The Loom of Thought

There is a machine I once saw worked in a manufactory at Spitalfields — or rather I never saw it at all, but heard it described so often, and with such relish, by Mr. Babbage, that I have carried it ever since as though it stood in my own drawing-room: the loom that weaves the figured silks, the brocaded flowers and the curling leaves that great ladies wear without once asking how the rose was set into the cloth. The weaver does not contrive each blossom afresh out of his own head. He punches a row of cards, each pierced with holes in a settled order, and strings them upon the engine of the loom; and the threads rise, or do not rise, precisely as the card commands — so that the pattern is, in the strictest sense, read out of the pasteboard and into the silk. I am lying now in a darkened room, the medicine drawing its slow tide along the hours, and I find that I can still hear, with a perfect distinctness, the click of those cards turning over — though, as I say, I never heard them at all. Some images are given to us not through the ear but through the understanding; and they are, I think, the truer for it.

I had seen, years before, the elder engine — the Difference Engine, or a portion of it, brass and steel and a beauty of its own kind — wheel through its columns of figures at one of Mr. Babbage's Saturday evenings, when I was seventeen and newly let loose upon the world. That instrument was a marvel; but it was a marvel of a single kind. It could tabulate; it could grind out its differences and lay down a column of Numbers as a mill grinds corn — faithfully, tirelessly, and only ever the one labour. You put to it a question of a settled sort, and it answered. It did not — it could not — be coaxed to do otherwise. I admired it as one admires a very fine clock: a thing that keeps its appointed motion and asks nothing whatever of the imagination.

But the new conception was of another order altogether; and it took me some while — and Mr. Babbage no little patience — to feel the whole weight of the difference. The Analytical Engine was not to be a calculator merely. It was to be a general instrument. Within it he had imagined two great provinces, and gave them names I have loved ever since for their very plainness: the Store, where the Numbers should be kept, ranged upon their columns like a vast library of quantities awaiting to be summoned; and the Mill, into which they should be carried to be operated upon — added, multiplied, subtracted, divided — and out of which the result should be carried back again to its place. And governing the whole — directing which Number should go down to the Mill, and what should there be done upon it, and whither the answer should return — the cards. Cards that did not merely count. Cards that commanded.

That was the hinge upon which my whole understanding turned; and I remember the very hour it swung. I had been thinking of the engine as a more cunning sort of arithmetic, no more. And then it came to me — not by degrees, but as light comes into a room when the shutter is thrown back — that the cards held the engine's reasoning quite apart from its Numbers. The operations were one thing; the things operated upon, another; and once those two are set asunder, one is no longer in the realm of arithmetic at all. One is in the realm of symbols — of relations, of any quantities soever that men may agree to let the letters stand for. The engine need not know that it deals in Numbers. It deals in whatever we instruct the cards to mean — and in nothing else.

It was then that the loom came back to me; and I wrote — for I did at the last write it, in those Notes that bear my initials — that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. I have been praised for that sentence, and I shall not pretend to think it a poor one; but I did not reach after it as an ornament. It was the exactest thing I could say. The loom takes its flowers from its cards; the engine takes its analysis from its cards; and the kinship between them is not a poet's flourish but a truth of structure. And having once seen that, I could not stay myself from going further — for if the engine could be made to act upon any symbols whatever whose mutual relations could be expressed, then why only Numbers? Were the science of harmony reduced to such relations — the pitches of sounds set out in their fixed proportions — then the engine, I saw, might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. I wrote that too; and my mother, I think, would have judged it the most Byronic thing I ever did. It was not. It was the most rigorous. It is only that rigour, carried far enough, arrives at the last in the very country of wonder.

The occasion for all this — the vessel into which my speculations might be poured — came from abroad. A young Italian, Signor Menabrea, had heard Mr. Babbage lecture at Turin, and had set down in French a Sketch of the engine: a clear and orderly account, and the first proper account ever printed anywhere of a machine that England, to her discredit, had let lie unregarded. I undertook to render it into our tongue. Translation is a humble-seeming labour, and I went at it humbly enough at first, wishing only to be exact — to let the Frenchman's sense pass over into English without the loss of a drop. But one cannot truly master a thing in the translating of it and not feel the master's impatience rising: I knew matters the Sketch had left in shadow; I saw connexions the page did not draw; and I began to crowd the margins of my own mind with all that I would have said, had it been mine to say.

It was Mr. Babbage who saw it before I quite dared to. When I showed him the work, he asked me — I will not feign to his words, but the sense of it was not to be mistaken — why I had not myself written something upon a subject I knew so intimately. I answered, I believe, that it had not occurred to me; which was true, and which seems to me now one of the small great turnings of a life — that a thing has only to be suggested by the right voice in the right hour to become, on the instant, the most natural ambition in the world. He proposed that I should append some Notes of my own. Notes! As though I were to add a footnote or two for the convenience of the slower reader.

What followed was among the happiest and the most arduous labour of my life; and I will set down honestly what it was, for I think few who have not done such work can know it. The Notes grew. They grew past all proportion to the article they were meant to serve — they came at the last to be some three times its length, so that the translation became the small thing and my appended matter the great, the tail wagging the dog with a shamelessness that delighted me utterly. I lettered them A to G. I wrote, and unwrote, and wrote again; I quarrelled with my own sentences as with disobedient servants; I went down to the very foundations of each idea, to be sure it would bear the weight I meant to set upon it. Mr. Babbage and I were forever sending papers to and fro — he furnished much, and freely, and I will say in another place all that I owe him — and once, going over his figures with that cold close attention the work exacts, I found an error in them, and told him of it, and was right. I record it not from vanity — or not from vanity alone — but because there is a particular joy, sharp and clean as cut glass, in catching a master in a slip and mending it: the joy of the thing itself, which cares nothing for who is grand and who is humble, but only for whether the Number be true.

That, I think, is what I had been seeking the whole of my divided life without once knowing its name. I was reared as a corrective — my mother's rational garden, every hedge clipped to a sightline, lest the poet's fever in my blood should bloom. I was made a wife, and a countess, and the mother of three; and I loved my children and my William; and none of it ever once gave me the particular peace of which I am speaking. But here, bent over the cards and the columns, tracing how a quantity should pass from the Store to the Mill and home again, I was neither the poet's daughter, nor the parallelogram's pupil, nor anybody's correction. I was simply at work — the truest home I have ever been given to inhabit. About me my health failed, and rallied, and failed again; there were the usual storms of a life — the debts, the dreads, the long quarrels I shall not here anticipate. And in the very centre of it all sat this still place, this absorbed and shining quiet, where the only question that might be asked was whether a thing followed from a thing — and where the answer, once found, stayed found.

I signed the Notes with my initials only — A.A.L. — and I have been asked since, with a kind of pity, whether I did not wish to set my name to them in full: my title, my father's name, that opens doors and turns heads across two kingdoms. I did not. In part it was the custom, that a lady does not parade herself in the philosophical journals; my mother's training does not wash off so readily as that. But in part — and this is the truer part — it was that I would have the work stand without the legend leaning its whole weight upon it. Let it be three letters. Let whoever reads them ask what mind was behind, and find his answer in the reasoning, and nowhere else. I had spent the whole of my life being someone's daughter; for once — for the length of those Notes — I should be only a mind that had seen a thing clearly, and set it down.

The engine was never built. I knew, even as I wrote, that the brass of it might never turn — that I was describing the motions of a creature existing nowhere save in Mr. Babbage's drawings and in the chambers of my own understanding. It did not lessen the labour; if anything it sharpened it, as one writes most carefully of all to a friend one may never see again. I was charting, in the dark, the far analytical shore — laying down soundings and bearings for vessels not yet built, to be captained by men not yet born. The loom at Spitalfields weaves its roses for ladies who will never ask how. I have woven mine, and signed them with three small letters, and sent them out upon a tide I shall not live to see come in.