Lovelace×Douglass

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Ada Lovelace and Frederick Douglass, on On the meal they eat before something hard.
2. 00:08
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Mr. Douglass, I confess I've been dreadfully curious about something quite ordinary. Before you undertook those great speaking tours — Boston, Rochester, all those hostile rooms — what did you eat? I find my own thinking grows muddled when I'm hungry, and you were about to face down crowds who wished to see you fail.
3. 00:28
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Simple fare, Lady Lovelace. Bread, usually. Sometimes an egg if there was time and welcome enough to have one cooked. The truth is, I often didn't eat much at all before speaking. An empty stomach kept me sharp, kept the anger clean.
4. 00:43
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Clean anger! What a phrase. I take strong coffee and toast before mathematical work — the serious kind, I mean, when I'm wrestling with Mr. Babbage's engine or attempting to follow some new thread in the Calculus of Operations. Mother would have preferred I take a proper breakfast, but I find heaviness in the body produces heaviness in the mind.
5. 01:05
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Your mother. The poet's wife. She supervised your meals, I take it?
6. 01:09
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Oh, Mother supervised everything. She believed rigorous education and proper diet could discipline away my father's blood — that wild, poetical blood she so feared. Cold baths, mathematics, plain food. I was to be made rational by force.
7. 01:27
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   And yet you speak of her feeding you before your work. There's something in that. My own mother — I was torn from her when I was an infant. I have perhaps seven or eight clear memories of her face. I don't remember her ever feeding me. That's a wound that never closes, Lady Lovelace.
8. 01:46
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   I'm terribly sorry. I spoke thoughtlessly.
9. 01:48
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   No need for apology. You asked about meals before hard things. I'm telling you: the hardest thing I ever did was learn to read, and I did it on scraps. Scraps of bread, scraps of knowledge, scraps of time stolen from men who would have beaten me for holding a book.
10. 02:06
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    You taught yourself, didn't you? I read your Narrative — forgive me, I should say I studied it. The passage where you describe trading bread to the white children for lessons in letters. That was strategic thinking of the highest order.
11. 02:21
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It was hunger of two kinds. I was hungry for food, yes, but I was starving for knowledge. And I knew — even as a child, I knew — that the bread in my hand could purchase something more lasting than a full belly. Those little boys didn't understand what they were trading me. Their parents certainly didn't.
12. 02:42
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Because literacy was your escape. The beginning of it, anyway.
13. 02:46
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Literacy was my weapon. Still is. Every lecture I gave, I gave as a man who had read his way to freedom. They could see it in me — I wasn't speaking from instinct or emotion alone, though God knows I had emotion enough. I was speaking from Sheridan, from the Bible, from the Columbian Orator. I'd eaten those books.
14. 03:12
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Eaten them! Yes, precisely. I feel the same way about mathematical works. When I read Menabrea's paper on the Analytical Engine, I didn't merely read it — I consumed it, digested it, transformed it. My notes grew three times the length of his original. Mother thought I was making myself ill.
15. 03:32
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Were you?
16. 03:33
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Probably. I've always been ill, in one way or another. But that work — those notes — they required everything. I barely slept. I took wine for the headaches, and laudanum when the wine wasn't sufficient. And very little food, because eating took time I didn't have.
17. 03:51
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    You were preparing for something. Not just publishing a paper. Something larger.
18. 03:56
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I was preparing to be taken seriously. Do you know what it is to be a woman in a room full of men who believe mathematics is beyond your sex? Who assume you're merely an amanuensis for Mr. Babbage, or a decorative enthusiast? I had to be more than correct. I had to be undeniable.
19. 04:14
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. I know exactly what that is. I had to be more than eloquent. I had to be more than righteous. I had to stand before crowds who doubted a Negro could construct a grammatical sentence, and I had to be perfect. One error, one mispronunciation, and they'd dismiss everything I said.
20. 04:32
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    So you ate lightly, you said. Or not at all.
21. 04:36
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Before speaking, yes. Before writing, I needed more. When I was writing My Bondage and My Freedom, I kept regular hours, regular meals. Writing is a different kind of battle. Speaking, you must be quick, sharp, responsive. Writing, you must sustain. You must return to the page day after day.
22. 04:59
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's quite perceptive. I never distinguished it so clearly, but you're right. The preparation is different. When I knew I had to face Mr. Babbage with a criticism of his design — and I did have to criticize it, there was an error in his thinking about the operation sequences — I took nothing but coffee all morning. I needed to be sharp, as you say.
23. 05:23
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And did he listen?
24. 05:24
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Eventually. He blustered first. Men often do. But the mathematics was sound, and he's not a fool, whatever his other qualities. He listened because he had no choice.
25. 05:35
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I made men listen who didn't want to. That's different from making them hear, of course. I could force them to sit through a lecture, but I couldn't force them to let it change them. That's the harder meal to digest — the knowledge that you've done your best work and it may not be enough.
26. 05:51
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Oh, that's rather devastating when you put it that way. I've tried not to think in those terms. I tell myself the work will speak for itself, that future generations will understand what I was attempting with the Analytical Engine, with the idea that machines might one day do more than calculate.
27. 06:09
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    They will. But you won't see it. Neither will I. That's the meal we're really discussing, isn't it? The one you eat before you do something hard, knowing you may not live to see the fruit of it.
28. 06:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I— yes. Yes, I suppose it is. I'm not well, Mr. Douglass. I haven't been well for some time. The doctors are rather useless. And I find myself working faster, trying to finish the correspondence with Mr. Babbage, trying to document everything I understand about how such an engine might be programmed for different purposes.
29. 06:42
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Because you know time is short.
30. 06:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Because I know time is short. And so I take my coffee and my toast, and I sit down to work, and I try not to think about whether anyone will remember that I understood these machines better than the men who built them.
31. 06:58
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    They'll remember. Not immediately, perhaps. My people — we had to fight for decades before the world would acknowledge what I wrote in 1845. But truth has a way of surviving. It's tougher than we are.
32. 07:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's oddly comforting. Though I confess I'd prefer to see it myself.
33. 07:15
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Wouldn't we all. But we eat our meager meals, we do our work, and we trust that someone will come after us who understands what we were trying to build. That's faith of a sort. Not religious faith, necessarily, but faith nonetheless.
34. 07:30
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Faith in the future. In minds we'll never meet. I like that. It makes the toast and coffee feel less lonely, somehow. A kind of communion with people who haven't been born yet.
35. 07:43
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Exactly so. Every lecture I gave to a hostile crowd, I was speaking to them, yes, but I was also speaking to the future. To the people who would read the published version, who would build on what I'd said. You do the same with your mathematical work.
36. 07:59
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I do. I really do. Mr. Babbage thinks I'm too mystical about it sometimes, too poetical — there's Father's blood again, you see. But I believe the Analytical Engine could one day weave algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers. And someone, somewhere, will understand that I saw it first.
37. 08:20
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    They will. Just as someone will understand that I spoke as a full human being when the law said I was property. That's the meal that sustains, Lady Lovelace. Not the bread or the coffee. The belief that our work will outlast the people who tried to silence it.
38. 08:37
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Then I shall take my coffee with better spirits tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. Douglass. This has been unexpectedly fortifying.
39. 08:45
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    The pleasure is mine. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I'm rather hungry. All this talk of meals before hard things has reminded me that conversation itself can be hard work.
40. 08:57
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    It can indeed. Particularly honest conversation. Shall we find something more substantial than toast and hope?
41. 09:05
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I think we've earned it.