Sketch of the Analytical Engine: Note G

Edition

Excerpt: Note G, the last of the translator’s notes (pages 722 to 731) to L. F. Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3, London, 1843, article 29. Text: the Wikisource transcription of the 1843 volume (pages 732 and 735 to 743 of its Index), checked word for word against the scan of the Natural History Museum copy (archive.org/details/scientificmemoir03memo, 400 ppi) and, where that copy is unclear, the Digital Library of India copy (archive.org/details/india.history.resource.53369). Corrections to Wikisource from the scans: “mathematical” (not “Mathematical”, p. 722); “Operation 21, which” (not “21;”, p. 728); “to make the number on V3” (the word “the” was missing, p. 728); “the sign at the top of V8” (not “V3”, p. 728); the closing parenthesis of “(for any even power of x.)” (p. 726); the “+” before the dots of formula (6.) and the period after x to the power -1 in the last formula (p. 731); the base of formulas (1.) and (4.) printed as an epsilon; and the values of n at the end of each line of the table of cycles (p. 730), which the NHM copy loses in its gutter and the DLI copy shows. Misprints of the volume are kept: “hovever”, “sucessively”, “the integral of a x_n”, “2n.(2n-1” without its closing parenthesis in formula (3.), and the signature “A. L. L.” (the other notes are signed “A. A. L.”). Formulas are set with KaTeX, capitals of variables upright and the V of the diagrams in bold as printed; dot leaders keep their printed number of dots, except the two dotted lines of the table of cycles, shorter. The three footnotes, marked with an asterisk on their pages, are numbered and set at the end. The diagram is the folding plate of the volume: the photograph on Wikimedia Commons (from sophiararebooks.com), the same printing as the plate of the NHM copy (leaf 754) but sharper, cropped to the plate, enlarged twice (Lanczos) and turned to black on white to remove the show-through of the facing page. The plate is set at the head of the text, across the columns; in the volume it follows page 722.

Rights

Ada Lovelace died on 27 November 1852 and Note G was published in London in 1843: the text is in the public domain in France (the author died before 1 January 1956) and in the United States (published before 1 January 1931). The diagram is the plate of the same publication; its Wikimedia Commons file page marks it as public domain (PD-old-100).

Diagram: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_for_the_computation_of_Bernoulli_numbers.jpg, public domain (PD-old-100). Scan of the text: the Biodiversity Heritage Library states “Public domain. The BHL considers that this work is no longer under copyright protection”.