A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (9 page)

10

The friendship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace was to grow one of the great friendships of the history of science. It is possible to trace the friendship in considerable detail by means of following chronologically the extant correspondence between Babbage and Ada. This correspondence spans the years from June 10 1835 to August 12 1852, which was when Ada wrote her last (known) letter to Babbage.

The surviving correspondence between them consists of eighty-five letters from Ada to Babbage and twenty-five letters from him to her. There are often references in the correspondence to other letters that have apparently not survived. Moreover, in 1853 Babbage wrote a letter to Lady Byron’s solicitor [Woronzow Greig] in which Babbage referred to an ‘extensive correspondence’ he had carried on with Ada ‘for years’. He is surely referring to a correspondence much more extensive than what survives. Indeed, in the year 2000, a small cache of letters from Ada to Babbage turned up in the store-room of the Northumberland County Archive in the north of England. It is possible that more letters between them may yet materialise. Most of the letters that do survive date from the year 1843, the year Ada was at her most productive as a scientist.

It may well be why so many letters survive from 1843 is that, while Lady Byron destroyed most of Babbage’s letters to Ada after Ada’s death (or delegated the job of destruction to someone else), she felt morally obliged as a dedicated amateur mathematician to keep the letters relating to her daughter’s great intellectual effort of that year.

At first, the friendship advanced relatively slowly. When Babbage and Ada met, she was still only seventeen and he a widower of forty-two. He was not a shy man but nor was he the kind of man who would have been excessively forward in developing the friendship. Had he been, there was always Lady Byron to contend with.

Ada was greatly impressed by Babbage. She regarded him with what she was to describe in a letter to her mother in late 1839 as a ‘fondness…. by no means inconsiderable.’ Ada and her mother kept in contact with Babbage and it seems certain Ada saw him on several other occasions as her mother’s search for a suitable husband continued.

Ada was dealing with the avuncular Dr William King, whom Lady Byron had recruited to be her moral guide They went on ‘pleasant walks’ where he would instruct on how to control one’s imagination and thoughts. She sweetly wrote him on Sunday 9 March 1834 that she was ‘
really
& permanently awaking to a sense of religious duty’.

Repeating to him his ideas in her words and using them slightly against him – the style of writing that dominates the letters to her mother – she tells him what will help her with ‘self-government’ of her imagination.

I must cease to think of living for pleasure or self gratification; and there is but one sort of excitement, if indeed it can be called by that name, which I think allowable for me at present, viz: that of study & intellectual improvement. I find that nothing but very
close & intense
application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.

She asks him to improve his teaching of mathematics, the other area in which Lady Byron expected Dr King to tutor Ada, by laying out a syllabus for him to put together:

I am most thankful that this strong source of interest does seem to be supplied to me now almost providentially, & think it is a duty vigorously to use the resources thus as it were pointed out to me. If you will do me so great a favour as to give me the benefit of your advice and suggestions as to the
plan
of study most advisable for me to follow, I shall be most grateful. – I may say that I have
time
at my command, & that I am willing to take
any
trouble.

It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics – that is to say – Euclid, and Arithmetic & Algebra; and as I am not entirely a beginner in these subjects, I do not anticipate any serious difficulties, particularly if I may be allowed to apply to you in any extreme case. My wish is to make myself well acquainted with Astronomy, Optics & c; but I find that I cannot study these satisfactorily for want of a thorough acquaintance with the elementary parts of Mathematics… In short, here I am ready to be directed! I really want some hard work for a certain number of hours every day…

Yours most gratefully & affectionately

A A Byron

Like Mary Somerville, a year after meeting Babbage, Ada’s sharp mind had found a subject to focus on – and a burning passion for mathematics had awoken within her.

11

Babbage was born some three years after Lord Byron on December 26 1791 in Walworth, Surrey, nowadays Elephant and Castle in London, after the coaching inn with that name. His father, Benjamin Babbage, himself born in 1753, was a wealthy goldsmith and banker. The two professions were then closely linked; it was a small step for customers who were buying gold and jewellery from their goldsmith to use the safes in goldsmith’s offices to store all their valuables and for the goldsmith to advance money on his clients’ valuables.

The Babbages had been well established since the late seventeenth century in Totnes, a small town in the county of Devon in the south-west of England, about 220 miles from London.

Today Totnes is a busy little market town, especially popular with people living New Age and alternative lifestyles. Its population, about 8,000 now, has not greatly increased since the end of the eighteenth century, when it was extremely wealthy by the standards of the day.

The historical prosperity of Totnes originated from wool sheared from the backs of the sheep that spent much of their lives in the meadows on the hills that ripple around the town. This wool was turned into an inexpensive, coarse, long-lasting woollen cloth called kersey. There was a huge demand for this cloth throughout Britain and abroad for workmen’s breeches and trousers.

Benjamin Babbage gradually built up his activities in the town and the surrounding district. He didn’t open a bank, but traded more informally, lending out sums, transacting business under his own name, and acting an agent for some London banks. Business was brisk. Benjamin was an astute businessman.

By the start of the 1790s, the Totnes cloth trade was visibly waning. Machines powered by steam were making an impact on weaving and all aspects of fabric-making. The new form of power provided what seemed at the time to be close to unlimited energy. The steam engine also offered the enormous advantage that it was no longer necessary for mills and factories to be located near running water for operating water-wheels. Coal was the fuel of the future, and in this new industrial world Totnes was at a big disadvantage, for Devon had, as far as was known, no large natural endowment of coal. The Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum and Totnes was being left behind.

A canny fellow, Benjamin was quick to spot the significance of the new developments. He decided to transfer his business activities to London, a radical move indeed in those days, when the vast majority of the population lived out their lives in the village or town where they were born. It has been said that many people who lived in villages in the days before significant urbanisation never met more than about seventy-five other people in their entire lives, and in a town like Totnes the number would have been higher.

Benjamin moved to London in 1791, taking with him his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married the year before. He had first-class business contacts in the capital and eventually became a partner of Praeds Bank in London, probably one of the banks for which he had acted on an agency basis.

Benjamin had always made his own luck, and there was really nothing accidental about his success in London. He chose to move to the great capital – then the largest city in the world – at a time when there was a huge increase in the demand for credit, mainly caused by the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. The banking business was literally a golden opportunity for lenders who could keep their heads and had the skill to distinguish good credit risks from bad. Benjamin possessed that skill. He prospered.

The only surviving portrait of Benjamin shows a man with a rather jovial expression (money may have been on his mind), and the look of having a precise understanding of his importance in the world and his success. Little else, however, is known about his personality except what can be inferred from the letters about him written by his son Charles and Charles’s wife Georgiana.

Judging from the letters, Benjamin was frequently prone to moods that were anything but jovial, at least in how he treated his eldest son. Benjamin was often impatient with Charles and frequently even abusive to him, accusing him of failing to make serious career plans for the future, even initially refusing to approve his wish to marry Georgiana until he had made safe headway in some suitable recognised profession.

Georgiana came from a family of quality, had a fortune of her own and was by all accounts a thoroughly charming and good person. But Benjamin, a self-made man, believed that young men should make money a higher priority than matrimony, like he had.

On Benjamin’s death in 1827, Charles inherited almost his entire fortune, including Benjamin’s cash in the bank and his silver and gold plate, was worth about £100,000. To set this amount in perspective, when Charles Dickens died in 1870 after a lifetime of working harder than almost any writer has ever worked – overwork undoubtedly contributed to his early death – he left £98,000 in his will.

How much would Babbage’s £100,000 be worth today? A reasonable rule of thumb is that for the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century (when there was little price inflation), sums of money should be multiplied by about fifty times to give an approximate idea of what they would be worth today. However, in practice, due to the poverty of the vast majority of people, which meant that food, drink and domestic service were even cheaper than the ‘fifty times’ ratio, between modern prices and prices from 1800 to 1870 implies, a multiplier of about 200 makes more sense. On that comparative scale, £100,000 would be equivalent to around £20,000,000 today. (Relative to income per capita now and then, today’s equivalent would be £113 million; or yet higher, £300 million, if its share of GDP is taken into account.) This figure is a more accurate estimate of Babbage’s net worth than the £5,000,000 would be. Benjamin’s legacy freed his son from financial care for the rest of his life and made possible the liberation of Charles Babbage’s scientific imagination and to follow any pursuit which interested him.

What is known about Babbage’s childhood comes from his autobiography
, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
, published in 1864 when he was seventy-two. Babbage liked to think of himself a philosopher rather than a mathematician or man of science. (The term ‘scientist’ did not become current until the 1890s.)

The son of a business man, Babbage was destined for a good education. When a boy of eight or nine, he was sent by his father to a small school in Alphington, a village then a mile and a half from the city of Exeter on the south side. Apart from his time at this school, and some time he spent at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, young Charles was mostly educated by tutors, though he also attended an academy at Enfield. There, under the inspirational tutelage of the Reverend Stephen Freeman, he ‘imbibed’ Freeman’s great love of mathematics.

As Babbage writes in his autobiography, among the books at the Enfield school

was a treatise on Algebra, called ‘Ward’s Young Mathematician’s Guide.’ I was always partial to my arithmetical lessons, but this book attracted my particular attention. After I had been at this school for about a twelvemonth, I proposed to one of my school-fellows, who was of a studious habit, that we should get up every morning at three o’clock, light a fire in the schoolroom, and work until five or half-past five. We accomplished this pretty regularly for several months.

Quite unlike Byron, he was always a well-behaved child and recalls how he lost his nurse at the age of five, while walking across London Bridge looking at ships.

My mother had always impressed upon me the necessity of great caution in passing any street-crossing: I went on, therefore, quietly until I reached Tooley Street, where I remained watching the passing vehicles in order to find a safe opportunity of crossing that very busy street.

In the meantime the nurse, having lost one of her charges, had gone to the crier, who proceeded immediately to call, by the ringing of his bell, the attention of the public to the fact that a young philosopher was lost, and to the still more important fact that five shillings would be the reward of his fortunate discoverer. I well remember sitting on the steps of the door of the linendraper’s shop on the opposite corner of Tooley Street, when the gold-laced crier was making proclamation of my loss; but I was too much occupied with eating some pears to attend to what he was saying.

The fact was that one of the men in the linendraper’s shop, observing a little child by itself, went over to it, and asked what it wanted. Finding that it had lost its nurse, he brought it across the street, gave it some pears, and placed it on the steps at the door: having asked my name, the shopkeeper found it to be that of one of his own customers…

Even as a boy, Babbage loved to know how things worked. What fascinated him from his childhood was the ‘desire to enquire into the causes of all those little things and events which astonish the childish mind.’ ‘My invariable question on receiving any new toy was ‘Mamma, what is inside of it?’ Until this information was obtained those around me had no repose, and the toy itself… was generally broken open if the answer did not satisfy my own little ideas…’

When the forty-two-year old met seventeen-year-old Ada and Lady Byron for the first time, little had changed. In a passage in his book
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
(1832) Babbage goes into great detail about how the remains of a horse are used economically by selling the hair from the mane to upholsterers, the skin to tanners, the flesh to the animal-meat trade, the fat to soap-makers, the bones to glue-makers and cutlers, and how even the maggots produced in the decomposing flesh are put to use as bait for fishing, though mainly as food for fowls, and (as Babbage notes) ‘especially for pheasants’.

The young Babbage’s enthusiasm was carefully fanned by his parents. When he was living in London with his parents, his mother took him to several exhibitions of machinery, including one in Hanover Square, organised by a man who called himself ‘Merlin’.

I was so greatly interested in it, that the exhibitor remarked the circumstance, and after explaining some of the objects to which the public had access, proposed to my mother to take me up to his workshop, where I should see still more wonderful automata. We accordingly ascended to the attic. There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high.

One of these walked or rather glided along a space of about four feet, when she turned round and went back to her original place. She used an eye-glass occasionally, and bowed frequently, as if recognising her acquaintances. The motions of her limbs were singularly graceful.

The other silver figure was an admirable
danseuse
, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings, and opened its beak. This lady attitudinised in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible.

These silver figures were the chef d’oeuvres of the artist. They had cost him years of unwearied labour, and were not even then finished, like the engines that Babbage was to design.

Four years after Byron, Babbage attended the same college as Ada’s father, Trinity. His Cambridge years couldn’t have been further removed from a cauldron of moral turpitude or a pile of mounting debts, however. He keenly played chess and recalls, for example, how he and some friends founded a Ghost Club, designed to collect evidence about the existence of ghosts. They also founded ‘a club which they called The Extractors’ designed to help its members in the event that any of them were the subject of a petition to get them sent to a lunatic asylum.

His wildest time was a sailing trip of several days during term time:

I was very fond of boating, not of the more manual labour of rowing, but the more intellectual art of sailing. I kept a beautiful light, London built boat, and occasionally took long voyages down the river, beyond Ely into the Fens. To accomplish these trips, it was necessary to have two or three strong fellows to row when the wind failed or was contrary. These were useful friends upon my aquatic expeditions, but not being of exactly the same calibre as my friends of the Ghost Club, were very cruelly and disrespectfully called by them ‘my Tom fools’…

I also directed my servant to order the cook to send me a large well-seasoned meat pie, a couple of fowls, etc. These were packed in a hamper with three or four bottles of wine and one of noyeau [Noyaux, almond liqueur]. We sailed when the wind was fair, and rowed when there was none. Whittlesea Mere was a very favourite resort for sailing, fishing and shooting. Sometimes we reached [King’s] Lynn.

The truth is that Babbage, having been encouraged in all his enthusiasms, was something of a dilettante. He dabbled, and what was worse, he rather seems to have enjoyed dabbling. Unlike his friend Charles Dickens, his father’s money had always cushioned him from the need to ever finish anything. And much like Byron, Babbage had a disdain for making money off his inventions, let alone turning them into a commercial enterprise.

Any goals would be set by Babbage himself. By the time he went up to Trinity College in 1810, Britain was in the midst of its unprecedented technology revolution. Transport, communications and above all the application of steam power to industry were giving mankind the opportunity to use levels of power thousands of times greater than that which the horse, or the human hand, could produce. Babbage felt he would like to take part in that revolution in some capacity or other, so he withdrew from the curriculum for the Senate House Exam and pursued his own mathematical and scientific agenda. At the time, gentlemen scholars were permitted to do this.

With two friends he had met at Cambridge – John Herschel (son of the famous astronomer Sir William Herschel who had in 1871 sensationally discovered Uranus, the first new planet) and one George Peacock – Babbage also helped form what he called the ‘Analytical Society’. Its main objective was to overhaul the study of calculus at Cambridge and replace the notation of Newton with what Babbage and his friends regarded as the much more efficient notation invented by Leibniz. The campaign was, in the end, successful, although it would not be won until after Babbage graduated from Cambridge in 1814. (He would later become the eleventh Lucasian Professor in Mathematics at the university; Isaac Newton had been the second holder of this prestigious chair.) But the vigour of the arguments put forward to support the change forced the outside mathematical world to start to take notice of the founders of the Analytical Society, and particularly of Babbage and Herschel. It was an important contribution to science, and one of the few Babbage ever saw through to its end.