A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (12 page)

In June or July 1840, Babbage had been invited by the Italian mathematician Giovanni Plana to attend a meeting of Italian scientists scheduled to take place in September in Turin, the city Ada and Lady Byron had visited during Ada’s continental tour. Babbage was invited to a similar meeting the previous year but had declined, pleading that he was too busy with his work on the Analytical Engine. This time he accepted. Very likely he did so because of the extraordinary insight into the importance of the Analytical Engine shown by Plana in his letter of invitation.

In his autobiography, Babbage recalls:

In 1840 I received from my friend M Plana a letter pressing me strongly to visit Turin at the then approaching meeting of Italian philosophers. M. Plana stated that he had enquired anxiously of many of my countrymen about the power and mechanism of the Analytical Engine. He remarked that from all the information he could collect the case seemed to stand thus: ‘Hitherto the
legislative
department of our analysis has been all-powerful – the
executive
all feeble. Your engine seems to give us the same control over the executive which we have hitherto only possessed over the legislative department.’

Considering the exceedingly limited information which could have reached my friend respecting the Analytical Engine, I was equally surprised and delighted at this exact prevision of its powers.

Plana’s comment in effect amounted to a recognition that the Analytical Engine might be able to solve the long-standing problem of the lack of processing power to evaluate complex mathematical formulae. It was an extraordinarily far-sighted observation, and it is hardly surprising that Babbage was so thrilled at Plana’s perceptiveness.

The German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis once remarked: ‘It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.’ This could be a motto for all of Babbage’s life; it explains much of his behaviour, especially during the long and often lonely years when he was working on his cogwheel computers. With no efficient working version of a Difference Engine or Analytical Engine to show the world, he was obliged to seek what seemed the next-best thing; the society of those who seemed to understand what he was trying to do. The fact that he was prepared to travel all the way to Italy – a far from easy journey in 1840, even for a man of Babbage’s financial resources and energy, suggests how cut off from empathy and support at home he perceived himself to be.

Very possibly he was also influenced in his decision to make the journey by the fact that the journey to Turin offered Babbage an ideal opportunity to visit Lyons on the way, and find out more about Joseph-Marie Jacquard. The Lyons silk industry had sprung up there partly because of the city’s proximity to Italy, and now Babbage was exploiting that very fact to combine his excursion to Turin with a visit to Lyons.

As things transpired, the trip to Turin led directly to a development that put Ada at the centre-stage of the computer revolution that very nearly took place in Britain in the midst of the nineteenth century.

Babbage left England for Paris in the middle of August 1840. In the capital, he collected letters of introduction from Arago and other friends to people in Lyons.

A few days later he arrived in Jacquard’s birthplace. As he relates in
Passages
:

On my road to Turin I had passed a few days at Lyons, in order to examine the silk manufacture. I was especially anxious to see the loom in which that admirable specimen of fine art, the portrait of Jacquard, was woven. I passed many hours in watching its progress.

If you wanted to be part of the scientific and literary set in the London of the 1840s, you would have done just about anything to beg, steal or borrow an invitation to one of Babbage’s soirées.

Charles Dickens, 1838 (Samuel Laurence).

Babbage had moved to Dorset Street in 1828 after the death of his wife. For the first few years his parties there were private functions for family and close friends. But in the early 1830s, as he needed influential allies, he broadened the list of guests to include many of the leading luminaries of British intellectual life.

During the next decade his social events became renowned throughout the capital. They frequently lasted until well after midnight, under the glow of thousands of candles. Three hundred guests, or even more, might attend. Invitations were so prized that even some of the most famous people in London used to write begging letters to Babbage to try to secure an invitation for themselves, their family or friends.

By this time the soirées were becoming one of the great rendezvous points for liberal intellectuals in Victorian London. Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, the actor William Macready, the scientist Henry Fitton and his wife, the geologist Charles Lyell, the self-taught mathematician Mary Somerville and her family, the anatomist Richard Owen, the magistrate William Broderip, the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and of course Ada; these are just a few of the ‘names’ who were often to be found at Babbage’s parties. George Ticknor, a man of letters from the United States, describes a visit to one of Babbage’s parties on May 26 1838.

About eleven o’clock we got away from Lord Fitzwilliam’s and went to Mr Babbage’s. It was very crowded tonight, and very brilliant; for among the people there were Hallam, Milman and his pretty wife; the Bishop of Norwich, Stanley, the Bishop of Hereford, Musgrave, both the Hellenists; Rogers, Sir J. Herschel and his beautiful wife, Sedgwick, Mrs Somerville and her daughters, Senior, the Taylors, Sir F. Chantrey, Jane Porter, Lady Morgan [the novelist], and I know not how many others. We seemed really to know as many people as we should in a party at home, which is a rare thing in a strange capital, and rarest of all in this vast overgrown London. Notwithstanding, therefore, our fatiguing day, we enjoyed it very much.

The Difference Engine was eight years long the most prominent conversation piece at his glittering events. But he also delighted in entertaining the guests who came to his soirées with ingenious devices and gimmicks.

Thus, in the spring of 1840, Babbage started exhibiting something else: the almost miraculous woven portrait of Jacquard. The woven portrait shows the inventor sitting in a luxurious cushioned chair at his work bench. He is holding a pair of callipers against long strips of cardboard that have tiny holes punched in them. The bench also accommodates a model of a loom. Hanging up on a rack on a wall behind the inventor are chisels and other tools in a variety of shapes and sizes. Rolled-up plans are poking out of a drawer on a table beneath the rack.

The portrait gives the impression of being an informal snapshot of the inventor as he momentarily turns away from his work and glances at the artist. He has a thoughtful, frowning air about him, and his well-cut coat and general air of prosperity suggest that this is an inventor who has enjoyed some success.

Babbage enjoyed showing the portrait to his guests. He would then ask them how they thought it had been made. When they told him they thought it was an engraving, as they usually did, he gave a knowing smile.

One evening in 1842, two of the most distinguished people in the realm had attended a Babbage soirée. They were the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. The ‘Iron Duke’ was, of course, the hero of Waterloo and a former Prime Minister. Prince Albert was famous for his intellect and the important, even essential, role he played in governing Britain. Officially he had no power, but in practice the Queen deferred to his judgement and opinion on almost every matter. She usually succeeded in persuading her ministers to do the same.

Almost as soon as the Duke and the Prince arrived, Babbage showed them the portrait. The Prince asked Babbage why he thought the portrait so important. Babbage replied, in characteristically enigmatic fashion, ‘it will greatly assist in explaining the nature of my calculating machine the Analytical Engine.’

Once the two guests had examined the portrait, Babbage asked them what they thought it was. The Duke of Wellington made the usual mistake of responding that it must be an engraving. But it turned out the Prince knew the truth, having apparently heard of the portrait before. He informed the Duke of Wellington that the portrait was not an engraving at all, but a woven piece of fabric.

A few originals of the woven portrait still exist today. As we gaze into Jacquard’s stern features, it is difficult to believe that this faded, rather small picture (it only measures 20 inches by 14), could have had such a prodigious effect on Ada’s imagination, but it did. It’s no exaggeration to say that without this woven portrait, Ada would almost certainly have never had the insight she did not only into Babbage’s Analytical Engine, but into her dream of what a computer could be.

Babbage returned to Britain in September 1840. Temporarily exhilarated by his visit to Turin, where he had been received as an eminent international scientist and inventor, he had to confront the depressing truth that it was increasingly unlikely he would ever be able to afford to build the Analytical Engine. He knew that his own financial resources, considerable as they were, would be nowhere near enough for the task. Yet somehow he continued to apply himself with energy and dedication to his great object.

He was sustained by two hopes.

Firstly, he thought it reasonably likely that one of the Italian scientists whom he had recently visited might write a lengthy and detailed paper on the new project. Babbage hoped that such a paper would affirm the importance of the invention and give him leverage with the British Government who had so generously supported him with the construction of the Difference Engine. He had a curious habit of trying to win influence by these rather indirect means instead of honing his diplomatic skills and adopting a more direct, and possibly more successful, approach.

Luigi Federico Menabrea.

His host in Turin, Giovanni Plana, had indicated that he himself was not in sufficiently good health enough to undertake the job, but Luigi Federico Menabrea, a talented young mathematician whom Plana had introduced to Babbage in Turin, appeared interested in carrying it out. Babbage remained in touch with Menabrea and supplied him with comprehensive information about the Analytical Engine. It was this connection with Menabrea that was soon to lead to the involvement of Ada Lovelace.

Babbage’s second cause for optimism, however tenuous, was that the Government might, after all, have a spontaneous change of heart and make new funding available to him. This was something he intended to advance. It may well be that in his mind the idea had formed that Ada’s involvement could in some way help his indirect campaign to spread the word about his new Engine.

Meanwhile, he had his friendship with Ada to enjoy. Here, for example, is a letter she wrote to Babbage on Tuesday January 12 1841. She was very keen to be involved with his plans, and pressed him on this whenever she could.

My Dear Babbage.

If you will come by the
Railway
on Friday, we will send the carriage to meet you at
Weybridge
, for the Train that leaves Town about 4 o’clock & arrives at Weybridge a few minutes before 5 o’clock.

Bring warm coats or cloaks, as the carriage will be probably an open one.

If you are a
Skater
, pray bring
Skates
to Ockham; that being the fashionable occupation here now, & one
I
have much taken to.

I am very anxious to talk to you. I will give you a hint on
what
. It strikes me that at some future time, (it might be even within 3 or 4 years, or it might be
many
years hence),
my head
may be made by you subservient to some of
your
purposes & plans. If so,
if
ever I could be worthy or capable of being
used
by you, my head will be yours. And it is on this that I wish to speak most seriously to you. You have always been a kind and real & most invaluable friend to
me
; & I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare so exalt myself as to hope however humbly, that I can ever be intellectually worthy to attempt serving
you
.