Michael Mattis

Growing up in the 1950s in Mar Vista, in Southern California — the nexus of America’s car culture — Breedlove got a bee in his bonnet that’s been stinging him for nearly half a century: speed. At age 13, he began building his first car — a little deuce coupe — and he won his first drag race with it at 16. By 1958, at 21, he was clocking 236 mph in a supercharged Oldsmobile “streamliner” at Bonneville.

At the time, Englishman John Cobb held the world land speed record. In 1947, Cobb had piloted his internal combustion Railton Special to a two-way average of 394 mph. (Land speed rules dictate that for a record to be official, a car must make two runs within one hour, the average of the two being the record.)

Employing aerodynamics he’d learned making model airplanes and working at Douglas Aircraft, Breedlove set to work building a car that would challenge Cobb’s record. In the autumn of 1962, his team wheeled Spirit of America onto the salt at Bonneville. It was gorgeous. At a time when American spacecraft looked more like they’d been built by high school science classes than by rocket scientists, Spirit of America looked like something out of “The Jetsons.” It was powered not by conventional internal combustion, but by a surplus J-47 jet engine out of a U.S. Navy F-4 Phantom.

With 5,000 pounds of thrust, it wasn’t just pretty, it was fast. On Oct. 5, 1963, clocking a two-way average of just over 407 mph, Breedlove brought the land speed record back to the United States for the first time in 32 years. He broke records with Spirit of America until October 1964, when, at more than 500 mph, his chute snapped off. The car overshot the track, smashed through some telephone poles, skipped across a saltwater pond and sank like a stone. Breedlove walked away wet, but unscathed, and with a record — 526.28 mph. He’s the only driver to nearly drown while setting a land speed record.

At a time when drag racing was the fastest-growing sport in the United States, Craig Breedlove was a hero. While his speed records won him the kudos of his racing brethren, his matinee-idol good looks assured him photo spreads in national magazines. People called him Captain America. The Beach Boys sang his praises on their “Little Deuce Coupe” album:

An airplane, an auto now famous worldwide,
Spirit of America, the name on the side.
The man who would drive her, Craig Breedlove by name,
A daring young man played a dangerous game …

The hype machine went into overdrive as rival tire and oil companies vied to have their logos affixed to record-breaking cars. Breedlove was quickly challenged, and for the next two years traded records back and forth with rivals Tom Green and Art Arfons. But by the end of 1965, sponsors’ interest waned as national attention turned to grander spectacles like the Apollo space program and to more down-to-earth matters such as the war in Vietnam. Breedlove’s 1965 record of 600.6 mph held until October 1970, when Gary Gabelich drove the rocket-powered Blue Flame to 622.4 mph. But land speed racing’s holy grail — the sound barrier — remained untouched.

Breedlove never gave up hope of grabbing the chalice. In the early ’80s, he built a full-scale mock-up of a new, rocket-powered Spirit of America. But government regulations on rocket fuel chemicals effectively put the kibosh on the project.

Then, in 1983, a British sportsman named Richard Noble brought his jet-powered Thrust2 car out to Black Rock. On Oct. 4, Noble achieved a two-way average of 633.5 mph. Noble had upped the ante, but he’d left the sound barrier open while presenting the United States with a challenge — one Breedlove hoped would rally sponsors around the flag, and to his cause.

“Frankly, though,” he laughs, “I can’t say the companies were all that receptive.”

Still, Breedlove hung on. To make some money of his own, he went into real estate, where he finally earned enough that he could devote his energies to a new Spirit of America project full time. In 1989 he moved his workshop from Southern California to the small town of Rio Vista, east of the San Francisco Bay Area. He bought a pair of new J-79 jet engines and began designing the new car. He finally unveiled Spirit of America II a few years later. With its needle nose, sharklike fins and low-slung air scoops, the 44-foot-long, 45,000-horsepower car was by far the most beautiful land speed racer ever built.

However, when Noble got wind that Breedlove was planning a comeback, he set in motion a project of his own, called ThrustSSC (Super Sonic Car). To drive the car, Noble chose the dashing Royal Air Force fighter jock Andy Green, a choice that assured the project the tacit support of her majesty’s government.

In the autumn of 1996, Breedlove’s car was ready to run, and the team brought the new Spirit of America to Black Rock to try to break Noble’s 1983 record. The project had been delayed when a group of environmental protesters attempted to block the team’s permit to operate the car. By the time it was all sorted out, six weeks of the year’s best weather had passed. On Oct. 28, Breedlove set out to attempt the record-breaking runs. Once the car was stationed on the desert and ready to roll, Breedlove radioed for a wind profile from up-range. The report came back: “one five.” Breedlove took that to mean 1.5 knots, well within limits. At go time, Breedlove hit the loud pedal and the car roared off.

But several things had gone wrong. For starters, the distance to the timing area had been miscalculated. Breedlove realized that at his rate of acceleration he’d hit the timing area not at a brisk 640-mph cruise, but at more like 800 — 160 mph faster than he’d planned for, and much, much faster than any car had ever attempted to go.

“I was really carrying the mail,” says Breedlove dryly.

He had also misunderstood the wind report — it was 15 knots, not 1.5, and gusting even higher up-range. He was busily trying to shut down the J-79′s afterburner, when, at 675 mph, a wicked crosswind hit the car, jacking it up on its forward and side wheels. Imagine it: Jammed into Spirit of America’s tiny cockpit, Breedlove is riding literally balls out, scrunched up in the very tip of the vehicle, his nuts snug against the steering column. At those speeds, the spindly roll cage that surrounds him is all but worthless. Two inches behind his head are the front wheels, weighing 170 pounds each, spinning at more than 7,500 revolutions per minute, their outer edges pulling 33,000 G’s. At that speed, an ounce of dust build-up on the rim weighs as much as 1,700 pounds. As the car heeled over, the wheels acted like a giant, off-kilter gyroscope, forcing the car hopelessly off-course. Enveloped in a cloud of dust, Breedlove was hurtling blind.

“I thought, This is it,” he remembers. “I’ve just bought the farm.”

But Breedlove kept his cool and the car careened on, carving a giant arc into the desert floor, missing the crowded spectator area by a scant half-mile. It eventually came to rest, three or four miles off the course. Rattled but unhurt, Breedlove was able to walk away. Though he had blown the doors off Noble by 43 mph, it wasn’t an official record, as Breedlove was unable to make a return run.

Had Breedlove indeed bought the farm that day, he would not have been the first to do so chasing the demon speed. The honor roll of land speed racing’s glorious dead is long: Parry Thomas, Pendine Sands, Wales, 1927; Frank Lockhart, Daytona Beach, Fla., 1928; Lee Bible, Daytona, 1929; Athol Graham, Bonneville, 1960; Glen Leasher, Bonneville, 1962. And Craig Arfons, nephew of Breedlove rival Art Arfons, was killed trying to break the water speed record in 1989. You might think, after an incident like this, Breedlove would walk away permanently. Not likely. For one thing, he reserves quick decisions for the cockpit.

Craig T. Nelson, best known as the star of the TV comedy series “Coach” and a longtime friend and auto racing comrade of Breedlove’s, recalls some advice Breedlove once gave him. Nelson was racing at Road Atlanta in 1995 and Breedlove was there to support his friend. During the race, Spice-Olds driver Jeremy Dale T-boned Fabrizio Barbazza’s Ferrari at more than 100 mph. The impact tore the Ferrari in half, shattered Dale’s legs and broke Barbazza’s arm and leg. As Nelson puts it, “The ballet went bad.” While Dale was being life-flighted off the raceway, Breedlove took Nelson aside. “Whatever you do,” Breedlove said to him, “don’t think about what happened for at least three days. Don’t make any decisions based on what you’ve seen here.”

“It was very important for me to hear that,” says Nelson. “That kind of wisdom and experience can help you discern the proper path.” He’s currently working on a screenplay about Breedlove’s life. He still races, on the Trans Am circuit.

People generally fall into two camps about land speed racing: those who get it instinctively and those who don’t. For those who get it, it’s like eating peanuts — they can’t get enough. It’s what drives people to camp out at Godforsaken places like Black Rock and Bonneville for weeks at a time, hoping to get a glimpse of the record-breaking moment. They’re often the same sort of people who get all weepy when they hear the words, “That’s one small step for a man …”

It’s hard to appreciate land speed racing if you haven’t seen it. But if
you’ve seen the pod race scene in “Star Wars: Episode I– The Phantom
Menace,” you at least have an inkling of what it looks like — a tiny
vehicle tearing across the vastness of the desert at unimaginable
speeds. The striking similarity between George Lucas’ pod races and land
speed racing is no coincidence. During the ’60s, when Breedlove was
breaking records right and left, Lucas was working at Bonneville as an
assistant cameraman, filming him. Lucas was one of an informal clique of
land speed racing enthusiasts called the Salt Bears, which also included
writers Bill Neely and Bob Ottum (who together co-wrote the screenplay
for “Stroker Ace,” starring Burt Reynolds), racing photographer Pete
Biro and fellow director Lear Levin.

Los Angeles freelance writer Bill Sharpsteen, on the other hand, is not
impressed. “A car equipped with a surplus jet engine seems crude
compared to the infinitely swift, silent power of a Pentium computer
chip,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. “These days, the
competition for the land speed record looks more like Neanderthal breast
beating than a celebration of ingenuity.”

Not so, argues Bill Withuhn, curator of transportation at the
Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History. “Passing the speed
of sound on land, in full contact with the ground, is a major
technological achievement,” he says. The problem, explains Withuhn, is
the shock waves that build up around the car as it approaches the speed
of sound. In the air, these shock waves are predictable, but on the
ground they can bounce off the deck in ways that are all but impossible
to foresee. They can make a car shimmy and shake out of control, or even
take it airborne. “This is not a high-tech drag race. This is something
quite
different. It’s an exercise in real science.”

Britain showed off its prowess in “real science” the year after
Breedlove’s near miss. Both the Spirit of America and ThrustSSC teams
were out at Black Rock, with Breedlove again hoping to take the record
from the British and the Brits intending to defend their title. Troubles
plagued Team Spirit of America from the start. Early in the season, an
object — possibly a loose bolt — was sucked into the car’s engine,
destroying it. The team rushed back to Rio Vista to haul out its spare
J-79, but the project never regained its lost momentum. Finally, on Oct.
15, 1997, Andy Green blew the lid off the sound barrier, driving the
hulking, twin-engine ThrustSSC to a jaw-dropping two-way average of 763.035
mph, or Mach 1.01. The sonic boom rattled windows as far away as
Gerlach, 13 miles to the south. (To make a new record official, Breedlove
will have to outpace Green by at least 1 percent, making 771 the magic
number.)

Breedlove was stoic. “Well,” he told reporters, “they’ve certainly
raised the bar on us.” Other members of his team didn’t take it so well.
“We were devastated,” says Cherie Danson, Spirit of America’s PR
director. “This is not the way the script was supposed to end.”

But after 34 years of trying, Breedlove isn’t about to give up. Last
year, Shell Oil, Spirit of America’s most tenacious sponsor (the car
actually runs on ordinary Shell premium gasoline), was too busy with its
merger with Texaco to bother with land speed racing. This year, however,
the company has once again kicked down enough to keep the
team in business. (Land speed racing is one of the last great amateur
endeavors. Drivers win no purse for breaking a record. Accordingly,
Breedlove takes no salary from his sponsors and has put about $1.5
million of his own money into the car.)

Still, funding remains Breedlove’s greatest obstacle. It’s a no bucks,
no Buck Rogers game. As land speed records increase incrementally,
funding requirements seem to increase geometrically. (Although the
numbers are trifles compared with the financial needs of an Indy or
NASCAR team.) A key attraction for potential sponsors may be that,
while Green will always be counted as the first to drive through
the sound barrier, Breedlove may well be the first American to go the
distance.

For that reason, the Smithsonian’s Withuhn says he’s “keenly
interested” in the Spirit of America effort. He has a hole he’d like to
fill in his collection of racing cars, in the land speed record
category, and to have a supersonic car would be an added bonus. “The
best effort around is Craig’s — no doubt about it,” he says. “It’s
really just a matter of funding.”

Withuhn’s interest in Spirit of America could act as an important
value-add to potential sponsors who’d like to see their logos splashed
across a car that might one day be displayed in the United States’ most
prestigious history museum. Speaking for himself, Withuhn says he’d like
to see Breedlove’s effort get more help from “spirited” corporate
sponsors and more recognition from the public. “It seems silly for us to
just give the record over to the British,” he adds. “This needs to be an
American record. And I need to fill a niche in my collection.”

Breedlove was hoping to bring Spirit of America back out to Black Rock in
September, but doctors have determined he’ll have to undergo outpatient
surgery for a torn rotator cuff. (He fell while jogging “about four years
ago,” and, like a typical race car driver, has all but ignored it.) He says
the delay doesn’t bother him too much. He’s been patient a long time, and
besides, “Spirit of America 2000″ has a nice ring to it. Whether he takes
the record or not, he says he won’t quit. He’s already got a plan for a new
twin-engine spirit of America III, “all worked out in my head.” He’d also
like to try his hand at the water speed record, currently held by
Australian Ken Warby (317 mph).

Breedlove has what Cole Coonce, a land speed racing enthusiast and
editor of Nitronic Research, calls “Go! Fever.” The fever has driven
Breedlove to be the fastest man on earth for more than 40 years. When
asked what’s behind it, Breedlove seems almost incredulous, like he
doesn’t understand the question. The question also flusters his friend
Craig T. Nelson.

“Goin’ fast,” Nelson sputters. “When it comes to sitting in that car, there’s only one thing in his mind — goin’ fast.”

But I get where HP was coming from when it turned down the Woz’s brainchild. In the summer of 1977, when I was 13, the parents of the smart kid next-door bought an Apple II. It cost $1,300 — a fortune at the time. I’d seen computers before, in the basement of the Sacramento Bee newspaper building, where my father still works as an editor. They didn’t seem to do very much, except blink their lights and put hot-lead typesetters out of work.

The Apple II, though, was different. This, my neighbor told me, was a personal computer, and it could do all sorts of things. Could it answer questions, like the main computer on board the Starship Enterprise? Well, no.

In fact, the only way to get the Apple II to do anything remotely interesting was to program it yourself, using arcane symbols. And that required being good at higher math — which I wasn’t. This, I thought, was a total gyp. So with the exception of some dabbling in BASIC in high school, I stayed away from computers for a very, very long time. And so did a lot of other ordinary people.

The executives at HP had their heads screwed on OK. It isn’t that the portrayal is untrue — HP did blow it — but, like most historical dramas, “Pirates of Silicon Valley” is a movie concerned more with vivid, colorful myths than with the subtleties of truth.

What actually happened was that in March 1976, the Woz brought his invention around to his supervisor in HP’s Advanced Products Division. The super was impressed enough to contact the company’s other divisions to gauge their interest. You can imagine the calculations that went on in the minds of HP’s decision makers when they looked at the prospects for an $800 computer directed at consumers — people who thought “computer” meant “really smart machine like the one on board the Starship Enterprise” — and for which there were virtually no applications.

Given the realities of building, marketing and supporting a new and entirely untested product, dismissing Wozniak’s machine was a no-brainer. Wozniak himself later admitted, “It’s not like we were all smart enough to see a revolution coming … There are a million people who study markets and analyze economic trends, people who are more brilliant than I am … None of them foresaw what was going to happen either.”

But such complexities aren’t part of the Silicon Valley mythology. They probably wouldn’t make a good movie, anyway. With “Pirates,” writer and director Martin Burke has made a film that repackages the trope — call it The Man Just Don’t Get It — into bite-size nuggets for easy consumption.

Burke works The Man trope over and over. His first variation is The Man as HP. Then The Man is Xerox, then IBM, and finally a self-satisfied and complacent Steve Jobs himself (played by Noah Wyle), who has been given the shaft by that wily Bill Gates (Anthony Michael Hall).

If “Pirates” makes HP look bad, check out the treatment of Xerox: Apple’s fabled “raid” on Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center is played as some premeditated attack by the visionaries on the clueless fools.

At PARC, so the legend goes, Xerox had literally been squatting on the PC revolution for years. PARC scientists had come up with an impressive array of newfangled widgets, built into its Alto and Star computers, that were designed to make computing easier and more accessible to non-geeks. These included a detached keyboard, software that created “windows” on the screen and icons that could be clicked using a little, wheeled contraption called a mouse. But the stodgy suits at Xerox HQ just didn’t get it and, the thinking was, they never would.

Enter Steve Jobs. Xerox had made a $1 million investment in Apple prior to the start-up’s initial public offering in 1980. For the privilege of investing in Apple, Xerox agreed to let Apple employees visit PARC and take a look at the Alto and the Star. At the end of 1979, a team led by Jobs made two trips to PARC.

In the film, Apple descends upon PARC like a horde of Visigoths, pirating away PARC’s technology to create the Lisa and, later, the Macintosh. In turn, Bill Gates and Microsoft filch the technology from Mac prototypes — given to Microsoft as part of a software development deal — to begin work on Windows.

But accounts vary as to what actually happened during the raid on PARC. Burke’s script has Wozniak present, while other histories of that famed moment don’t mention him. Regardless of just what occurred in 1979, this legend of The Man remains one of the valley’s most persistent.

It’s easy, 20 years after the fact, to point the finger at Xerox management, first for never bringing PARC’s PC innovations to market and second for giving up the farm to Apple. But Xerox made its fortune — and continues to do so — by thinking up new ways to handle paper documents. For Xerox brass to up and spin 180 degrees in favor of some remote idea of a new and “paperless” office dreamed up by a bunch of bearded hippies in California was a lot to ask. Besides, Xerox did profit from its relationship with Apple; its original $1 million investment became $17.6 million when Apple went public. Then there’s the irony that some of the wow-’em technologies Xerox PARC is known for — like the graphical user interface and the mouse — weren’t invented at PARC at all, but had been demonstrated back in the ’60s by engineer Douglas Engelbart.

And although Jobs allegedly got the import of PARC’s innovations — while Xerox management had its nose buried in the paper-products business — this much-ballyhooed notion of Jobs’ insight may be little more than an invention of Apple PR.

As journalist Michael Malone points out in his book “Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane,” the Mac and Lisa projects were both proposed in the spring of 1979 and begun in September, a good three months prior to the raid. Malone also points out that the PARC technologies had nowhere near the usability of those eventually incorporated into the Lisa and the Mac, making the similarities seem almost incidental. In fact, Xerox lost a lawsuit that accused Apple of infringing on its intellectual property.

Apple’s PR interest in creating and perpetuating such a myth is subtle, but effective. This interpretation of history gives us a morality play in which the virtuous (Jobs) defeats the wicked (The Man), not by bullets or brawn, but by the valley’s most prized virtue, brains. Mix that with a little piracy for sex appeal, and the virtuous Jobs makes Apple hip.

But Jobs is not spared in “Pirates.” Having shown both HP and Xerox to be the fool, the film then fits Jobs into The Man role. How could he not get what Gates was up to?

Director Burke toes the plot line of the Silicon Valley myth faithfully. The relentless public relations machine, and the media that covers its creations, together anoint gods only to dethrone them when the once-brilliant show the slightest twinge of not getting it. Along the way, the valley’s mythology creators have shown a talent for making tech culture — and technology itself — actually seem sexy. That talent has been so great, in fact, that Turner Network Television decided it could hawk a movie without gunfights, car chases or even cleavage to Mr. and Ms. John Q. Public; a movie that in the end is about nothing more sensational than well-worn legends — and computers.

For her work with Babbage, Ada has recently been granted such grandiose monikers as “the world’s first programmer,” “the mother of computing,” “the mother of the modern computer,” “inventor of the first computer language” and “mathematical genius.” She’s been distinguished by the United States Army, which named its universal programming language Ada in her honor in 1983. The book “1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium” ranks Ada at number 960, coming in for the show right behind John von Neumann’s 959. (Babbage himself galloped ahead of both to place at number 351. Bill Gates got lost in the backstretch.) She was even profiled in the official companion book to last year’s Lilith Fair.

She’s frequently portrayed as a sexual libertine, a compulsive gambler and a drug addict who despised her children — a veritable one-woman Thelma and Louise of primitive computation. “Cyberfeminists” like Sadie Plant, author of “Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture,” hold her up like a torch, a Byronic martyr to the struggle against a brutal and oppressive patriarchal technocracy who was intentionally “disappeared” from history.

The image of Ada Lovelace has coalesced into a potent and popular myth, one in which a complicated personality from the 19th century gets boiled down into an archetype for the dispossessed of the 20th. This Ada is wild and powerful and alluring. There’s only one problem: According to the experts, she’s a fiction. “This romantically appealing image,” writes one scholar, “is without foundation.”

It’s the Ada Myth that drives “Conceiving Ada,” a film directed by U.C. Davis arts professor Lynn Hershman Leeson. The plot is a kind of fusion between cyberpunk and historical drama, with a nod to “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Emmy (Francesca Faridany) is a computer genius living with her shaggy boyfriend Nick (J.D. Wolfe) in a groovy Multimedia Gulch warehouse. Somehow, Emmy programs her computer to look into the past, through which she voyeuristically watches actress Tilda Swinton do her brooding “Orlando” bit as the ill-starred supergenius, Ada. As Emmy looks into the past, the audience is treated to snippets of a decidedly ’90s version of Ada’s life struggles against 19th century sexism, laudanum addiction and compulsive gambling, not to mention her own unstoppable intellect. Eventually, Emmy conceives — and thanks to Nick’s meddling with Emmy’s computer, out pops a “cybergenetic” clone of Ada herself (Rose Lockwood).

Leeson’s Ada, like Plant’s, is a misunderstood genius — a woman born 160 years before her time. She understands Babbage’s machines better than Babbage, encrypts her scarf with ciphers with which to secretly transmit bets to the racetrack, hobnobs with Mary Shelley, is alternatively wild and sullen — maybe even bipolar — taking lovers on a whim and battling the patriarchy in the meantime. Leeson insists that everything in her film concerning Ada is based in fact. She credits “Ada, Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age,” a collection of Ada’s letters and biographical notes by science historian Betty Alexandra Toole, as a major source. “It’s all true,” says Hershman.

“It’s a fantasy,” counters Toole. “Lynn tells a story which fits her needs as a filmmaker.” Toole also takes umbrage at Plant, who, she says, used her work as a source to draw a similarly questionable caricature. Given the textual record, Toole says she’s hard-pressed to figure out why modern people insist on making Ada into a revolutionary, a wanton, a gambler and a druggie. But she does note that in today’s Foucaultian academic world, transgression is the mode du jour. “It’s what we have come to,” she says. “It sells books and movies.” It also buys tenure.

Reading Ada’s letters, as published in Toole’s book, we’re treated to a
very different Ada. This one is a mother who alternatively loves and
loathes her children; is often (but not always) fond of her husband via an
arranged marriage; enjoys dogs and horses and ice skating in winter; has a
gift for math and the poesy to articulate its complexities; enjoys a good
party (especially in the company of other scientific minds), the theater,
the opera and, on occasion, betting the ponies. She is also a Victorian
countess — a proud one — who is nevertheless struggling to find a
“useful” profession between, in and around her social and domestic duties.
This Ada also may (or may not) have had affairs with a number of men,
including Charles Dickens. She’s a woman who died young and in pain from a
disease doctors were helpless to treat, except to prescribe laudanum,
cannabis and even mesmerism to relieve her suffering. In short, the Ada that
comes through in her letters is not a myth but a whole person.

The core of the Ada Myth lies in her alleged role as the Analytical
Engine’s “programmer.” Ada met Babbage, 43 and already a widower, at a
party in 1833. Just 17, she had a talent for mathematics and an enthusiasm
for science — having been drilled by her domineering mother, Lady Byron,
since early childhood. As intellectual fellow travelers, the two quickly
hit it off. Later, Babbage showed Ada the still-incomplete invention he
would work on for a decade, a calculating machine he called the Difference
Engine, created to execute flawless mathematical tables.

Ada watched rapt as the wheels, rods and gears of the brass and pewter
machine turned, accurately raising numbers by orders of magnitude and
extracting the root of a quadratic equation. She was rapt but not
dumbstruck; her grasp of the machine’s principles of calculating
differences was immediate and articulate, and Babbage recognized it. She
was so taken with the machine that her mother would later write that Ada
considered the Difference Engine “a friend.” It was also the beginning
of a friendship between Ada and Babbage that would last until Ada’s
untimely death of uterine cancer 21 years later.

Unfortunately for both, Babbage so loved tinkering with his work that he
could never let go of it — he had what science fiction writer Bruce
Sterling describes as “hacker’s disease.” After 10 years’ work and having
burned through 17,000 pounds of the British government’s money, he
abandoned the unfinished Difference Engine (already in version 2.0) for an
even grander scheme, the Analytical Engine. For all its utility, the
Difference Engine had been little more than a glorified adding machine,
able to add one plus one plus one, ad nauseam, though in relatively rapid
succession compared to a person armed with pencil and paper. The Analytical
Engine, by contrast, would be able perform any calculation, utilizing
punched cards for operations and variables — similar to the electronic
computers of the early 1950s.

“Functionally, the Analytical Engine was just like modern machines,”
says William Aspray, co-author of “Computer: A History of the
Information Machine” with Martin Campbell-Kelly. “But it had essentially no
storage capability compared to today’s computers, and its speed was a few
calculations a minute.”

A decade after Babbage began the Analytical Engine, it was still on the
drawing board, owing to troubles with his engineer, his own stubbornness
and the government’s unwillingness to spend any more on his radical
schemes. In 1842 an Italian military engineer, L.F. Menabrea (later Italy’s
prime minister), published his “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by
Charles Babbage Esquire.” Delighted, Babbage asked Ada to translate the
document into English and, under his guidance — the extent of which is not
precisely known — add some notes of her own, which wound up three times
longer than the original manuscript. Babbage was so impressed by the
“Notes,” as they’ve become known, that he urged Ada to redraft and publish
them in separate volume. Ada wouldn’t hear of it. She knew too well
Babbage’s mania for tinkering, and argued that if her “Notes” were not
published immediately, they might never be.

It’s from the “Notes” that Ada’s “programmer” reputation comes. Together
the “Sketch” and the “Notes” describe the Analytical Engine and how
routines might have been run on it, had it ever been built. Is there an
actual computer program tucked away in the “Notes”? In them, did Ada invent
a programming language? Is Ada, then, entitled to wear the badge of “first
programmer”?

“Absolutely not,” says Betty Toole. “Ada certainly did not invent a
computer language.” Toole says Ada’s immediate and substantive
contributions lay in differentiating the Analytical Engine from its
predecessor, using easy-to-read tabular format, and adding indices much
like those in a modern computer program. (Toole has co-authored an article
slated to appear in the May Scientific American on this topic.) Other
scholars, like the University of Sydney’s Allan Bromley, won’t give Ada
even that much credit. “All of the programs cited in her notes,” he writes,
“had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier.”

Toole insists the “Notes” were a close collaboration between Ada and
Babbage and says her Scientific American article will support that view.
Furthermore, Toole says, Ada’s contributions went beyond the merely
quantifiable, into the metaphorical. Ada had as keen a flair for turning a
phrase as she had a talent for mathematics. In the “Notes” she speaks of
the Analytical Engine weaving “algebraic patterns just as a Jacquard loom
weaves flowers and leaves.” Her “Notes” also predict that, given the right
algorithms, calculating engines might compose music and create graphics.
She even presaged Alan Turing and the “garbage-in, garbage out” effect,
saying, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any
thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform — it
has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

“She didn’t write any programs,” says Martin Campbell-Kelly, Aspray’s
co-author. “But she didn’t have to write them, in my opinion. I think it’s
pretty impressive to do what she did.” Like Toole, Campbell-Kelly honors
Ada as a pioneer, if not a programmer as the term is understood today.

Bruce
Sterling, co-author of the speculative href="http://www.steampunk.com">“steampunk” novel, “The Difference
Engine,” with William Gibson, which theorizes a world overtaken by
Babbage’s machines, chalks up the current Ada Myth to the
contemporization of history — what the critic Harold Bloom famously called “misprision.” “Everybody has to remake the past in their own image,” Sterling
says. “Hollywood does it all the time. There’s a 1930s Queen Elizabeth, a
’40s Elizabeth, a ’50s Elizabeth. Now there’s an androgynous, ’90s Queen
Elizabeth.”

“It’s like Charles Lindbergh — did he invent manned flight?” Sterling
continues. “I don’t think so. He made one particular bold, headline-seizing
adventure and was idolized forever after. I see Ada as being in that same
sort of position. She happened to write the first ever documentation on
what it meant to be computer programmer.”