Could a machine handle more than numbers?

That time, that place

The poet Byron's daughter. Fearing she would inherit her father's temperament, her mother had her taught mathematics from childhood.

What she encountered was Babbage's Analytical Engine — a machine of gears for calculating, which existed only as drawings and was never built.

Why this question

She was asked to translate an Italian mathematician's account of the machine into English. She added notes — and the notes ran to three times the length of the original.

Inside them she went somewhere Babbage had not.

What was found

One note sets out, step by step, a procedure for computing Bernoulli numbers — an order of operations written down in advance for a machine to follow. It is often called the first program.

Another note goes further. She saw that the engine need not be confined to numbers. If relations among things can be represented in symbols, then music, or anything else, could be handled.

Not a calculator but a machine for symbols. That is where Turing arrives a century later.

She also wrote that the engine can do only what we know how to order it to do, and originates nothing. Turing would later name this the Lovelace objection and take it on directly.