Mr Babbage stated that upon the first occasion he was disturbed by the noise of the defendant's organ, and he went out and requested him to cease playing, and to go away...The people in his neighbourhood encouraged the organ-men. He could not, he said, walk along the streets now without being insulted by persons living in the neighbourhood...Mr Babbage was engaged on works of great scientific importance, and of a nature which his persecutors could not understand.—Street Music in the Metropolis (London, 1864)

CHARLES Babbage, this blog's namesake, disliked the street noise of London prevalent in the 1860s, a couple of decades after this newspaper was founded. He was joined in public campaigns to squelch the discord that kept knowledge workers from maintaining focus by Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Richard Doyle, among others. (Walter Bagehot's opinions on noise are unknown.) His antipathy was a watchword in his day. And now it is immortalised in cartoon form, along with alternative history versions of several of his inventions.

The present Babbage came across 2D Goggles some months ago, a rousing episodic comic of Ada King, Lady Lovelace (née Byron)  and the eponymous Mr Babbage fighting the oral depredations of "The Organist", a foul besmircher of mental clarity. Lady Lovelace and Mr Babbage did collaborate, but their work together unfortunately fell short of incorporating sewers, monkeys and difference engines the size of buildings. "The Organist" has a backbone of facts over which artist Sydney Padua has built her fancy. This adventure recently concluded, with Lady Lovelace and Mr Babbage coming out smelling like roses (not monkeys). "It really is true that Babbage had this obsessive battle with the street musicians," says Ms Padua. "There are tons of documents. It was a byword. Any time anybody wrote a popular article about music in the 1860s, they had to mention Babbage."

Ms Padua, a Canadian animator who lives in London, created 2D Goggles for Ada Lovelace Day, an annual event to celebrate and encourage women in subjects dear to this blog: science, technology, engineering and maths. As Lady Lovelace died aged 36, Ms Padua says "I just did the comic as a joke, and the punchline of the joke is that she didn't die. They built a difference engine and fought crime." That first sequence was vivid enough to cause readers to ask for more, expecting an entire tale.

Ms Padua has read Mr Babbage extensively, examining work contemporary to his time available through Google Books, which is also the source of the book quoted at the start of this post. She notes that, as part of a project to build Mr Babbage's Analytical Engine, a more advanced computer than his Difference Engine, an effort is simultaneously underway to digitise Mr Babbage's personal papers. (A donation drive for the effort, Plan 28, ended without reaching its goal on February 1st. John Graham-Cumming, the man behind the programme, plans to proceed regardless. You may recognise Mr Graham-Cumming's name from his successful petition to rehabilitate Alan Turing, which resulted in a public apology by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.)

Ms Padua's portrayal of Lady Lovelace's obsession with and expertise in maths is likewise rooted in history. Lady Lovelace was the only legitimate child of George Gordon, Lord Byron, though she was raised apart from him and he died when she was nine. Her mother had her tutored rigorously in maths in an effort to keep rationality to the fore, and her father's madness in abeyance. Lady Lovelace's genius in maths had many admirers. "You couldn't make up this thing about Lovelace being brought up with this mathematical regimen because otherwise she'd go mad," Ms Padua says. Lady Lovelace is often credited with having written the first credible computer program.

2D Goggles is a side project for Ms Padua, who works on both computer- and hand-animated films for her living. Her Babbage/Lovelace comics use a rough drawing style intentionally. She employs both paper and computer tablet to create them. She says that the heavy subcultural interest in steampunk—the expression of computational functions in the design and mechanical aesthetics of the 19th century—derives from the same motivation. "The thing about steampunk that's really attractive is that technology is so abstract now. You push a button, and it goes into the box, and it doesn't make a noise. It's very abstract. It doesn't satisfy the monkey brain."

Ms Padua has so far written several stories of derring-do in addition to the Organist, including a visit from Her Majesty (Victoria, that is), interested in the mechanical device to which she had given patronage. More is to come. "If I did all the stories I would like to do, it would probably take me about 15 years," says Ms Padua.

The artist is happy to foster additional awareness of both the stars of her comic. Common knowledge of them is limited, despite their crucial roles on the path to functional computers. "You can draw them, and in a sense bring them back to life," she says. She notes of Mr Babbage that "he should be much more famous than he is. He needs better PR." We are trying...