A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (7 page)

Indeed, she soon proved to be one of the most remarkable intellects of the nineteenth century. Her book
Connection of the Physical Sciences
became famous.

Her son Woronzow soon became a close friend of Ada as well as, later, her lawyer. It is quite clear that, like all of London society, he was fascinated by Ada, and had a romantic interest in her. The feeling wasn’t reciprocated, but she enjoyed shocking him and he lapped up her shocks eagerly and faithfully.

His biographical document about Ada is in seven foolscap handwritten pages. Unfortunately, most of the document is illegible; legible handwriting was not regarded as necessary for a gentleman in the early nineteenth century and Greig was a determined gentleman. The biography is often illegible at precisely the moment when it is most interesting.

My first recollection of Ada Byron about 1832 or 3 is when as a young girl she was a visitor at the house of my mother at the Royal College Chelsea. She was very intimate with Mrs [illegible] who was about her age and as she had even in those early years a decided taste for science which was much approved by Lady Noel Byron [Annabella]….

Greig continues with an almost photographic glimpse of the teenage Ada:

She used to lie a great deal in a horizontal position, and she was subject of fits of giddiness, especially when she looked down from any height. As might be expected at this early passage of her life, she had not much conversation. She was reserved and shy, with a good deal of pride and not a little selfishness which developed itself with her advancing years. Her moral courage was remarkable and her determination of character most pronounced.

Greig’s pages are particularly interesting because Ada completely trusted her lawyer’s discretion, and gave him an unobscured view of her life:

In afterlife I became very intimate with her; quite as much so as it is possible for persons of different sexes to become consistently with honour. Her communications to me were most unreserved.

From Greig, then, we learn of Ada’s first love-affair and how she successfully escaped the suffocating shackles of the three furies to be with her first lover, a young tutor.

A short time before my family became acquainted with Lady Byron and her daughter… the services of a young man, the son of John Hamble… to come for a few hours daily to assist her daughter’s studies.… tenderness soon sprang up between these young people. This was not observed… by Lady B and the three furies.

Ada had no intention for their love affair to remain pure, and things moved almost to the point of a full ‘connection’:

…. managed to place in the young man’s hands a scrap of paper appointing an assignation at midnight in one of the outhouses [of Fordhook]. The assignation took place and Ada informed me that matters went as far as they possibly could without connection being completed. After this Ada’s feelings towards the young man naturally became stronger and more uncontrollable.

The formidable Lady Byron got wind of the friendship, but clearly didn’t have the full measure of what had happened, and soon Ada dramatically and impetuously eloped.

At length the mother’s eyes were opened and the young man’s visits were discontinued. Driven to madness by disappointment and indignation at the conduct of the furies… Ada fled from her mother’s house to the arms of her lover who was residing at no great distance with his relatives, Lady B’s friends.

Ada, when a younger girl, once made the mistake of remarking what a beautiful voice she had. ‘Ada,’ Lady Byron responded sharply, ‘do you think you gave yourself your voice?’ There can be little doubt that Lady Byron knew exactly what to do to rein in her daughter and collect her from her hugely-embarrassed friends. A guilt trip is a modern term, but, if Ada’s letter of March 8 1833 is anything to go by, that was unmistakenly her lot.

Fordhook

My dear Mama. I must now thank you for your last very kind letter. Though deeply impressed by the ceremony I attended on Sunday for the first & I hope not the last time, certainly I had no inclination to weep. – The more I see & the more I think & reflect, the more convinced do I feel that no person can ever be happy who has not deep religious feeling and does not let that feeling be his guide in all the circumstances of life. Had I entertained my present sentiments two years ago, I should have been now a very different person from what I am. But I am yet quite yet in the spring of life & hardly indeed full blown. I trust I may be spared many years longer, & may thus be allowed the opportunity of showing that
I am an altered person
.

Slightly feebly, Ada includes in the same letter a barb to Lady Byron about the lapse of a mother’s power to oblige her daughter.

If you said to me, ‘do not open the window in my room,’ I am bound to obey you whether I be 5 or 50. But if you said to me, ‘don’t open your room window. I don’t choose you should have your window open,’ I consider your only claim to my obedience to be that given
by law
, and that you have no
natural
right to expect it after childhood. The one case concerns
you & your
comfort, the other concerns
me only
and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on
all points;
but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease on all such points as concern
me
alone
, though I conceive your claim to my attention, and consideration of
your
convenience and comfort, rather to increase than diminish with years…

Four days later, however, Ada already backtracked and sent her mother a brief additional letter which contains these particularly illuminating lines:

You know I always must sermonize a little when I write to you. – I am very well, & the bones are flourishing.

7

On June 5 1833, London high society consisted of barely five thousand people, many of whom were related to one another by marriage or infidelity. They had substantial capital in the bank, enjoyed the best food and drink, mostly didn’t need to work, and were waited on by a small army of servants for whom servility was an essential professional skill. Leisured society was a constant round of big lunches, frenetic amorous liaisons, leisurely afternoons and glittering soirées.

The million or so people who comprised the rest of London’s population, like the vast majority of Britons at the time, scraped by on a diet rarely much above starvation level, and did their best to snatch such grimy slivers of happiness and scraps of life as they could.

Fashionable society’s London was the comparatively small area of the capital that stretched southwards from Marylebone Road in the north to the River Thames in the south. Charles Babbage, the mathematician who was to become very important in Ada’s life, lived at number one Dorset Street, near Manchester Square, and dwelled only a few hundred yards inside that unmarked but comprehensively recognised northern boundary.

The aristocracy and the ordinary people were like different species. A commoner might rarely be elevated to nobility by acquiring great wealth or political influence, but the easiest way into the aristocracy – then as now – was through marriage. Most aristocrats married other ones, but occasionally a commoner might get lucky, just as sometimes happens today.

Many aristocrats had gained their fortune by inheritances that usually dated back to land taken by the invading Normans after 1066 from Britain’s Anglo-Saxons.

Three decades into the nineteenth century, social conventions of British life seemed, on the surface, to be stronger than ever. But in truth Britain was changing fast. One of the biggest causes of change was the enormous impact of machine technology that so fascinated Ada. In 1829, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle had written an essay that, by 1833, was famous. The essay, ‘Signs of the Times’, elaborated on how Carlyle thought the epoch in which he found himself should be seen:

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. … On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster… For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances…. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

In 1833, few would have disagreed with any of this, least of all Ada or her future friend Charles Babbage. Yet Carlyle could have said even more. It was not only that the machinery revolution was changing how goods were made and how things were done. Even more importantly, the revolution also helped to liberate people’s imaginations about how things
might
be done, and allowed creative thinkers to speculate on exciting possibilities for using one type of new mechanical technology in conjunction with another, or with several others, to imagine new uses that were not yet technologically possible. This was precisely the kind of thinking in which Ada excelled; indeed, she was arguably one of the most innovative thinkers in this respect of her epoch.

As for the spirits of self-analysis and self-appreciation that had so thoroughly infused Carlyle’s essay, these were rife in a Britain that had emerged in 1815 from twenty years of war with France as the world’s richest economy, its military hegemon, and its self-appointed leader.

The man who had ruled this confident and energetic land since June 1830 was King William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, third son of the famously mad King George III. William, sixty-seven years old in 1833, was an avuncular, self-deprecating, rather comic, silvery-haired fellow, and the oldest person ever to have ascended the British throne. His record still stands today.

The Prime Minister was Lord Grey. His Whig party had convincingly won the first General Election held after the broadening of the electorate, the creation of new constituencies to accommodate the burgeoning urban middle-classes, and the scrapping of tiny, barely-inhabited constituencies known, appropriately enough, as ‘rotten boroughs’ following the passage in 1832 of the Reform Act.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the fraction of the British population entitled to vote had grown more and more awkwardly at odds with how Britain was developing as a rapidly urbanising nation. In 1831, for example, just 4,500 people in Scotland out of a total of 2.6 million people were entitled to vote. In Britain in its entirety – which in the 1831 Census was recorded as having a population of 13.1 million – the electorate was only about three percent of adult males.

But even after the passage of the Reform Act, there was a wealth qualification attached to the right to vote and the vast majority of men were still excluded from voting by it. Women were regarded as inherently
undeserving of the suffrage. Princess Victoria, the daughter of William IV’s younger brother, was the heir to the throne and looked set to become queen before long, but women were otherwise dismissed in political life. Ada would never have Babbage’s opportunities in a world where women were regarded as providers of pleasure and babies.

With the 1832 Reform Act on the Statute Book, Britain’s ruling class felt the danger of revolution to be past. Those with money and health could relax; this was a good time to be British.

The British domestic economy had been growing fast over the past few decades, fuelled by the demands of the increasingly prosperous and populous middle class who wanted good clothes, quality furniture, fine cutlery and excellent ornaments. Yet what had really made Britain the world’s richest country was the immense success of British exports. No other country in the world controlled such vast overseas markets.

The expanding British Empire played a hugely important role in Britain’s surging prosperity. It was the largest the world had ever seen – the Roman Empire had been quite small by comparison – and the British Empire was still growing. By 1833, as well as including the entire British Isles (Ireland was part of Britain then), the empire already consisted of Canada, India, New South Wales, Jamaica, British Honduras, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad, British Guiana, Gibraltar, Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Cape colony at the southern tip of Africa, various other small possessions and, in the Far East, Penang and Malacca.

The empire was the overseas legacy of the same British spirits of adventure and inventiveness that had caused so many changes back home. In the 1830s, the British liked to see it as having a reforming and civilising influence, governing people who were supposedly not fit to govern themselves. But at heart the Empire was a vast, efficient machine for making money for Britain, and the same Britons who liked to preach the Christian virtues had little compunction about plundering property, land and other wealth from the peoples they governed.

At home, the British textile industry was enjoying particularly phenomenal growth. It had hardly featured in the export figures back in 1750, yet by 1833 about one-half of all British exports were textiles. The expansion of the textile industry needed the coal and iron industries, and these three industries all forged forward in a dynamic symbiosis. Coal was powering the steam-engines that operated much of the machinery used in making textiles, while iron was used to build the machinery itself and was an important building material of the manufactories that housed it. Water power was still important, but the British towns that had expanded the most were the ones located near the coal-fields, especially the vast reserves in the north-east of England.

Britain’s war with ‘rude nature’ that Carlyle observed was, in particular, sustained by the success of its textile industry. New textile industry machinery had played and was still playing the leading role in the growth of the British economy.

About a century earlier, in May 1733, an ingenious inventor, John Kay, was granted a patent for his ‘flying shuttle’. This did not actually fly, but involved the shuttle being shot through a loom along wheels in a track. The weaver pulled a cord to operate the flying shuttle. Kay’s invention speeded up the weaving process enormously, dramatically increasingly yarn consumption, so much so that the flying shuttle spurred the invention of new machines that would spin yarn from cleaned and combed wool more rapidly than ever before.

The invention in 1764 by James Hargreaves of the spinning jenny (named after his daughter) was the first major breakthrough in textile machinery that comprehensively met this new challenge. The spinning jenny greatly increased the rate at which yarn could be spun, though the thread produced by Hargreaves’s machine was coarse and lacked strength, making it suitable only for use as weft: that is, the threads woven at right angles across a warp when making fabric.

In 1771, Richard Arkwright, a former barber who had become interested in textiles while carrying on a sideline as a wig-maker, patented his ‘water frame’ which produced a yarn of a superior quality to that yielded by the spinning jenny. Arkwright built factories employing hundreds of people.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton’s ‘spinning mule’ or ‘mule jenny’ combined the main benefit of the water frame (the quality of its yarn) with the speed of the spinning jenny. Ever since about 1790 most of the yarn-spinning machines in Britain had been Crompton’s mules. Meanwhile, Edward Cartwright in 1784 had invented the first steam-powered loom. By 1833, almost all the garments produced in Britain were woven on powered looms.

In 1833, the motive ingredient of all new discoveries was considered to be steam power. Charles Babbage yearned to build a calculating machine driven by steam; a teenage Ada imagined a steam-powered flying-machine. Steam power was the wonder of the age, offering the ability to get machines to work more quickly and much more reliably than the traditional sources – man, horses and water.

The inventor who had made steam truly the motive force of the British Industrial Revolution was James Watt, a Scottish instrument-maker. He hadn’t invented the first steam engine: that honour went to Thomas Savery, who patented a cumbersome steam pump in 1698. But Watt’s engines were easily the best. His successful endeavour to correct the inefficiencies of earlier machines had attracted the attention of Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham-based industrialist who manufactured decorative items and engaged Watt to build him a steam-engine.

Boulton, a sort of brusque self-parody of what industrialists were supposed to be like and frequently were like, quickly grasped that steam engine manufacture could itself be a highly successful commercial venture. In 1775 Watt and Boulton had gone into business together. Their collaboration made Watt rich and Boulton richer still. By 1800, Boulton and Watt’s factory in Birmingham had produced more than 500 steam engines. Boulton liked to take influential guests around his factory, boasting that he sold ‘what every man desires:
power
.’

In 1833, factories throughout Britain were equipped with their own rotary steam-engines, whose revolving shafts were connected by a network of drive-wheels, belts and pulleys to dozens of individual looms, spinning mules, spindle mills and to all kinds of powered machines.

While very efficient and complicated in design, Britain’s machinery was relatively plain in its purpose. The truth is that by 1833, the most sophisticated, fully operational machine ever devised was not a British invention at all. Neighbouring France – for several centuries Britain’s arch-enemy but by 1833, a somewhat strained political ally – too, was having its own ‘industrial revolution’. The very expression was the invention of a Frenchman, the diplomat Louis-Guillaume Otto, who on July 6 1799 had written to a friend to say that
‘une revolution industrielle’
had started in France.

In 1833, the most ingenious and versatile textile machine in the world was a French silk-weaving loom developed in the early years of the nineteenth century by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a master silk-weaver from Lyons, and patented by him in 1804. It was this machine that fascinated Ada.

The Jacquard loom was a mind-boggling invention. It was used by weavers who wanted to weave luxurious silk fabrics that featured images, such as portraits, still lifes, or even landscapes. These ‘figured’ fabrics were enormously popular and commanded the highest prices round the world.

The silk business in Lyons had been so successful that by the early nineteenth century, about 30,000 people in Lyons – an actual
majority
of the working population – earned their livings from silk. Brawny workmen would load heavy wrapped silk fabrics into the backs of horse-drawn carts for transportation along the two great rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, on whose convergence the city is built. Prosperous merchants lingered over their glasses of absinthe at streetside cafés, boasting to their business rivals of the latest deal they had made with wealthy customers, who might easily include a member of Europe’s many royal families.

Before the Jacquard loom was introduced, figured fabrics could only be created painfully slowly (at the rate of about an inch of fabric woven per day) by two weavers. One worked the shuttle, the other (known as the ‘draw-boy’, though it was usually men who were employed in this role rather than boys) was perched on a platform above the loom and worked hundreds of strings to govern which warp threads should be raised and lowered for a particular woven image.

The Jacquard loom transformed this cumbersome process by allowing just one weaver to create the images automatically, using a long chain of punched cards that controlled the complex configuration of the warp threads when an image was being woven into silk. The loom’s invention allowed a lone weaver to work about twenty-four times as fast as before. One weaver, equipped with a Jacquard loom, could produce around two feet of finished figured fabric every day. Everyone was happy except the draw-boys, who, reputedly, ambushed Jacquard in Lyons and tossed him into the Rhône.