A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (13 page)

Yours most sincerely

A.A. Lovelace

You
must
stay some days with us. Now don’t contradict me.

Six weeks later Ada returned to her fashionable, modern, Cubitt-designed house on St James whose renovation had evidently already been completed. She urged Babbage to visit at once and mentioned with mounting excitement that they will embark on a project together.

Monday, 22 February,

Ockham Park

My Dear Mr Babbage

We are to move to Town on Thursday; & I hope to see you as soon afterwards as you like, – the sooner the better.

Remember that
one
o’clock is the best hour for a call. –

I believe I shall perhaps pass Sunday Evening with Mr & Mrs De Morgan [Augustus and Sophia (Frend)]; but this is not yet quite fixed, & if it should not take place, will
you
come & spend it in St James’ Sqre – You see I am determined to celebrate the Sabbath
Mathematically
, in one way or other. -

I have been at work very strenuously since I saw you, & quite as successfully as heretofore. I am now studying attentively the
Finite Differences
… And in this I have more particular interest, because I know it bears directly on some of
your
business. – Altogether I am going on well, & just as we might have anticipated. -

I think I am more determined than ever in my future plans; and I have quite made up my mind that nothing must be suffered to interfere with them. – I intend to make such arrangements in Town as will secure me a couple of hours daily (with very few exceptions), for my studies.

I think much of the possible (I believe I may say the
probable
) future connection between
us
; and it is an anticipation I increasingly like to dwell on. I think great good may be the result to
both
of us; and I suspect that the idea, (which by the bye is one that I believe I have
long
entertained, in a vague and crude form), was one of those happy instincts which do occur to one sometimes so unaccountably & fortunately. At least, in my opinion, the results
may
ultimately prove it such.

Believe me

Yours most sincerely

Ada Lovelace

14

Luigi Federico Menabrea’s paper on the Analytical Engine might have stayed as obscure as the learned Swiss journal in which it was published had not Ada decided that translating it into English would neatly achieve two objects that she considered close to her heart.

Firstly, it would give her the opportunity to publicise the important work being done by her close friend Babbage, of whom she was seeing a good deal more than ever before.

Secondly, the translation work would allow her to advance her dream of having an intellectual career which would lift her above the demands of motherhood, running three homes and looking after a wealthy but ineffectual husband.

Ada was conscious of the difficulty of her task, but was convinced that she was more than equal to the job. She launched into it with characteristic energy. Her French was excellent, and her best writing has a fluency, clarity of expression and mastery of metaphor and image that on occasion even recalls her father’s fluent and expressive prose. There is no reason to disbelieve Babbage’s account in his autobiography that it was Ada’s idea to produce the translation in the first place. Here is what Babbage says in
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.
Babbage calls Menabrea’s article a ‘memoir’, presumably after
Scientific Memoirs
in which Ada’s translation was published in 1843:

Some time after the appearance of his memoir on the subject in the
Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève
, the late Countess of Lovelace informed me that she had translated the memoir of Menabrea. I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted? To this Lady Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her. I then suggested that she should add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir: an idea which was immediately adopted.

In many ways this passage is telling. It was written by a man who was convinced of his own abilities. From his early youth he had been coddled, encouraged, and told he was brilliant – which he undoubtedly was. Only months earlier to the events he describes he had, as we shall see, almost verbally assaulted a man he’d never met and whose views he didn’t know but whose support he nonetheless sought. Ada was undoubtedly gifted, but had been told from early youth to not think too much of herself – as was common for rich aristocratic girls surrounded by tutors and governesses – lest it encourage the wilful parts of her personality. She was highly intelligent and used to getting her way as she grew older and less timid. In science, her confidence melted away and she saw her role as that of the hand-maiden to others. Even her close friendship with the highly respected scientist Mary Somerville had made little difference on what Ada thought of herself. Babbage was surprised by her suggestion to translate Menabrea’s essay, and seems to have thought she knew enough about his invention to be able to write an article of her own. The confidence Babbage expressed in her abilities appears not to have convinced Ada, however. She decided to go ahead with a translation, aided by Babbage.

We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.

Instead of writing her own article, what she did was append Menabrea’s article with notes that exceeded the length of the translation several times over.

The notes of the Countess of Lovelace extend to about three times the length of the original memoir. Their author has entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.

It has been suggested by some modern – mostly male – writers that the translation and notes were really the work of Babbage’s. Certainly he stood to gain from an extended article as the two parts together showed the entire operation of the machine.

The two memoirs taken together furnish, to those who are capable of understanding the reasoning, a complete demonstration –
That the whole of developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery.
[Babbage’s italics.]

It is, however, hard to see why one would want to rob Ada Lovelace of the authorship of her article and Babbage of the sincerity of his memoirs. It seems out of character for a man such as Babbage to inflate his Analytical Engine in a back-handed way. If he had truly wished to see the article translated no doubt he would have been able to find an established scientist through his popular soirées. Moreover, if he had concocted this elaborate lie why exclude the ‘working out of… the numbers of Bernoulli.’ This is quite apart from the ample linguistic and epistolary evidence suggesting that her writings on the machine were her own. There seems little doubt that he was closely involved and no doubt read her work as it progressed, but peer-review is common in scientific writing. Few would want to claim that PhD theses do not contain the ideas of the candidates themselves.

Babbage’s own attempts to advance the interests of the Analytical Engine had encountered a major disaster. A particularly unfortunate example of this was his meeting, on Friday November 11 1842, with the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. Babbage was trying to obtain government funds to complete the machine. The meeting took place not long after Prince Albert’s visit and perhaps his intercession had helped Babbage to secure a meeting with the most powerful man in Britain at that moment.

The interview was an unmitigated catastrophe for Babbage. It is possible to reconstruct it almost on a minute-by-minute basis from a detailed account Babbage wrote of the interview. The word ‘wrote’ is in fact not really adequate to describe how it came to be composed. Immediately after the interview, in a hot fury of anger and disappointment, Babbage rushed back into his house, dashed into his study and – as if aware this was the only way he could obtain any relief – gouged onto paper a blow-by-blow account of what he must even at the time have realised was a meeting that pretty well killed his twenty-year vision of cogwheel computing stone dead.

The document containing the account is lodged in the British Library in London. It is both deeply moving and profoundly troubling.

What Babbage wrote is how what might have been never was. Had the meeting been successful, the seeds would have been sown for the start of an information technology revolution in Victorian Britain. The ways in which technology might have accelerated, and history run differently, over the course of almost two centuries are too enormous to contemplate.

Babbage’s vivid account of the meeting includes much of the verbatim dialogue between the two men. His pain and upset are even apparent in the appearance of the writing itself, which is hastily scrawled out and not easy to decipher, and in its syntax. Uncharacteristically for him, in his haste and anger his description of the meeting leaves out much of the punctuation and even some of the words. But he does provide a verbatim account of some of the conversation, so here we have some attest dialogue that can be set down.

The timing of the meeting was, from any perspective, extremely unfortunate. The year 1842 had been a truly tough one for Peel. Shortly before the day when he met Babbage, Peel had written to his wife Julia that he was ‘fagged to death,’ with the cares of office. Much of the population – whether working in towns or on the land – was permanently close to starvation. Hunger and rioting were widespread.

Peel was in no mood to meet Babbage at all, let alone in the mood for a stressful confrontation with a mad scientist. Babbage would have done much better if he had handled the meeting in a radically different manner. He should have been to the point, pleasant, placatory, and done his utmost to explain his work to Peel in language that presented the practical function to Britain’s economy of his invention. As it was, and this is clear even from Babbage’s own notes, he conducted the meeting in a defensive, sullen, bad-tempered, querulous, self-centred and self-pitying manner that would only irritate and alienate Peel. As Babbage explains in his account of the interview he began somewhat irrelevantly telling Peel how his detractors might see him:

I informed Sir RP that many circumstances had at last forced upon me the conviction, which I had long resisted, that there existed amongst men of science great jealousy of me. I said that I had been reluctantly forced to this conclusion of which I now had ample evidence, which however I should not state unless he asked me. In reply to some observation of Sir RP in a subsequent part of the conversation I mentioned one circumstance that within a few days the Secretary of one of the foreign embassies in London has incidentally remarked to me that he had long observed a great jealousy of me in certain classes of English Society.

Babbage went on to explain why he was mentioning all this. He told Peel of his fears that some of those who had advised the Government over the worth of the Engines might have based their decision on personal malice rather than on an objective assessment. Peel evidently made no direct reply to this.

Then, finally, Babbage got down to what really mattered:

I turned to the next subject, the importance of the Analytical Engine. I stated my own opinion that in the future scientific history of the present day it would probably form a marked epoch and that much depended upon the result of this interview. I added that the Difference Engine was only capable [of] applications to one limited part of science (although that part was certainly of great importance and capable of more immediate practical applications than any other) but the Analytical Engine embraced the whole science.

I stated that it was in fact already invented and that it exceeded any anticipations I had ever entertained respecting the powers of applying machinery to science.

The brilliance of Babbage’s anticipation how posterity would see the Analytical Engine uncannily reflects the view of him currently, a time when even the smallest computer has a digital version of what he proposed.

Yet as far as his dealings with the pragmatist Peel were concerned, the problem was that Peel had no real idea what the difference was between the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Peel had no doubt been clearly briefed that the Difference Engine had swallowed up funding equal to two frigates and that it was a technological boat whose inventor himself had decided would never sail. Babbage would surely have done better to have given Peel a clear indication of the practical benefits of his machines, accompanied by a realistic plan of action and a date when the Government could expect that something of definite practical usefulness would be completed, and how completing the Difference Engine would cost more than completing the Analytical Engine – or something to that effect.

But Babbage, in his bitterness and haste to justify himself, tried quoting to Peel the comment Plana had made that the invention of the Analytical Engine would provide ‘the same control over the executive [department of analysis] as we have hitherto had over the legislative’. Again, it is difficult to imagine that Peel had the faintest idea what Babbage was talking about. And even if Peel had been carefully briefed, why the British taxpayer should invest a substantial amount of money in furtherance of an obscure statement by an obscure Italian mathematician.

After another bad-tempered, irrelevant and unpleasant discussion, initiated by Babbage, about the different pensions and grants given to scientists by the Government, Peel finally decided to interrupt the endless stream of complaints and grievances and call Babbage to order with a hard fact:

‘Mr Babbage, by your own admission you have rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better machine.’ Babbage took the bait and glared at Peel. ‘But if I finish the Difference Engine it will do even more than I promised. It is true that it has been superseded by better machinery, but it is very far from being ‘useless.’ The general fact of machinery being superseded in several of our great branches of manufacture after a few years is perfectly well known.’

Only briefly diverted from his spilling his spleen, Babbage again went on to complain of all the vexation and loss of reputation he considered that he had suffered from those members of the public who believed him to have profited personally from the money the Government had granted towards the development of the Difference Engine. ‘This belief is so prevalent that several of my intimate friends have asked if it were not true,’ Babbage said. ‘I have even met with it at the hustings at Finsbury.’

Peel was on home territory now. ‘You are too sensitive to such attacks, Mr Babbage,’ he replied. ‘Men of sense never care for them.’

Fixing the Prime Minister with another hard stare, Babbage finally showed the wit that his friends loved and might have got Peel on side if by now a river of bile didn’t flow between them:

Sir Robert, in your own experience of public life you must have frequently observed that the best heads and highest minds are often the most susceptible of annoyance from the injustice or the ingratitude of the public.

Peel was exhausted, and irritated with Babbage. Babbage felt hurt, betrayed, and angry that the Prime Minister could be so reluctant to support the continued development of machines whose worth seemed to Babbage at any rate self-evident.

One wonders to an extent whether Babbage’s bluster might have been partly due to the fact that, unlike the Difference Machine which was directly inspired by De Prony’s work for the French Ordinance Survey, he found it less easy in his own mind to see the exact point of the far more open-ended Analytical Engine beyond its pure mathematical use.

‘I consider myself to have been treated with great injustice by the Government,’ was Babbage’s unhelpful parting comment, ‘But as you are of a different opinion, I cannot help myself.’