by Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London
In 2009 for Ada Lovelace day, a comic strip about Ada and Babbage was created, not quite 100% historically accurate but certainly in the spirit of Lovelace’s love of science and mathematics. Her thrilling adventures in Victorian London have now become a graphic novel.
In her own time, Ada was captured as a demure and beautiful young woman in portraits and sketches that were shared in books about her father. Ada would have sat for hours to have her portrait drawn, but she would have known about quick draw cartoons. Newspapers and magazines such as Punch contained satirical cartoons of the day. They were very influential in the 1840’s. Faraday was drawn in Punch, but Babbage and Lovelace didn’t make it then. But now they are crime busting mathematical superheros in their very own alternate history of computing comic book.
Books, films, even a musical have been created about Ada Lovelace, but as we write the circle has not quite been closed. There are no computer games about Ada. But maybe you could change that.
Further reading
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua.
This article was first published on the original CS4FN website and a copy can be found on page 17 of issue 20 of the CS4FN magazine, which celebrates the work of Ada Lovelace. You can also read some of our other posts about Ada Lovelace and she features as one of our Women in Computing poster set.
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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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