The Woman Who Wrote For A Machine That Did Not Exist

One of her parents was known in many countries for his writing — writing made from beautiful words that moved like music. He went from the family when she was small, and she did not see him after that. The parent who held her feared what he had been, and chose numbers for the child: numbers, lesson after lesson, and not one beautiful word. It did not go as planned. She found the beautiful inside the numbers.

The machine made from wheels

When she was young, she knew a man who planned a number machine before there was electricity to make one — a machine made from wheels and turning parts, as big as a room. He planned it for years, and asked the government for money, and the machine was planned but not made.

She wrote about this machine, and her writing grew bigger than the writing she had started from. Inside it there is a plan: things for the machine to do, one after another — do this, then this, and then go back and do it another time. It was the first plan like it. She wrote the first telling words — for a machine that no one made in her years.

What she saw

The man with the wheels thought his machine was for numbers. She saw more. She wrote that the machine could work with all things that can be written as marks — words, pictures, music — not numbers only, and that if music could be written as numbers, the machine could make music. The number machines do all of this now. She saw it one hundred years before the first one was made.

And she wrote one thing more: that the machine could only do what people told it to do — that it could not start a thing on its own, or make a thing no person had put into it. People go back to these words now, when they think about the machine that says one more word, and ask each other: do her words hold true now? It is a good question, and it is hers.

After

She died young. Her writing sat for one hundred years, and not many people read it. Then people made the first working number machines, with electricity, and — looking for what had been thought before them — they found her. She had been there first.

Now, each year, people who write telling words hold a day with her name on it.