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The translator’s Note G, signed A. A. L., to Menabrea’s memoir in Scientific Memoirs (1843) states that the Analytical Engine “has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing”, that it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform, and that it has no power of anticipating analytical relations or truths. Copy claim link
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Date 1843 · publication Records dated 1843 → Role Earliest located Register (kind of text) Nonfiction Scope and limits The statement concerns Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and the note introduces it as a guard against ‘exaggerated ideas’ of the engine’s powers. The note does not use the word ‘only’, as Turing (1950, p. 459, note 1) observes. The printed volume signs the notes ‘A. A. L.’; their attribution to Ada Lovelace is not established by this volume, though Turing’s paper of 1950 names her as the memoir’s author. Earliest located means the earliest text found by the collection’s searches, not a first statement.
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Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, with notes by the translator (Scientific Memoirs, vol. III, Article XXIX) ↗ Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, and from Foreign Journals, vol. III, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1843), pp. 666–731 · 1843
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Source excerpt “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” Location in source Article XXIX, Note G (keyed to p. 689), p. 722, second paragraph
How it was read Retrieved directly from the publisher
Machine-checked · 2026-11-04
Source details and check notes Authors L. F. Menabrea (memoir); A. A. L. (translation and notes; attributed to Ada Lovelace) Version Retrieved for the candidate pack on 2026-11-02 (SHA-256 d633c2462f1a7fc282035b2b338b112a2307abc6acf22aaaca574f851d1a441a) and again at admission on 2026-11-04 (same file). Internet Archive scan of the 1843 volume (Royal Asiatic Society, Bombay Branch copy; digitised 2016, collection IndiaHistory), read in its OCR text; quotations compared with the OCR, which has scattered character errors. Canonical address Open the canonical source ↗ Accessed 2026-11-04 Language English (en) Attribution L. F. Menabrea (memoir), A. A. L. (translation and notes; attributed to Ada Lovelace), “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, with notes by the translator (Scientific Memoirs, vol. III, Article XXIX)”, 1843. Reuse No open redistribution licence asserted. Bibliographic metadata, editorial paraphrases and short attributed quotations (at most 50 words each). Recheck terms before wider redistribution. Check notes Candidate pack passage, antecedent texts (research/prehistory). The quotation (39 words) matched a fresh retrieval of 2026-11-04 (SHA-256 d633c2462f1a…, the file the candidate pack read). Matching ignored differences of whitespace, case, quotation marks, dashes, line-break hyphens and Unicode compatibility forms, so the source’s typography can differ. OCR reads ‘re- lations’ across a line break; the scan’s spelling ‘any thing’ is kept. No human editorial review. Status and meaning Editorial status. Machine-checked . Machines found this record and checked it against its sources; no person accepted it individually. Each evidence record above shows how it was checked.
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Date. Year on the title page of Scientific Memoirs, vol. III; Note G is on p. 722.
Record ID pre-u01-lovelace-1843-notes