A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (11 page)

But it didn’t take Ada too long to realise that William was a somewhat aimless man. He spent a great deal of time and money designing and ordering the construction of tunnels at their country houses. The precise purpose of all these tunnels was never clear. On the accession of Queen Victoria in 1838 he was elevated in the peerage from Baron to Viscount of Ockham, and to the Earldom of Lovelace, an extinct title from Annabella’s family the Noels (upon the death of her uncle Lord Wentworth, she and her father had inserted ‘Noel’ before ‘Milbanke’). But rather than rewards for any particular achievements of William’s, they appear to have been political pleasantries from the new monarch prompted by one of her ministers. Ada herself would henceforth sign her name ‘Ada Lovelace’, using her own family name. Paradoxically, Lady Byron never dropped her husband’s name, even when she eventually inherited her uncle’s title and became Baroness of Wentworth.

After a few years of what appears to be genuine happiness, Ada began to find her husband’s lack of overall purpose intensely irritating. This was evidently a problem throughout their marriage; one of the letters discovered in the north of England and written by Ada on Christmas Day 1846, amounts to a ticking-off of Babbage for, as she saw it, obstructing the procurement of a possible appointment for William. ‘
You
can have no conception of what my husband is, when his home
alone
occupies his irritable energies,’ she writes. She craved a husband who would do great things, be great, stride to fame and illustriousness with her by his side and understand her own pressing needs for an intellectual life. But William was not that man.

Her duty as wife having been dispensed with, Ada resumed her passion for mathematics despite the wealth that surrounded her. She became determined to find a distinguished mathematical and scientific tutor who would guide and accompany her on her intellectual quest. Who better to ask than Babbage?

During the first few years of her marriage, he was often a visitor to Ada and William at their home in Ockham in Surrey. Ada was certainly keen to see him. In one short letter written on March 24, almost certainly in 1839, she chastises him playfully:

Sat[ur]d[a]y next will suit us perfectly, but we hope you will stay on as far into the following week, as possible. Surely the machine allows you a holiday sometimes. –

This charming note sets the tone for how their friendship would develop with Ada often describing herself as ‘a fairy’. In November 1839, she writes to Babbage to ask if he could help her find someone to teach her mathematics:

… quite made up my mind to have some instruction next year in Town, but the difficulty is to find the
man
.
I
have a peculiar
way
of
learning
, & I think it must be a peculiar man to teach me successfully.-

Do not reckon me conceited, for I am sure I am the very last person to think over-highly of
myself
; but I believe I have the
power
of going just as far as I like in such pursuits, & where there is so very decided a taste, I should almost say a
passion
, as I have for them, I question if there is not always some portion of natural genius even. – At any rate the taste is such that it
must
be gratified. – I mention all this to you because I think you are or may be in the way of meeting with the right sort of person, & I am sure you have at any rate the
will
to give me any assistance in your power.

Lord L [Lovelace] desires all sorts of reminiscences, & that I am to take care & remind you about coming to Ockham. –

Yours most sincerely,

Ada Lovelace

When Babbage replied on November 29 1839, he responds, perhaps playfully, to his ‘fairy’.

Dear Lady Lovelace

I make no most ungrateful returns for your kind letter from London. I have lately been ever more than usually occupied by the Engine.

I allowed myself ten days in Cheshire and finding this did not do I was obliged to go to Brighton for five days which restored me to the calculating state and have been working very hard ever since.

I have just arrived at an improvement which will throw back all my drawings full six months unless I succeed in carrying out some new views which may shorten the labour.

I have now commenced the description of the Engine so that I am fully occupied.

I think your taste for mathematics is so decided that it ought not to be checked. I have been making enquiry but cannot find at present any one at all to recommend to assist you. I will however not forget the search.

The London World is very quiet at present. Mrs De Morgan has just added a new philosopher to its population and Mr Sheridan Knowles has written a most popular play called ‘Love’ to which I have been a frequent attendant. I met the author yesterday at a dinner at Mr Rogers’.

I could not by possibility have visited you this year in the West, but I cherish the hope of getting a few days at Ockham when I can indulge in a little recreation.

Pray forgive my epistolary negligence and believe me with best regards to Lord Lovelace.

Ever very sincerely yours.

C Babbage

Knowles’s play concerns a countess who is in love with her serf called Huon but her father the duke is opposed to this marriage. Was it intended as an allusion to Babbage’s true feelings, and did Ada read it that way?

Ada Lovelace, 1838 (A.E. Chaton, RA).

13

Ada received Babbage’s letter about seeing the play
Love
in December 1839. Whatever she felt exactly about Babbage, in the same month she would write another letter that would have important consequences for their work together.

1839 was not a good year for England. With riots happening almost every day in the countryside and towns over high food prices and low wages, many feared that England was in danger of sliding into anarchy. By modern standards the vast majority of people in Britain were poor; suffering routinely from malnutrition, and illness. The small proportion of the population who were well-fed and privileged slept uneasily in their comfortable beds, only too aware of what happened in France a few decades ago.

So here we are here on a December day at Number One Dorset Street, Babbage’s London home. The man himself, forty-seven years old, is sitting at his writing-desk in his study. He takes out his pen, dips it into an inkwell, and starts to write a letter to a Parisian friend.

The particular friend Babbage is writing to is the French astronomer and scientist, François Jean Dominique Arago. Babbage got to know Arago in Paris back in 1819 when he travelled there with John Herschel. Babbage and Arago hit it off at once and had remained friends ever since. When Babbage corresponds with Arago he does so in English, while Arago replies in French. They both understand each other’s native languages, but prefer to express themselves in their own.

‘My dear sir,’ Babbage writes:

I am going to ask you to do me a favour.

There has arrived lately in London… a work which does the highest credit to the arts of your country. It is a piece of silk in which is woven by means of the Jacard [sic] loom a portrait of M. Jacard sitting in his workshop. It was executed in Lyons as a tribute to the memory of the discoverer of a most admirable contrivance which at once gave an almost boundless extent to the art of weaving.

It is not probable that that copy will be seen as much as it deserves and my first request is,
if
it can be purchased, that you will do me the favour to procure for me two copies and send them to Mr Henry Bulwer at the English Embassy who will forward them. If, as I fear, this beautiful production is not sold, then I rely on your friendship to procure for me
one
copy by representing in the proper quarter the circumstance which makes me anxious to possess it.

The portrait of Jacquard was indeed fascinating as it was essentially a digitised image. Made using 24,000 punched cards, it wove an image of the inventor of the loom on which it was woven. Babbage had become fascinated by the Jacquard loom and he sensed the importance of the portrait in relation to his own work. Also, back in 1836 he had noted briefly in one of his notebooks that the Jacquard loom punched cards – or rather, cards very much like them – could be utilised to act as a way of – as Babbage expressed it – making the Analytical Engine ‘special’, by which he meant making it ready to carry out a particular calculation. This terminology of making his machine ‘special’ was the closest Babbage got to describing the modern concept of programming a computer.

Babbage was so fascinated with the Jacquard loom and the portrait that in the same letter, he asked Arago to send ‘any memoir about it which may be published.’ Clearly, no information was available to him as yet, as he continued the misspelling of ‘M. Jacard’. Money was no object to Babbage, so keen was he to get what he wanted. Although he was misspelling Jacquard’s name, he had no misapprehension about the revolution the Jacquard loom had created in the story of technology.

Whatever these things may cost, if you will mention to me the name of your banker in Paris I will gladly pay the amount into his hands and shall still be indebted to you for procuring for me objects of very great interest.

Babbage’s letter then proceeds to the hub of the matter. The Englishman explains exactly why he is so fascinated by the Frenchman’s work.

You are aware that the system of cards which Jacard [sic] invented are the
means
by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to weave
any
pattern that may be desired. Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate
any
formula however complicated. But I have also advanced one stage further and without making
all
the cards, I have communicated through the same means orders to follow certain
laws
in the use of those cards and thus the Calculating Engine can solve any equations, eliminate between any number of variables and perform the highest operations of analysis.

Among Babbage’s many contributions to the birth of information technology, the most significant was that he spotted a way to adapt Jacquard’s punched-card programming to a completely new purpose: mathematical calculation.

Augustus de Morgan.

At a technical level, Babbage really did borrow Jacquard’s idea lock, stock and barrel. Babbage saw that just as Jacquard’s loom employed punched cards to control the action of small, narrow, circular metal rods which in turn governed the action of individual warp threads, he himself could use the same principle to control the positions of small, narrow, circular metal rods that would govern the settings of cogwheels carrying out various functions in his calculating machine.

Ada was at this time still looking for a tutor. In the summer of 1840, Lady Byron came to the rescue. She arranged for her daughter to be instructed by the well-known mathematician and logistician named Augustus de Morgan, another Trinity graduate from Cambridge and friend of Babbage’s. Under his guidance, Ada made rapid progress in studying her favourite subject. For the first time in her life she seems to have felt some real intellectual fulfilment. She was relentless in her questions to him. In fact when she fell ill he and his wife Sophia (Frend) wrote with great concern to Lady Byron that Ada’s constitution might be temperamentally unsuited to mathematics. The formidable Lady Byron, as well as Lord Lovelace, seem to have promptly disabused De Morgan of that idea in the bud:

I have received your note and should have answered no further than that I was very glad to find my apprehension… is unfounded in the opinion of yourself and Lord Lovelace who
must
be better than I am.

He didn’t want to let it go though and wrote ‘at the same time it is very necessary that the one point should be properly stated’. More specifically he was the expert in one thing. He pointed out politely that they knew Ada ‘on every point of the case but one, and may be on that one.’ Here lay his deep worry: Ada’s voracious attack on his subject. She was not satisfied with merely taking lady-like instruction from De Morgan, she questioned him widely, well beyond what he put on her plate and he anxiously avoided encouraging her in this.

I have never expressed to Lady Lovelace my opinion of her as a student of these matters. I always feared that it might promote an application to them which might be injurious to a person whose bodily health is not strong. I have therefore contented myself with very good, quite right, and so on. But I feel bound to tell you that the power of thinking on these matters which Lady L. has always shown from the beginning of my correspondence with her, has been something so utterly out of the common way for any beginner, man or woman, that this power must be duly considered by her friends with reference to the question whether they should urge or check her obvious determination to try not only to reach but to get beyond, the present bound of knowledge.

Putting his point more finely – in a short-hand that both Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace would understand – he rated her performance as if she was a Trinity student. She was unlikely to have gained the top first in her first year at Cambridge (called the senior wrangler).

Had any young beginner, about to go to Cambridge, shown the same power, I should have prophesied first that his aptitude at grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles would have very much lowered his chance of being senior wrangler; secondly, that they would have certainly made him an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.

It was the point that followed hereafter that really carried the nub of De Morgan’s concern. It reads now as unadultered misogyny, but its sentiment was accepted by most if not all at the time: the concern he really had was that the foundations of science and mathematics should remain out of bounds for women. He wrote this despite the fact that his wife had been extremely well educated by her father, the former Cambridge don William Frend (Ada and Lady Byron’s tutor) and was a social reformer – education for women, opposition to vivisection, assistance of ‘gutter children’ – as well as a journalist and children’s writer.

The questions Ada was asking him were simply not appropriate for any woman in the world to ask, not even Mary Somerville – on whose work a recent book of his relied. He might, he writes, allow one exception (but not really): the mathematician Maria Agnesi. She was the author of a huge two-volume work on mathematics in 1748 that earned her a professorship at the University of Bologna by appointment of Pope Benedict XIV, and she is today credited as the first female mathematician. What worried De Morgan hard and deep was the fact that Ada thought like a man.

All women who have published mathematics hitherto have shown knowledge, and the power of getting it, but no one, except perhaps (I speak doubtfully) Maria Agnesi has wrestled with difficulties and shown a man’s strength in getting over them. The reason is obvious: the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application. Lady L has unquestionably as much power as would require all the strength of a man’s constitution to bear the fatigue of thought to which it will unquestionably lead her … . Perhaps you think. that Lady L. will, like Mrs. Somerville, go on in a course of regulated study, duly mixed with the enjoyment of society, the ordinary cares of life, &c., &c. But Mrs. Somerville’s mind never led her into other than the details of mathematical work; Lady L will take quite a different route. It makes me smile to think of Mrs. Somerville’s quiet acquiescence in ignorance of the nature of force…“and that is all we know about the matter” – and to imagine Lady L. reading this, much less writing it. Having now I think. quite explained that you must consider Lady L’s case as a peculiar one I will leave it to your better judgment, supplied with facts, only begging that this note may be confidential.

To their credit, Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace must have been unimpressed. Ada’s studies continued.

During the next two years of her life Ada often met Babbage in London, or he came to visit her and William at Ockham. She clearly enjoyed discussing all sorts of puzzles and mathematical problems with Babbage, and in one particular letter she has the first vision of how she might be able to help him with his endeavours with the calculating engines. During this period of her life, she is often very forward towards him and there is a sense of a true intellectual collaboration.

On January 24 1840, Babbage received a reply, in French, to his letter to his friend Arago, who wrote amicably and helpfully:

My dear friend and colleague

I fear that the person from Lyons of whom I have made enquiries for information about the Jacquard portrait must be out of town. I haven’t had any answer to my queries… Please be assured that I will completely fulfil,
con amore
, the commission with which you have charged me. I do not want you to have the slightest reason to doubt the high esteem in which I hold your talents and your character, nor the importance I attach to our friendship.

Your devoted friend Jean Arago.

Arago was as good as his word. He stuck to the task, and by the spring appears to have been successful in obtaining at least one of the woven portraits that Babbage longed to own.

Driven on by curiosity and admiration, Babbage made a personal pilgrimage to Lyons later that year to see Jacquard’s loom in action.

The story of Babbage’s visit to Lyons contains some intriguing surprises. Buried in the Babbage papers at the British Museum there is an invoice, dated September 8 1840, issued by the French Society for the Manufacture of Fabrics for the Furnishing and Decoration of Churches. This relates to the purchase of a ‘tableau’ (that is, the woven portrait) of Jacquard produced by the Lyons firm of Didier Petit & Co. The invoice is made out to ‘Monsieur Babbage’. It is quite clear that Babbage kept it as a record of having purchased the woven portrait and of how much it cost him. The invoice is for 200 francs. The daily average wage of an artisan in 1840 was about four francs. Comparing wage rates today with 1840, we can conclude that Babbage paid about £4,000 at modern prices for his woven portrait of Jacquard.

It is natural to assume that the invoice in Babbage’s papers relates to the woven portrait of Jacquard that Babbage obtained through Arago, and which he put on show at his soirées. But in fact this was
not
the case. Instead, the invoice turns out to be for a
second
portrait of Jacquard that Babbage obtained under rather more exotic circumstances.