A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (16 page)

My channels for developping [sic] & training my scientific & literary powers, are various, & some of them very attractive. But I wish my old friend to have the
refusal.

Firstly: I want to know whether if I continue to work
on
&
about
your own great subject, you will undertake to abide wholly by the judgement of myself (or of any persons whom you may
now
please to name as referees, whenever we may differ), on
all practical
matters relating to
whatever can involve relations with any fellow-creature or fellow-creatures.

Secondly: can you undertake to give your mind
wholly
&
undividedly
, as a primary object that no engagement is to interfere with, to the consideration of all those matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual
assistance
&
supervision
; & can you promise not to
slur
&
hurry
things over; or to mislay, & allow confusion & mistakes to enter into documents, &c?

Thirdly: If I am able to lay before you in the course of a year or two, explicit & honorable propositions for
executing your engine
, (such as are approved by persons whom you may
now
name to be referred to for their approbation), would there be any chance of your allowing myself & such parties to conduct the business for you; your own
undivided
energies being devoted to the execution of the work; & all other matters being arranged for you on terms which your
own
friends should approve?

You will wonder over this last query. But, I strongly advise you not to reject it as chimerical. You do
not
know the grounds I have for believing that such a contingency may come within my power, & I wish to know before I allow my mind to employ its energies any further on the subject, that I shall not be wasting thought & power for no purpose or result….

Yours
is to love truth & God (yes, deeply & constantly); but to love
fame, glory, honours, yet more
. You will deny this; but in all your intercourse with
every
human being (as far as I know & see of it), it is a
practically paramount
sentiment. Mind, I am not
blaming
it. I simply state my belief in the
fact
. The fact may be a very
noble & beautiful
fact.
That
is another question.

Will you come
here
for some days on Monday. I hope so. Lord L – is very anxious to see & converse with you; & was vexed that the Rail called him away on Tuesday before he had heard from yourself your own views about the recent affair.

I sadly want your
Calculus of Functions
. So
Pray
get it for me. I cannot understand the
Examples.

I have ventured inserting to one passage of Note G a small Foot-Note, which I am sure is
quite tenable
. I say in it that the engine is remarkably well adapted to include the
whole Calculus of Finite Differences
, & I allude to the computation of the
Bernoullian Numbers by means of the difference of Nothing,
as a beautiful example for its processes. I hope it
is
correctly the case.

This letter is sadly blotted & corrected. Never mind that however.

I wonder if you will choose to retain the lady-fairy in your service or not.

Yours ever most sincerely.

A.A.L

*

Babbage didn’t accept the offer. He didn’t realise just how brilliant her understanding of his work really was, still less how deep her understanding of his personality was. One wonders how intently he had even read the discursive part of her
Notes
. If he had read them properly, wouldn’t he have realised just how useful her insights were into the advancement of the Analytical Engine?

There is no written evidence surviving that Babbage truly understood what Ada had written about the Analytical Engine. In reading her
Notes
, he may have focused merely on the complex mathematical material (and attributed – or blamed – what he saw as its more discursive ideas on her ‘fairy’ imagination).

All we know is that the day after Ada wrote this letter, Babbage said no to her without much consideration. At the top of the long letter that Ada sent him on August 14 and which is to be found in the Babbage papers, there appears a pencilled note in Babbage’s hand stating, simply:

Tuesday 15 saw AAL this morning and refused all the conditions.

Babbage could on occasion be selfish, stubborn and ungenerous of spirit where his work was concerned. In that short note he combines all three vices. Despite his respect for Ada’s ability to articulate and popularise the most important project of his life, he could never see her as anything more than an ‘interpreter’. Ada’s reaction to what he told her on Tuesday, or, indeed, how exactly he told her what he had decided is not recorded.

Ada’s translation of Menabrea’s paper on the Analytical Engine was published a few days later in September 1843 in the third number of
Scientific Memoirs
. Entitled
Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. (by L. F. Menabrea, with notes by Ada Lovelace)
.
It was respectfully received by the scientific and mathematical community, but did not cause the sensation Babbage no doubt hoped for, nor did it prove to be the springboard to a literary and scientific career for Ada.

One of the big problems was that Ada was a woman, and although she had signed her
Notes
only with the initials A.A.L., her authorship soon became generally known. The very fact that she was a woman ended up working against her, because the scientific community did not take her work seriously, as it would have done if she had been a man.

16

If Ada was upset with Babbage, and surely she must have felt some disappointment that her idea had been dismissed, this is not apparent from her or his letters that survive from after her proposal to him

Nonetheless, there are no surviving letters from Ada to Babbage between the long one she wrote on August 14 1843 and a short one she wrote to him on March 4 1845. Instead, we have a letter from Babbage to her, which he wrote on September 9 1843, that opens a casual window on the nature of their relationship.

This is not the first surviving letter after August 14 1843; there is another, shorter letter, on August 18 1843 about some drawings he had sent her, and concerning some mathematical papers that she had apparently asked him about, though it’s not clear whether she asked him verbally or in a letter.

That day was clearly a day when Babbage was desperately frustrated with his life and with the difficulties he was facing in his work. He decided to put all the miseries of London behind him, and went to see Ada and her husband – though it was clearly Ada he most wanted to see – at their home at Ashley Combe. Rather than hunting, riding, shooting or other leisurely country house pursuits, he was planning to take the train up to Ashley Combe to tackle with Ada topics of cutting-edge mathematics that had recently been discovered.

My Dear Lady Lovelace

I find it quite in vain to wait until I have leisure so I have resolved that I will leave all other things undone and set out for Ashley taking with me papers enough to enable me to forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Number.

My only impediment would be my mother’s health which is not at this moment quite so good as I could wish.

Are you at Ashley? And is it still consistent with all your other arrangements that I should join you there? – and will next Wednesday or next Thursday or any other day suit you: and shall I leave the iron-shod road at Thornton or at Bridgewater and have you got Arbogast
Du Calcul des derivations
with you there (i.e. at Ashley). I shall bring some books about that horrible problem – the three bodies which is almost as obscure as the existence of the celebrated book
De Tribu Impostoribus
so if you have Arbogast I will bring something else.

Farewell my dear and much admired Interpreter.

Evermost Truly Yours

Charles Babbage

Louis Arbogast’s
Du Calcul des derivations
was published in 1800 and contains the statement of a formula that would only receive widespread recognition 55 years later when it was named after an Italian mathematician, Faà di Bruno, who published two versions of the formula in an Italian academic journal. Not surprisingly, in 1834 the mathematical problem was still so new and difficult that Babbage refers to jokingly it as
De Tribu Impostoribus
. The educated would recognise the name as the mythical book that denied all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It was a common rumour from the eleventh century to the eighteenth century that there was a heretical text by this name, but it never existed. Ossian-style, in France and Germany two hoaxes were published under its name (as the power of religion wilted from the nineteenth century onwards, however, so would the rumour).

What is, furthermore, curious about this letter is the use of the phrase ‘Enchantress of Number’ for Ada. Babbage wrote ‘Number’ in the singular. This point needs making because there is a comprehensive misconception that he wrote ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ in the plural. A search for the phrase ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ on Google reveals 390,000 references, all wrong.

However the word ‘Number’ in the singular is unmistakably there at the end of the page of the manuscript of the letter. The mark to the right of the word is clearly a full stop.

What did Babbage mean by ‘Enchantress of Number’? The modern answer might be that he simply misspelled the word. However, such a slip of the pen seems unusual in a time where good spelling was – unlike now, perhaps – generally considered a sign of distinction.

The other obvious suggestion is that he meant to describe Ada as an enchantress. There is sense in this as Dr Johnson defines a fairy in his 1755 Dictionary as an ‘enchantress, an elf, a fay’, and to Babbage Ada described herself as a fairy during this period. But there is a social difference. Few would thoughtlessly repeat a joke that a correspondent has just made about themselves. Dr Johnson defines the word ‘enchantress’ itself less innocently as ‘a sorceress; a woman of extreme beauty or excellence’, and a ‘sorceress’ as a ‘female magician or enchantress.’ Ada had never been encouraged to believe she was exceptionally gifted, let alone think of herself as an exceptional beauty. Whatever she may have felt deep inside, these views hadn’t changed in the August letter she had written to Babbage. The almost camp hyperbole of the word enchantress as a way of describing her powers might have made someone like Ada ill at ease, if indeed Babbage had meant to flatter her by way of a joke.

The Babbage who speaks through his letters or emerges from the books about his life does not seem someone who would so expressly refer to Ada herself in the direct, flirtatious if not seductive tone that a poet like Lord Byron might permit himself when writing to a married noblewoman whose husband’s country house he would like to visit. That is a different matter from the Babbage who, to others such as Michael Faraday, refers flatteringly to Ada as an ‘Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it.’

If it is not Ada, the enchantress is either the Analytical Engine or mathematics itself. Given their close working relationship on Menabrea’s essay at this time and Babbage’s monomaniacal obsession with the new machine, it is more likely that he meant the former. Ada’s and Babbage’s correspondence is functional and not, ultimately, that of equals, as Babbage had made clear in August. The clue lies perhaps in his complaint to Ada, ‘I find it quite in vain to wait until I have leisure…’, and he will come to Ashley but ‘leave all other things undone’. At Ada’s he will devote himself exclusively to his work, leaving behind the ‘world and all its troubles.’

He leavens this heavy-handed lament with light-hearted kennings: the railway becomes the ‘iron-shod road’, an essential book on mathematical series that will be worked on by the two becomes a mythical religious tome. In fact, Arbogast’s book was far from ‘mythical’. The book developed an idea that was crucial to the success of the engine. Arbogast writes in the prelims to his book, ‘The secret power of Analysis consists in the happy choice and application of signs, which are simple and characteristic of the things they represent.’ Thus the light-hearted circumlocution for an engine that would handle infinite fractions and formulas accurately became the ‘enchantress’: not of numbers in plural, but of the analytical concept itself.

So by ‘Enchantress of Number’ Babbage appears to have meant the Analytical Engine. The possibility that he was writing in an obfuscated spirit of flirtation and did mean Ada, and she read it as such, is tantalising. But if it was amorous it seems curious that he repeated it casually to Faraday. Without the discovery of any conclusive evidence it is not clear that their relationship was ‘impure’ in Lord Byron’s terms.

The letter makes clear that Ada had taken being rebuffed by Babbage very well indeed. It had not dented her resolve to help the gestation of the Analytical Engine in any way she could as a ‘fairy’. She was not serving mere mortals but the Enchantress herself. No wonder Babbage signed off warmly to the only one in the world who gave him unconditional help, despite all, and who saw the significance of what he was trying to achieve.

Apart from Ada, there was one man in the nineteenth century who grasped, in its technical detail at least, the exceptional value of Babbage’s work. Federico Luigi Menabrea was a professor of engineering at the University of Turin when he wrote his essay on Babbage that Ada translated (he thought she was called ‘Lady Lovely’). Originally an army engineer before he became a professor, he would become involved in politics in the mid-1840s and enter the Italian cabinet in 1861 as navy minister.

Menabrea’s rise to prominence at that time may well have been an important factor for Babbage to publish his memoir
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
in 1864. Menabrea’s name was now commonly known in Britain’s government circles. However, whatever the demands of the Italian navy, the fiendishly complicated cogwheels of Italian unification now absorbed Menabrea (he was to become Italian prime minister a few years later in 1867). There was little he could do personally – even if he had remembered his essay and wanted to use his position to advance Babbage’s now somewhat stale project.

Thus the year 1864 was marked in the UK by the publication of Babbage’s
Passages
. But also by a biting satire of the Engine together with a portrait of his odd, self-aggrandising pettiness in Charles Dickens’
All the Year Round
, showing the inventor to be relentlessly bullied by his neighbours who knew they could get a rise out of him simply by making noise in front of his house:

Some of Mr Babbage’s neighbours have derived great pleasure from inviting musicians of various tastes and countries to play opposite his house, with the view of ascertaining whether there are not some kinds of instruments which he might approve; but their best efforts have had no other effect than to bring the philosopher out into the street in search of a policeman.

What a misfortune it is to a man to have no taste for music! There goes Mr Babbage in search of an officer of the law followed by a crowd of young children, urged on by their parents and backed at a judicious distance by a set of vagabonds shouting forth uncomplimentary epithets, and making ridiculous rhymes on his name. When he turns round to survey his illustrious tail, it stops; if he moves towards it, it recedes; but, the instant he turns, the shouting and the abuse are resumed. In one case there were above a hundred persons, consisting of men, women, and boys, who followed him through the streets before he could find a policeman…

A foolish young fellow purchased a wind instrument with a hole in it, with which he made discordant noises for the purpose of annoying him. A workman inhabiting an attic which overlooked his garden, blew a penny whistle out of his window every day for half an hour. When Mr Babbage took measures to put a stop to these proceedings he was threatened with vengeance. One correspondent kindly volunteered to do him a serious bodily injury, while a third, in a personal communication, intimated his intention of burning the house down with Mr Babbage in it. The smaller evils of dead cats thrown down his area, of windows from time to time purposely broken, or of occasional blows on the head from stones projected by unseen hands, Mr Babbage will not condescend to speak.

All these things are trifles compared to being awakened at one o’clock in the morning (just as he has fallen asleep after a painful surgical operation) by the crash of a brass band. On a careful retrospect of the last dozen years of his life, Mr Babbage arrives at the conclusion that one-fourth part of his working power has been destroyed by street music which he regards as a twenty-five per cent income-tax on his brain, levied by permission of the government, and squandered among the most worthless classes. During eighty days he registered one hundred and sixty-five instances when he went out to put a stop to the nuisance. In several of these instances his whole day’s work was lost, for they frequently occurred when he was giving instructions to his workmen relative to some parts of his analytical engine.

At the end of his life, Babbage truly had become the charicature of a mad scientist – even to his former friend.