Georgiana feeling good about us and the project. We’re in a process. I can’t explain everything, but I have to ask you to just assume it’s for the best for a while longer. Eyes on the prize.
Love
Smith
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: math
well now you got me doing it im staying up late looking at this stuff you sent me its a bunch of nonsense as far as i can tell none of it makes any sense as mathematical tables
so i went and read about babbage and his stuff and i found out babbage and ada were also interested in statistics about which i know not a lot so now i go to the department to see if anybody can tell me anything i have to tell you its a little embarrassing but i dont care i guess anything for knowledge ily
t
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]>
Subject: Leeches cc: “Thea Spann”
Lee—
One thing I found out—you can find out anything on the Web, really, it almost makes research irrelevant, or no fun, except that half of what you find out is bullshit—but one thing I found out is about Dr. Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator. That was the machine or “engine” that Ada went to see when her friend got a look at the manuscript. Maybe you thought that was some kind of joke, but there really was a Dr. Merryweather and he really did come up with a new machine for predicting sudden changes in what, the weather, all this is true. Here’s what he did: he had discovered that leeches, you know leeches, tend to become very agitated when there is a drop in barometric pressure. So he worked up a machine made of several glass jars, each with a leech inside, and tied to each little leech there was a silver chain—why silver? I don’t know—and the silver chains were attached to a bell at the top, very delicately balanced; and when the barometric pressure dropped, meaning a storm or bad weather coming, the leeches would wiggle furiously, and the silver chains would pull the bell, which would ring a warning. In the picture I found the jars were all cut-glass, and the thing looked like a big chandelier. That’s all.
S
From: [email protected]
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Leeches
Ah. And did you know that her mother—Byron’s wife—was addicted to leeches? She was constantly using them, applying them, being “bled.” She distrusted any doctor (and she saw a lot of doctors) who questioned the utility of leeches. She applied them to her forehead and temples for headache, other parts for other pains. Leeches! How is it that the world or history can visit these tiny sweet revenges on awful people, furnishing their lives with exquisite symbols (or metonymies might be the word) too obvious for any author to dare to use, but true.
She was bulimic too: isn’t that the term? Said she never ate, but actually liked to eat a lot—especially mutton—and then she’d have herself rowed a ways out to sea, and upchuck. AND she kept an “issue”—an open wound on her arm, which she somehow picked at or did something to keep from healing, to facilitate bleeding. And everyone—all her many friends, the general public, her son-in-law till (almost) the end, thought she was a paragon of virtue and self-denial.
May I ask who the Thea is you cc’d the leech machine to?
Lee
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: got it
okay okay i got it i got it
youre not gonna believe me but i got it and you didnt
we started working on it with the computer its first of all not statistics there is actually an algorithm that will tell you if a list of numbers is statistics its called benfords law and it predicts the frequency of digits in statistical data a big data set like this if it defies the predicted frequency curve its not statistics wow huh yeah i ws impressed then i started thinking and i got it you could get it in a second if you just think about it about ada and her dragon mom youd have done exactly this yourself what she did
so heres what you do you have to find a quiet room with a door you can lock and call me like you havent done and be sure its in the evening like about nine est and we can talk a long time and youll tell me stuff lots of stuff cause nitetime is the rite time and then if you are good I WILL TELL YOU THE SECRET BECAUSE I GOT IT
T
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: Morning After
Thea, what if it’s so? What if it’s really so and you’re right? If she really did that, put the whole book into a code and made it look like math stuff. I keep thinking about it and laughing because it’s so great, or it’s so stupid, I don’t know which. O Thea you amazing person.
God what a night, huh? How could I forget that nine at night where you are is 3 AM here. Oh well. Georgiana looked at me funny this morning like maybe she heard something.
But you never mind all that. You go break that code. If it is a code. You’ve got to break the code, and all by yourself, and in secret. And then afterward we’ll be famous. YOU’ll be famous. If we can get Georgiana to let us tell anybody.
S
From: “Smith”
To: [email protected]
Subject: News
Lee—Maybe news. Maybe the book’s not gone. Maybe.
Thea is my partner. In email you can’t see me choosing that word over a few others, but it’s the only one I want. And she’s wonderful, and she’s just done something wonderful, I think and hope. Maybe. I’ll let you know soon.
S
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: codes
not a code a cipher heres how it works you substitute letters for other letters according to some kind of rule one rule you can use is to start the cipher alphabet from a different letter than the plain text the plain text starts at a and goes to z the coded text starts at g and goes through z and on to f get it so the word cab comes out igh to break a cipher like that you need to run through all the possible letters from which the code alphabet starts until one starts making sense but then what you do to make it harder is you change the alphabet starting letter you do it according to some key you take a word for instance like lordbyron and you drop out the repeating letters and then add all the o
ther letters after it to make a whole alphabet so you get this
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ldbyronacefghijkmpqstuvwxz
get it then you use that alphabet and if somebody has the key they can figure it out but thats too simple becuz every letter in the text is represented by the same letter in the code every b is a d easy to break so there are other things you do you can make a table 26 letters square a to z on one axis a to z on the other and then you have 26 different alphabets starting from different letters and you take your ldbyron key and you use it to specify a different alphabet for each of the first 7 letters of the text and repeat for the next 7 when youre done the code was called a vigenere code here is the square you use the top row and the left column are the key row and column
so say the first word in your text is eerie first letter is e you read down from the e in the top key row to the same position in the l row and you have the letter p and then you do the same for the next letter of your text which is e again but this time using the next letter in ldbyron for your alphabet so you read down again from the e in the key row but this time to the d alphabet and you get h so see if you keep using the ldbyron key then identical letters in the text wont be enciphered with the same letter consistently they will be different not every time but often but anybody who knows the key can translate easily
get it i do not think you do but you know who figured out first how to break this hard code guess it was babbage
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: RE:codes
I do get the idea. Your letters would be easier if you would just punctuate, you know, Thea. But we’ve had that talk. So never mind. And btw ADA is using numbers not letters. Do you just translate? ABC = 123? If you do, then how do you know when the number for one letter ends and another begins? If you use 1 for A and 2 for B and 12 for L, how do you know 12 stands for L and not for AB? Just asking.
S
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Re:codes
man have to invent the wheel with you here all you do is assign a pair of numbers for every letter and so every 2 numbers are 1 letter its one of the giveaways you look to see is every line an even number and hers are
you also make the lines an arbitrary length broken into regular units adas are ten digits so five letters that way the decipherer cant tell the word lengths and you cant look frinstance for singletons which wd have to translate to i or a why you guessed it the only 1 letter words in english which wd give you a clue you couldnt look for two letter words either which there are only a few of like of and am babbage wrote down whole dictionaries of words of different lengths words of two letters words of three letters so you cd try them all out its called the brute force method you just keep trying
guess whats good at the brute force method a computer
t
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: Babbage
Okay. I’ve been doing Babbage too. I think he’s very strange and wonderful, like the world’s greatest nerd, god of the nerds, but stranger even than that. He’s in this somehow, he’s got to be. You know he had a portrait of J. M. Jacquard, the punch-card loom inventor, on his wall that was woven by a loom using punch cards—it was so finely detailed that people thought it was done in oils. Like, here’s what punch cards can do.
After Ada was dead, he wrote a sort of autobiography, called Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, and guess what—on the title page is a quote from Byron, and here it is:
I’m a philosopher. Confound them all—
Birds, beasts, and men,—but no, not womankind.
Is this a hint? Or am I now totally paranoid and seeing connections everywhere? He used to call Ada his fairy, and she went along with that. His fairy friend, his fairy helper.
btw his wife’s name was Georgiana. So okay, whatever. But here’s something else: Babbage knew Isambard Kingdom Brunel. When Byron King, Lord Ockham, died—remember, he’s Ada’s son who kept all this stuff in his chest—he was working at the shipyard owned by Brunel on the Isle of Dogs, where the “Great Eastern” was being built. So what if maybe Babbage got him the job?
Am I learning things or just going crazy?
Smith
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Babbage
whos brunel whats great eastern what isle of what dogs who cares
t
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: RE:Re:Babbage
Sorry. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the biggest Victorian engineer. He built huge things made of iron. Bridges and ships. The biggest ever up to that time. The Great Eastern was a ship, a paddle-wheel steamship, the biggest ever built. He had a factory or a works as they say at this place in London called the Isle of Dogs, I don’t know why it’s called that, why don’t you LOOK IT UP.
Here’s a link to a picture of Brunel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ programmes/greatbritons/gb_brunel_isambard.shtml
Check out the cigar and the plug hat and the thumb in his waistcoat pocket. The HUGE chains hanging behind him are the chains of the “Great Eastern.” It was made for the American trade. Oh my god. I am paranoid, I do see the signs everywhere. But what if they’re there?
S
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: program
you see signs and you are a nutcase but you know what they say paranoids have enemies too wont know till we know cant take long once we get it set up but i just thought once you change letters into a string of numbers then you could even run a math program to transform the string i just thot of this hm like every line cd be multiplied by a key number or could be the result of some arithmetical operation or even algebraic to keep all the lines a consistent length you wd use modulo arithmetic the modulo wd be the same as the line length wow
which might mean this really is a program meant to run on a computer like the analytical engine was gonna be like she said it would weave algebraic patterns just as a jacquard loom weaves colored threads or something right
i like this i like it a lot theres problems but im thinking thinking
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: RE:program
Okay T. So what you’re saying is that what she could have done was to set out this table, which if you use it right can be used to punch a series of cards, like the Jacquard loom cards? Which you can then run on the Analytical Engine (which she was sure would be built somewhere somehow at some time) and the Engine would translate the punch cards into printed papers with the writing on them. Each punch card would have enough holes for the whole alphabet plus punctuation, like punch cards for computers when we were kids, and some way to make the machine store the numbers in order in the memory. Sure. Then last instruction, each card would force the computer, I mean the Engine, to print out a number, which corresponds to a word in 01-02-03 = a-b-c cipher, or maybe a word-plus-punctuation, and print it. Okay.
And it would only take a few years to punch the 100,000 cards you would need to carry every word of the book, if it was even a medium-sized book. And she doesn’t seem to have left any instructions about how the machine could read cards she specified before she knew how the machine worked. Wouldn’t that be like writing software for a computer that hadn’t been built?
Maybe she could have used a compressed vocabulary somehow. Is that possible? Like a way of indicating by one holepunch or one instruction that a word has “a” at position five seven and nine. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Mayb
e she wanted the punch cards made, and when they were all set out on a Jacquard loom, they would weave this humongous piece of fabric with the book woven into it. It would have been easier to copy it letter by letter on stones and leave them on the beach for somebody to find.
S
From: “Thea”
To: “Smith”
Subject: RE:Re:program
you do not trust me and you do not get it i can see that you will b sorry for your mockery when i get it all right and soon too
she didnt need to think anybody would punch all the cards she knew that instructions about how to punch the cards were enuf that the future wd get it from that and run it on machines that didnt exist but she knew they would someday and they do they do
btw the cloth with the book woven in it would not have to be that big or the number of cards either you are not reading your history what i read says that the silk portrait of mister or monsieur jacquard that babbage owned was made with 24000 cards and each card had 1000 hole positions so there a book is a piece of cake the real problem wd be knowing how to program cards to weave letter shapes i dont think ada did you tell me
t
From: “Smith”
To: “Thea”
Subject: ILY
I can’t find out that she knew how to program a jacquard loom. I bet she couldn’t. But listen I thought of something else. It’s so obvious. The one page of the novel we found—it didn’t end up there by chance. Ada saved it, that one page, so we could break the code. So we could know the code was a code. It should be the last page, so that you could use it to break the code with. A key. But it’s not the last page, not unless the book’s unfinished, which maybe it is, so you can’t just count back from the last letter and the last number. But I’m sure that’s what it is, and what she meant it for.