The book grew out of a
webcomic of the same name. The comic began as a single comic strip for Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, a celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Disliking the fact that both Babbage and Lovelace died with their life work incomplete, Padua created a fictional ending for the strip, then found that "a lot of people saw it and thought that I was actually going to do a comic, which I had no intention of doing. But then I started thinking, 'What if I actually did the comic?' I started fooling around, and I guess I'm still fooling around with it." in which
Ada Lovelace and
Charles Babbage have actually built an
analytical engine and use it to "fight crime" at
Queen Victoria's request. Also featured in the comic is the great engineer
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whom Padua has called "the
Wolverine of the early Victorians". The comic is based on thorough research on the biographies of and correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace, as well as other bits of early
Victoriana, which are then twisted for humorous effect. "Some of the documents are more entertaining than the actual comic. Plenty of times, I've thrown something into the comic just so I'd have an excuse to refer to some document," Padua says. ==Awards and reception==