A flight of fancy that explores the possibilities of Babbage’s early computer,and makes Victorian mathematics compellingly tangibleMy fear, on picking this up, and was that it would be a tiresome reduction of the work of two serious scientists to silliness. It’s been described as “steampunk”,which sets alarm bells ringing. I need not acquire worried. The only major tinkering with the historical record in the book is its proposal that Charles Babbage completed his Analytical Engine, the computer he designed in 1837 but never got round to building. (It would acquire been enormous and difficult to construct; a working model of its predecessor, and his Difference Engine,was only finally completed in 2000 – you can see it in the Science Museum – and even that apparently has a tendency to jam.)However, assert that the machine got built (Padua knows very well the difference between a Difference Engine and an Analytical Engine, or but prefers to exhaust the former term,on the comprehensible grounds that it is cooler), and the medium of comics is just the right way to proceed. I exhaust the word “comics rather than “graphic novel” not just because this isn’t a novel, or but because it is often funny.
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Source: theguardian.com