If there’s one thing that most events simply don’t have enough of, it’s robots. Robots, and saws. Not so Ada Lovelace Day Live!, which will feature the robot-wrangling saw-flexing talents of Sarah Angliss, composer and tech historian.

Sarah describes her performances as “tapping into her obsessions with scientific oddities, obsolete machines, faded variety acts and the darkest European folk tales to create highly original, unsettling and sometimes strangely comic work.”

With a live show that can only be described as a technical marvel, Sarah’s geeky, science-focused music features theremin, keyboard and musical saw.

Hugo, one of Sarah’s robot friends

Sarah’s mechanical sidekicks include Hugo, a rather spooky roboticised, disembodied 1930s vent doll head, The Ealing Feeder, a robotic bell playing machine, and Clara 2.0, which Sarah describes as ‘the polite robot thereminist’.

Sarah, performing with Spacedog

Sarah’s band, Spacedog, is probably the only live band to give equal billing to both humans and robots and has been featured on Radio 4 and in 2011 won the Best Music Event of Brighton Festival and Fringe. She’s had received funding from NESTA Dreamtime and public engagement grants from the Wellcome Trust. In 2007, her digital performance Repeat Repeat, in collaboration with performer Caroline Radcliffe, won a Quake Dance Festival Award.

We can promise you, of all the performances you’ve seen in 2012, nothing will be quite like Sarah Angliss and her robot pals!

Tickets for ALD Live! are £10 for the general public, £5 for students. Book now!

We are privileged to be holding Ada Lovelace Day Live! at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) this year, because of our partnership with the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). As you’ve probably noticed, WES will be presenting the prestigious Karen Burt Memorial Award to a newly chartered woman engineer during ALD Live!.

But our presence at the IET is also appropriate for another reason: held in the IET archives are letters from Ada Lovelace to Michael Faraday, a letter from Lovelace’s close friend Charles Babbage to Faraday, and portraits of both Lovelace and Babbage. When I visited, IET archivist Sarah Hale was kind enough to arrange for me to see the letters and Lovelace’s portrait, although sadly the room where Babbage’s hangs was in use at the time.

The IET has a number of letters from Lovelace to Faraday, including this one from 16 October 1844 (note: capitalisation, underlines, punctuation and spelling as per originals):

Dear Mr Faraday,

I have never yet thanked you for the little paper you sent me this spring. I read it with the deepest attention & interest, & it has suggested to me some very curious (& perhaps important) considerations for my own future use an an Analyst; considerations which fell in with some previous trains of ideas I had been long gradually forming, but which you have called into more tangible existence in my mind.

Perhaps no one has read your paper with such full appreciation as myself of it’s practical bearings; or has valued it so justly, both for it’s contents, & as presented to me by it’s Author, for whom I entertain an esteem little short of reverence.

Ada was keen to persuade Faraday to tutor her in maths, although Faraday was 53 by this time and, whilst flattered by her attentions, he was probably also a bit perturbed by this feisty young lady asking for tutelage. Lovelace wrote, on 10 November 1844:

Dear Mr Faraday,

I am exceedingly tickled with your comparison of yourself to a tortoise. It has excited all my fun (& I assure you I have no little of that in me).

I am also struck with the forcible truth of your designation of my character of mind:

“elasticity of intellect“.

It is indeed the very truth, most happily put into language.

You have excited in my mind a ridiculous, but not ungraceful, allegorical picture, viz:

that of a quiet demure plodding tortoise, with a beautiful fairy gambolling round it in a thousand radiant & varying hues; the tortoise crying out, “Fairy, fairy, I am not like you. I cannot at pleasure assume a thousand aerial shapes & expand myself over the face of the universe. Fairy, fairy, have mercy on me, & remember I am but a tortoise“.

(You can read letter in full via scans kindly provided by the IET: part 1, part 2, part 3 & part 4.)

In an earlier letter held by the IET and dated 9 September 1843 Babbage writes to Faraday about Lovelace:

My dear Faraday,

I am not quite sure whether I thanked  you for a kind note imputing to me unmeritedly the merit of a present you received I conjecture from Lady Lovelace.

I now send you what out to have accompanied that Translation.

So you will now have to write another not so that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it. I remember well your first interview with the youthfull fairy which she herself has not forgotten and I am gratefull to you both for making my drawings rooms the Chateau D’Eu of Science.

Despite all the fairies and enchantresses bandied about by Lovelace and Babbage, Faraday never did acquiesce to Lovelace’s wishes that he let her become his pupil.

The portrait of Lovelace that hangs in a corridor outside the Lovelace Room is actually a copy by Mary Remington of the 1836 portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter, about which Lovelace joked:

“I conclude she is bent on displaying the whole expanse of my capacious jaw bone, upon which I think the word Mathematics should be written.”

Lovelace’s letters will be available to view during Ada Lovelace Day Live! in one of the display cabinets in the IET foyer.

If you’d like to see the letters and portraits, and are feeling generous, then the IET has offered Ada Lovelace Day supporters a tour at 2pm on 16 October as a part of our fundraiser.

Members of the public can also organise their own tour of the building and archives directly with the IET. Tours are free and usually last an hour.

Email: archives@theiet.org
Tel: 0207 3448407
The IET Archives

I was delighted to be asked by Mookychick to talk about sexism in science, Ada Lovelace Day and whether there’s a female Brian Cox out there. Here’s a snippet that’s particularly apposite, but do pop over and read the whole thing:

Ada Lovelace Day has set up a fundraiser this year. Well done on running it so long with volunteers. How will those funds help women in technology?

SCA: My key aim is to create a charitable organisation that can provide support to women in tech all year round, not just on one day. One project we’re working on is to create a database of all the different support groups that exist for women across different sectors, to make it easier for women to find the right kind of group for them. When I started in tech, I felt very isolated, a problem made worse by the fact that I was a freelance so didn’t spend long at any one company, and certainly not long enough to build a social support structure around myself. There are many more groups around now than there used to be, but like us, most of them have almost no budget and they don’t always have the reach they need. We’d like to help bridge that gap.

I’d also like to be able to help women with skills development, particularly around things like media training so that we can get more women experts on the TV and in the newspapers. Whenever there’s a big tech story, the pundits are almost always men, and it’d be great to be able to matchmake knowledgeable women with journalists so that we can even out the ratio a bit.

And finally, there’s a huge need for educational materials around women in technology and science. I’ve had a number of teachers come to me and ask if we have lesson plans that they could use for Ada Lovelace Day, but unfortunately we don’t. It would be great for us to be able to provide teachers at all grades with lesson plans that they can adapt for their classes. We need to inspire a new generation of girls and show them that women can be successful in technology, and this would be one way to could do that.

In an epic feat of planning ahead, the East Midlands branch of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is searching for a female speaker to talk about the role of women (or a particular woman) in mathematics for an Ada Lovelace Day 2013 event.

They are looking for someone who could speak to a group of mathematicians and students interested in maths. Audience size would be up to 100, although that’s obviously difficult to predict. Traditionally the talks are held on a week-day evening at 7.30pm and typically last about 50 minutes. The venue would be a university in the East Midlands: Loughborough, Nottingham, Leicester, Derby or Nottingham Trent.

The IMA would be able to definitely cover travel expenses, and may be able to cover hotel costs although that would be confirmed nearer the time. The speaker would also be invited out for a meal either before or after the talk.