 People who are into steampunk are always combining weird stuff into new ideas like heavy metal and airships I mean what would that even be a lead zeppelin? So in case you've been trapped in a fallout shelter for a while now welcome back to civilization here are a few highlights we've landed a probe on a comet there's a new star wars movie in 43 days global climate change is still a huge problem and also there's this thing called steampunk steampunk is an aesthetic and literary genre that's heavily influenced by authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne sort of a mashup of 19th century steam powered industry and modernity lots of clockwork lots of brass tubing lots of leather some have described the general look as what happens when goth kids discover the color brown there are steampunk web comics and conventions and novellas and bars and cosplays that are perhaps close to the coolest things that anybody has ever made most steampunk fiction is set in an alternate version of the 19th century often in victorian england or the wild west where that massive explosion of technology and culture which appeared in the 20th century happened just a little bit earlier where things like robotics and computers were realized before that whole electricity thing came into vogue and made everything boring I mean laptops are cool but laptops with boilers awesome but that's crazy right I mean whoever heard of a clockwork computer that ran on mechanical oh my god this is Charles Babbage's difference engine the very first automatic mechanical calculator designed to solve polynomial functions it was never actually built until 1991 almost 200 years after Babbage first published his paper describing its design and operation Babbage was tired of the mistakes that he and other mathematicians like him made while calculating the results of polynomial functions which are useful for approximating all sorts of different things like sine waves or market prices or artillery tables so he built his difference engine to do the hard work quickly and accurately its operation is actually pretty ingenious it works on the method of divided differences first developed by Newton now I'm going to get into some math here if you're having a panic attack take some deep breaths watch this video and then come back everything is going to be fine let's start with a polynomial function like y equals 2x squared plus 5x plus three if you start at x equals one and go up you get a series of numbers for y at x equals one y is 10 at x equals two y is 21 at x equals three y is 36 you can see how someone without a calculator might screw this up now if you take the differences between these numbers you get another series of numbers here the difference is 11 here the difference is 15 here the difference is 19 and if you take the differences of these numbers you get four four four that last set of differences is always constant for a polynomial with a power of two that makes it really easy to calculate the next value in the sequence without doing crazy longhand multiplication you just add four to this add this to this and bam there's the next value Babbage's difference engine did precisely this up to a power of seven using only cams and gears and such if you wanted to get the next y value in the sequence you would just turn the crank a few times and then read the answer off of the machine that's really impressive well it would have been really impressive like i said Babbage never actually built the thing he only designed it based on his ideas the british government gave him 17 000 pounds to build it and then produce a nice set of mechanically calculated tables but Babbage took that money and used it to redesign the machine to be faster and more powerful at which point the government just said screw it however there was someone else who appreciated Babbage's work perhaps more than Babbage himself did Ada Lovelace described by Babbage as everything in short but the enchantress of numbers was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron Byron had many many other children with many many other women but he wasn't married to any of them at the time that was partially why Ada's mother decided that her daughter should study grounded disciplines like logic and mathematics to keep her away from poetry and other nonsense that had made her father such a worldly individual she took to that education like a fish to water she described herself as an analyst and a metaphysician and in the middle of victorian england where women were supposed to find nice rich landowners to marry Ada instead developed a professional relationship with Babbage as an equal and a fellow mathematician after being totally blown away by his design for the difference engine during that period Babbage confided in Ada about an idea he'd had for an even greater machine something that he called an analytical engine the machine as he envisioned it contained mechanisms for conditional branching in loops arithmetic memory a machine which could take any set of instructions written on a punch card and then operate on those instructions to produce any output yeah that Ada later published a translation of another mathematician's thoughts about the analytic engine to which she added some notes a lot of notes notes longer than the actual memoir itself she had basically written a full dissertation on what she'd realized about the potential implications of Babbage's machine how it could be configured to simulate anything which could be represented as an algorithm she provided an example in those notes of how one might configure the machine to produce Bernoulli numbers coefficients which describe fluid flow the original idea was probably Babbage's but Ada definitely worked out all the nitty gritty details of how one might set up the machine to produce the desired results that was the very first functional computer program written out almost a hundred years before Alan Turing designed his enigma breaking machine Ada's notes also highlighted just how much the analytical engine was a departure from the basic adding machines that had come before and why being able to perform any arbitrary operation including operations on its instructions could revolutionize everything the analytical engine might act upon other things besides number where objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine she went on to describe such a machine composing music because hey music is an algorithm basically this is a polite Victorian way of saying holy people this is literally everything unfortunately the analytical engine was mostly seen as a quaint curiosity and Babbage ran out of funding to construct it Ada would never see the Bernoulli program that she perfected run on any hardware however some mathematicians and computer scientists have analyzed her software and I'm sure that she would be very satisfied to know that it totally works so the next time that you see someone wearing some awesome brass goggles or a leather top hat with sprocket sewn onto it remember Charles Babbage's incredible inventions and Ada Lovelace's exceptional insight and vision for them and consider just how close we came to having a clockwork version of YouTube a hundred years ago and speaking of YouTube happy thunk aversary we're entering our third year we have more than six thousand subscribers if you're anyone of those or if you comment or if you just watch the videos I just want to say thank you so much one of the most frequent comments that I get is it's a real shame that this channel doesn't have more views and honestly I'm just pleased this punch that anybody watches at all and the comments are almost always just really insightful and respectful and you know I'd rather have a quality audience than like millions and millions of views and you know the the youtube one million view trophy there's no room there's no room for it it just it just wouldn't fit I just like to take one moment and explicitly thank those people who I send my scripts to for revision or just to sound them out Liz especially she's been through almost every single script that I've written uh Tanya Courtney Robert Elena you guys are all fantastic and also you you're awesome thank you very much for watching don't forget to pop up subscribe below share and don't stop thunking