Ada Lovelace & the Fire of Making

By: Matthew Battles
March 24, 2009

Steampunk artist and impresario Hieronymus Isambard von Slatt has joined the ranks of good people observing Ada Lovelace Day. See how he makes his Altoids tin etching of an Ada Lovelace portrait here.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, is remembered for championing Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine,” a mechanical forerunner of the computer. Ada Lovelace Day is a web-driven effort to celebrate women who make amazing things.

Lots of bloggers, programmers, and engineers are being celebrated around the internet. HiLobrow wants to celebrate the work of the Flaming Lotus Girls, a San Francisco-based art collective that builds astonishing fire-belching kinetic sculptures. The Flaming Lotus Girls show that the energies of burning, forging, and making belong to us all.

Tags

AdaLovelaceDay09, lobrow, steampunk

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Ada Lovelace & the Fire of Making

Categories

Tags