A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (5 page)

Despite seeing Annabella as Clytemnestra, Byron continued to write to her about Ada. In 1820 he sent a locket with his hair for his five-year-old daughter to carry around with her (it seems unlikely that Annabella was in a hurry to pass this on to Ada), and received a portrait of Ada in return.

Ada Byron, after a miniature.

Just before his death he asked for ‘some account of Ada’s disposition, habits, studies, moral tendencies, and temper, as well as her personal appearance.’ Annabella wrote back:

Her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good temper. Observation. Not devoid of imagination, but is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity – the manufacture of ships, boats, etc… Tall and robust.

And so Ada, like Allegra, grew up remote from Byron both geographically and emotionally – unaware of her father’s warm interest in her. She was frequently ill as a child; her health was never particularly good and suffered from headaches and all manners of other childhood ailments. When Ada was seven and a half, she became particularly sick. She suffered from an illness that gave her especially sharp headaches, and even affected her eyesight in such a way that her doctor ordered her education to be halted. Lord Byron heard about her illness in 1823, not long after arriving in Greece to help the Greeks fight to win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire.

He was so upset about hearing of Ada’s illness that he stopped writing in his journal, and his peace of mind about Ada was only to some extent restored when Lady Byron wrote to him in early 1824, saying that Ada felt better.

This correspondence between Byron and his wife was usually carried out via Augusta, with whom Byron was in regular contact, but sometimes Lady Byron wrote to her estranged husband directly.

Byron’s life on the Continent had been his usual round of affairs with both sexes, along with travel and writing poetry. But he had eventually found robust and reliable passionate love with a young Italian countess, Teresa Guiccioli, who was small and voluptuous, and who had auburn curls. She also reportedly had large and luminous eyes, a fresh, youthful face and a large bust that some thought was so out of proportion with her figure that it made her look dumpy.

After Byron told Teresa he was leaving for Greece she pleaded with her poet lover to let her accompany him, but he refused. Bored, the romantic idea of helping to free the Greeks from the Ottoman Empire was his new grand passion. Soon after arriving in Missolonghi, Byron became ill with flu, which developed into a more severe fever.

He died on Monday April 19 1824, cursing his doctors, although according to the account of his valet, the last words Byron actually spoke were: ‘Oh, my poor dear child! – my dear Ada! my God, could I have seen her! Give her my blessing… ’

An enormous crowd viewed his funeral entourage, which consisted of forty-seven carriages passing through the streets of London. His body lay in state for two days in London, on July 9 and 10 1824.

Byron’s friends led a campaign for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey in Poet’s Corner, as a tribute to the quality of his work. But these calls did not find favour and, instead, Byron, who had travelled so far both geographically and emotionally in his life, was buried only about six miles from his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey, in the Byron family vault at the church of St Mary Magdalen in a Nottingham village called Hucknall.

Neither Lady Byron nor Ada attended the funeral. Ada did know of it, however, for her September 7 1824 ‘fryed fish ’letter above was edged in black in memory of the death of her father.

George Noel Byron, the poet, had been the sixth Lord Byron. The poet’s cousin, a naval officer called George Anson Byron, inherited the baronetcy and became the seventh Lord Byron.

This new Lord Byron became a good friend of Lady Byron, presumably because there was no further need for estrangement after Byron’s death. And George went with his family – taking along with him his own son and heir, yet another George, who was only eighteen months younger than Ada – to visit Lady Byron and Ada.

Clearly Lady Byron was keen for the vacuum of ‘Lord Byron’ to be filled, and to encourage Ada’s idea of kinship. On September 13 1824, Ada wrote to George, a cousin several times removed, calling him her ‘dearest brother’, an affectionate letter whose ideas no doubt came from the adults around her.

My dearest brother, for so my love I can justly call you. I have been considering what a great misfortune it is for me not to have brothers and Sisters but I look upon you as one that I can talk to as a brother or a Sister… and when you die, I shall have none that are so well suited to my age to talk to… If ever you come to settle with me for some time how happy will my time be… I can then show my affection and love in a thousand ways, your death would therefore be to me a very severe blow of grief…

Mentioning her visit to the Hercules that had sailed her father to his death, she added

I went to see papa’s ship and liked it very much but I should have liked it better if my brother George had been there…

She had never met the boy, but these words no doubt helped pave the way to rapid normalisation of family relations, expunging the unpleasant ructions of the past.

5

In her early years of bringing Ada up, Lady Byron received financial help from her family. But in 1825, a great financial year for Lady Byron, she got the abundant sums of money she needed to live as she wanted to live and to bring Ada up in the style she wished to raise her daughter.

By 1825, Lady Byron’s mother had died and she had inherited money from her. Lord Wentworth had passed away in 1815, and finally the funds, too, had become available, a decade later. Combined with her inheritance from her mother, she was now a very wealthy woman. Her days of poverty with Byron were over. He had taken his debts with him in his grave. She now owned estates in Leicestershire that provided a substantial income.

Lady Byron now also owned coal mines in the north of England, and lived in luxury with Ada on the proceeds of the coal mined from them and from her rents. Meanwhile, of course, the coal-miners lived from hand to mouth in damp, cold cottages. Lady Byron, though, often sponsored schemes to help educate her miners’ and tenants’ children.

For Lady Byron, it was a great adventure to educate Ada. The little girl was famous throughout the nation because of her father, and Lady Byron was aware that her education of Ada would itself soon come under the spotlight.

As Ada passed from girlhood to womanhood, Lady Byron’s educational energy, far from flagging, increased.

The usual educational opportunities open to girls in the early nineteenth century varied from limited to non-existent. Even middle-class and aristocratic girls were usually only taught such skills as were necessary for overseeing the management of the households they could one day expect to oversee.

Many professional educators, even female ones, actually believed women’s minds to be inferior to men’s at a fundamental biological level. The fallacious reason often given at the time was that women’s brains are on average smaller in physical mass than those of men.

Lady Byron’s zeal as an educator stemmed from the unusually broad education she had herself received as the only daughter of wealthy, liberal, forward-thinking parents. She had studied history, poetry, literature, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, drawing and dancing. Lady Byron was was now rich enough, and confident enough, to get what she wanted.

That, of course, did not mean that Ada would find an outlet for her mental energies after her education was completed anymore than Lady Byron had done herself.

Even for a girl of Ada’s socially elevated class who yearned to lead a mentally fulfilling life, opportunities were close to non-existent. There was generally little alternative but to marry, produce children and live for one’s husband. The idea of Ada doing anything other than marry would not have entered her mother’s mind. Ada’s education was there to stock her mind. Beating a path for science, however, was anathema. Lady Byron, to whom Ada was in thrall for much of her life, was conscious of how disastrous her own marriage had been. She was determined that Ada would marry an aristocrat who could offer Ada a secure, comfortable domestic life. Ideally, Lady Byron wanted Ada to marry into the
older
aristocracy as there was a particular appeal at the time for titles that were more than a century old – indeed, such as the Byron baronetcy.

Lady Byron, now rich, influential and strong-willed, was quickly getting – if she wasn’t already – used to having her wishes obeyed. Ada’s yearning to lead a life of the mind, readily expressed even in the letters she wrote as a teenage girl, was thus doomed from the start. She was destined to spend much of her life aching to use her mind, but was confronted with the day-to-day reality of children, nannies, servants, running a household and dealing with a husband’s whims.

Some middle-class women, such as Jane Austen, the Brontës or – later in the century – George Eliot won careers for themselves through successful authorship. When they did, the reality of their struggle was likely to be a key subject of their books; Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(1847), for example, is largely autobiographical in its account of the predicament of an intellectually gifted young woman forced to confront the rigid limitations of life as a governess.

It was also true that, occasionally, enormous talent along with a stroke of good fortune, might give a woman an opportunity to escape the bonds of domesticity. Another middle-class woman, Mary Somerville, later a close friend of Lady Byron and Ada, who was to achieve international renown as a mathematician and scientist and was to have the first Oxford College for women named after her in 1879, had first became interested in mathematics when she amused herself by solving the often challenging mathematical puzzles that were frequently published in Victorian embroidery magazines.

Mary Somerville, 1834 (Thomas Phillips).

Not an inch of such freedom beckoned in Lady Byron’s grand designs for her aristocratic daughter.

Instead in June 1826, ten-year-old Ada embarked with her mother and her governess, Miss Stamp, for the Continent. They travelled with a range of friends and one of Lady Byron’s cousins, a Robert Noel.

Annabella hadn’t dared take Ada abroad while Byron was still alive. Byron had been desperate to see Ada, and Annabella feared he might hear of his daughter’s arrival on the Continent and try to have her kidnapped. In style, they made a fifteen-month Grand Tour of the continent.

Ada loved the sensory explosion that touring brought to her quiet life. On one occasion she wrote to the Scottish poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie, a friend of Lady Byron and Ada, how beautiful she thought the Alps were, and how she could see them from every street in the Turin. At the time, Turin was the capital of the kingdom of Sardinia, and a prosperous city of more than 150,000 inhabitants, splendidly sited on the rapid-flowing Po river with great views of the Alps. The city reappears in our story in due course because, as chance would have it, it was there that a mathematician called Charles Babbage found a more interested and committed audience than he was readily able to find in Britain.

Ada enjoyed sketching as well as writing, and she drew some chalk sketches of the Alpine scenery in Switzerland. She also wrote about being impressed by the steam boats she saw on Lake Lucerne, and how she enjoyed the organ music she had heard in the churches. At one point she even speculated that she might make a career as a singer. Ada was given to developing passions. When learning the violin as a child, she did so while walking around the billiard table as she was so absorbed in her studies that it was feared that she would otherwise not get enough healthy exercise.

In the autumn of 1827, Lady Byron and the eleven-year-old Ada were heading back with Ada’s governess, Miss Stamp, from their fifteen-month grand tour of Continental Europe.

After their return to England, Lady Byron rented Bifrons, the imposing country house at Patrixbourne, Kent, that was a day’s coach-drive from London and far enough to be secluded, and moved there with her daughter. Life resumed its usual pattern and for much of the early part of 1828, Lady Byron was away visiting friends or at various ‘rest cures’, leaving Ada alone with her governess, her various tutors, and her beloved cat, Puff, one of whose kittens she promised to her ‘brother’ George, the heir of the new Lord Byron.

With her mother often away, Ada now relied somewhat on Puff for emotional support. She wrote in French from Bifrons, on her twelfth birthday, December 10 1827, all about him to a lady called Flore, presumably her French tutor.

This morning Madame Puff gave me a pretty gift of a purse, which she presented to me in the most gracious manner between her two fore-paws, the truth is that Miss Stamp had the kindness to make the purse, and then made Madame Puff give it to me, and it is quite a curious thing enough that while Miss Stamp was making this purse, Puff jumped onto her lap every so often and watched the work or pushed her nose against the silk as if she were taking an interest in it.

Goodbye,

Your affectionate

AAB

With little else providing interest at Bifrons, what happens in Puff’s life makes a frequent appearance, too, in Ada’s letters to her absent mother.

Your grand-daughter [Puff] has taken up all her kittens into a very nasty dirty hole in the roof of the house where nobody can get at them, she stays with them all day long & only comes down for her meals. I suppose their bed is made of cobwebs, and I think that Puff cannot have a very refined taste.

And on January 8 1828:

My dear Mammy… Puff is a naughty cat and has got a little hiding place in the chimney of my room where she puts the birds she catches and there she leaves them till she is hungry and wishes to eat one, this morning she took one of them under my bed and gave me the satisfaction of hearing her crunch each bone as she eats the bird.

It was still only months after the exciting year and a half on the road through Europe; in the same letter about her cat crunching a bird’s bones, she hit on the daydream of flying:

I wish that supposing I fly well by the time you come back you would, if you are satisfied with my performance, present me with a crown of laurels, but it must only be on condition that I
fly
tolerably well. Pray do not ask me whether I get on well or ill with my flying because as I mentioned before you went I do not wish you to know anything about it till you come home and even then I shall only let you know by my actions…

Your affectionate young Turkey…

Ada grew more and more interested in the idea of flying. No longer were hers just idle daydreams of a teenager. Ada’s had an unmistakable structure and purpose to them: she wasn’t only interested in the idea of flying, she passionately wanted to build a flying machine. She was deeply fascinated by the practical challenges of the task, and thought out its practicalities during her solitary, writing to her mother, still her only confidant, on Wednesday April 2 1828.

Since last night I have been thinking more about the flying, & I can find no difficulty in the motion or distension of the wings, I have already thought of a way of fixing them on to the shoulders and I think that they might perhaps be made of oil silk and if that does not answer I must try what I can do with feathers.

I know you will laugh at what I am going to say but I am going to take the exact patterns of a bird’s wing in proportion to the size of its body and then I am immediately going to set about making a pair of paper wings of exactly the same size as the bird’s in proportion to my size….

I ought not to forget to tell you that in my new flying plan, if it answers, I shall be able to guide myself in the air by a method I have lately thought of. I have now a great favour to ask of you which is to try and procure me some book which will make me thoroughly understand the anatomy of a bird, and if you can get one with plates to illustrate the descriptions I should be very glad because I have no inclination whatever to dissect even a bird. I do not think that without plates, I could be made thoroughly to understand the anatomy of a bird….

Five days later Ada wrote another letter, again to her mother, about her plans. By now Ada’s speculations had progressed to the dream of powered flight.

As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a… steamengine which, if ever I effect it, will be more wonderful than either steampackets or steamcarriages. It is to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steamengine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back. This last scheme probably has infinitely more difficulties and obstacles in its way than my scheme for flying, but still I should think that it is possible…

The day after writing this letter, Ada wrote to Lady Byron again, though now Ada had evidently been chastened by a letter from her mother indicating Lady Byron’s disapproval of the thinking-time she was giving to her pioneering of aviation.

My dearest Mammy. I received your letter this morning & really do not think that I often think of the wings when I ought to think of other things, but it was very kind of you to make the remark to me….

I have now decided upon making much smaller wings than I before intended, and they will be perfectly well proportioned in every respect, exactly on the same plan and of the same shape as a bird’s. Though they will not be nearly enough to try and fly with, yet they will be quite enough so, to enable one to explain perfectly to any one my project for flying, and will serve as a model for my future real wings.

It wasn’t the first time Ada and her mother would disagree over the nature and direction of Ada’s interests, and it wouldn’t be the last. Ada’s fascination with flying continued and on Wednesday April 9 1828, she wrote to Lady Byron:

… great pleasure today in looking at the wing of a dead crow and I still think that I shall manage to fly and I have thought of three different ways of flying that all strike me as likely to answer.

It was not much later that Lady Byron hired a tutor at £300 a year to teach Ada mathematics. It equates to around £225,000 today and it was a small fortune. Clearly Lady Byron thought her daughter merited such an expensive education, and she wrote to him with careful instructions: