A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (21 page)

While Bifrons, in Patrixbourne near Canterbury, has now been demolished, the little bridge is still here. It is readily visible from the road between Patrixbourne and Bridge, and is less than a hundred yards from the road.

It was there, too, at the time Ada spent her often lonely year at Bifrons in 1828. I am sure she often wandered down to the bridge from the house, and perhaps she glanced with some envy at village children playing in the adjacent field beyond the road, and wondered why she couldn’t have more friends. I think she must have stood on the bridge and watched the Nailbourne flow under her. She might have glanced above her and seen birds flying and thought, yet again, how one day she planned to find a way of flying herself.

Today, if you stand on that bridge and look skywards, you will see the occasional jet airliner pass by on the flight path towards Eastern Europe or back from there towards London. Ada never saw those planes flying, but her spirit did.

We may, too, think of the following, from the final lines of the third canto of
Childe Harolde
, in which Byron addresses his daughter.

Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught,

I know that that thou wilt love me; though my name,

Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught

With desolation, – and a broken claim:

Though the grave closed between us, – ’twere the same,

I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain

My blood from out thy being were an aim,

And an attainment, – all would be in vain, -

Still thou would’st love me, still that more than life retain.

N
otes

1
May Gray. Gray was Scottish, and fond of discipline. Her sister Agnes had previously been Byron’s nursemaid. I haven’t been able to find out exactly how old May was when she looked after Byron, but judging from the fact that by 1798, a married Agnes was living in Woodside, a working-class district of Aberdeen, with two children of her own, it seems logical to assume that May was younger than Agnes and that Agnes was in her late teens or early twenties by 1798. This would mean that May was probably about seventeen or eighteen when she was Byron’s nursemaid.

2
From Trinity College (Cambridge) Archivist Jon Smith.

3
The date of Babbage’s wife Georgiana’s death was discovered by Annelisa Christensen who assisted me with the research for this book. The date is mentioned in an issue of the London
Times
for September 1827, which records the death as having happened ‘on the 1st inst at Boughton-house, in the county of Worcester, aged 35, Georgiana, the wife of Charles Babbage Esq., of Devonshire-street, Portland-place.’

4
The exact date of his daughter Georgiana’s death isn’t found in Anthony Hyman’s standard biography of Babbage; Hyman just gives the year 1834. But Anne Christensen, researching the details of Babbage’s daughter Georgiana’s death for this book, found a reference to Georgiana’s death in the London newspaper
The Standard
for September 30 1834. (Admittedly Hyman did not have the advantage of access to on-line newspaper archives.)

I wish especially to acknowledge one particular source,
Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers
by Betty Alexandra Toole. Her book contains all Ada’s letters to Babbage, as well as many other letters between Ada and a wide range of people, including Lady Byron. The book also contains Babbage’s letter from Ada to Babbage in which he mentions the phrase ‘Enchantress of Number’

In order in which they appear in the book, the following sources were used:

The site of Bifrons house is close by Patrixbourne village, and is accessible via a path close by the mini-roundabout just outside Patrixbourne

Lovelace-Byron Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, with kind permission of Lord Lytton

The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds

The Woeful Victorian
by Phyllis Grosskurth (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1964)

Annabella’s letter to Byron on Sunday, August 22, 1813, which rekindled their relationship is in the Lovelace-Byron Papers. It is almost completely legible.

Benjamin Disraeli
Venetia
(1837)

Toole, JJ O’Connor and E.F. Robertson’s article on Mary Somerville. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Somer-ville.html

Woronzow Greig’s short and often illegible biography of Ada is in the Lovelace-Byron Papers.

Jacquard’s Web
by James Essinger
My main source for the early history of Jacquard’s life are papers published in the
Bulletin Municipal Officiel
of Lyons between 1998 and 1999.

A History of Textiles
by Kax Wilson (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1979)

The Fontana History of Technology
by Donald Cardwell (Fontana Press, London, 1994)

On the subject of Babbage’s personal life, there is an intriguing letter to him from a Reverend Lunn in Add. MSS 37,185, folio 310. This suggests that Babbage had asked Lunn to enquire about a potentially suitable candidate for a wife for Babbage

Charles Babbage’s
Passage from the Life of a Philosopher
, and his archive, held by the British Library.

Herschel to Babbage urging the abandonment of formality in correspondence is in Volume 2 of the Herschel Papers in the library of the Royal Society, London. Folio 8.

The draft letter from Charles Babbage to Jean Arago is in the British Library, Additional Manuscripts No. 37,191 folios 287-9.

The portrait of Jacquard which Babbage was finally able to obtain is on display in the Babbage exhibition in the Science Museum, London.

Jean Arago’s letter explaining his problems with obtaining the Jacquard portrait for Babbage is in the British Library, Additional Manuscripts No. 37,191, folio 316.

The evidence for when Babbage returned to Britain from Turin is inherent in a letter in Add. MSS 39,191, folio 450. This is dated 11 September 1840. It was addressed to Babbage in London but redirected to an address in Ostend, where he seems to have been staying prior to coming back to Britain.

Sketch of the Analytical Engine, invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. [by L.F. Menabrea, with notes by Ada Lovelace]
Scientific Memoirs, iii, p 666-731 www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

Sir Robert Peel’s letter to the Earl of Haddington about the correct attitude to adopt to the financial requests of men of science is in the British Library’s Additional Manuscripts 40,456, folio 98.

Peel’s letter to Buckland, showing how the Prime Minister felt about Babbage, is in Add. MSS 40,514 folio 223.

Henry Goulburn’s letter to Babbage notifying him of the Government’s decision to stop funding the Difference Engine, is in Add. MSS V 37,192 f 172-173

Babbage’s detailed account of his abortive meeting with Sir Robert Peel on Friday, 11 November 1842 is in Add. MSS 37,192, folio 189.

Although I do not mention this directly in the text, for details of a dinner-party given by Dickens which Babbage, Lord and Lady Lovelace attended see
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 5 1847-1849,
p. 513 ed. Storey/Fielding (OUP, Oxford, 1981).

For Dickens’s letter to his brother-in-law, the architect and artist Henry Austin, about the bill for Tavistock Place, see
The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. 6,
p. 556 ed. Storey/Tillotson and Burgis (OUP, Oxford, 1988).

The diagnosis by Dr West is in the Lovelace-Byron Papers.

The account of Ada’s funeral appeared in the
Nottinghamshire Guardian
on Wednesday December 8 1852. It was found by Annelisa Christensen.

A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
by Howard Aiken (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1946 and Herman Hollerith,
Forgotten Giant of Information Processing
by Geoffrey D. Austrian (Columbia University Press, New York, 1982

Aspray, William (Editor),
Computing Before Computers.
Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1990.

Babbage, Charles.
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.
London: Charles Knight, 1832.

Babbage, Charles.
On the Principles and Development of the Calculator.
New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1961.

Babbage, Charles.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.
New Brunswick,
New Jersey: Rutgers University Press and Piscataway, New Jersey: IEEE Press, 1994.

Babbage, Charles.
Science and Reform, Selected Works of Charles Babbage.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Bromley, Allan.
The Babbage Papers in the Science Museum.
London: The Science Museum, 1991.

Brown, Donald.
Charles Babbage – The Man and his Machine.
Totnes: The Totnes Museum Study Centre, 1992.

Byron, Lord.
The Works of Lord Byron
. Wordsworth Editions. 1994.

Buxton, H.W.
Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq. F.R.S..
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press and Tomash Publishers (Los Angeles / San Francisco), 1988.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin and William Aspray.
Computer: A History of the Information Machine
. New York: HarperCollins, 1986.

Collier, Bruce.
The Little Engines that Could’ve.
New York & London Garland Publishing: 1990.

Dickens, Charles.
The Letters of Charles Dickens
: 1820 – 1870 (2nd release). Electronic edition.

Dickens, Charles.
Little Dorrit
. London: Chapman & Hall, 1855.

Eisler, Benita.
Byron.
London: Hamish Hamilton, 1999.

Essinger, James.
Jacquard’s Web.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.

Grosskurth, Phyllis.
Byron, The Flawed Angel.
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.

Hyman, Anthony.
Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

King-Hele, D. G. (Editor),
John Herschel 1792-1871: A Bicentennial Commemoration.
London: The Royal Society, 1992.

Knowles, James Sheridan.
Love, a play in five acts.
[First US edition]. Baltimore, H.A. Turner. c 1840.

Lethbridge, Lucy.
Ada Lovelace, computer wizard of Victorian England.
London: Short Books 2004.

Maddox, Brenda.
Rosalind Franklin, the dark lady of DNA
. London. Harper Collins 2002.

Moore, Doris Langley.
Ada: Countess of Lovelace: Byron’s Legitimate Daughter
. London: John Murray, 1977.

Moseley, Maboth.
Irascible Genius: A Life of Charles Babbage, Inventor.
London: Hutchinson, 1964.

Snyder, Laura J.
The Philosophical Breakfast Club.
New York: Random House, 2011.

Stein, Dorothy.
Ada: A Life and Legacy
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985.

Swade, Doron.
Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines.
London: The Science Museum, 1991.

Swade, Doron.
The Cogwheel Brain.
London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 2000.

Toole, Betty.
Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers.
Mill Valley, California: Strawberry Press, 1992.

Woolley, Benjamin.
The Bride of Science.
London: Macmillan, 1999.

My sincere thanks to my publisher and discerning, insightful and hard-working editor Martin Rynja of Gibson Square, and my agent Diane Banks. Diane is an agent and ally of the very highest calibre.

My great thanks to Ada’s descendant the Earl of Lytton for granting me access to the Lovelace-Byron Collection in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and for permission to reproduce material from it. My thanks also to the Earl of Lytton’s literary executors, Laurence Pollinger Limited.

Alexandra Toole’s superb book
Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers
(1992) has been an essential companion to me during the writing of
A Female Genius
, as have been my conversations with my friend Alexandra herself.

My very sincere thanks to Laurence Green, Alexander Dembitz and Briony Kapoor for their support and friendship. My deep gratitude also to Helen Komatsu (formerly Helen Wylie), with whom I have had so many conversations about Ada and Babbage; to Russell Galen in New York for kindly editing the early sample material of this book; to Annelisa Lynch for her wonderfully ingenious and dedicated research and advice; and to Fiona Godfrey for being my amanuensis for this project and for her excellent editing and our many helpful discussions about Ada and Ada’s world.

Many thanks also to Dr Doron Swade MBE for his friendship and for his generosity with his time over several years, and to Ada enthusiast and expert Dr Betty Alexandra Toole for her help.

I would additionally like to express my gratitude to: Margaret Dowley MBE; Jackie Hammond; Andrew Greet IM; Nicole Roberts, Stephen Gillatt, Maurice Raraty; Meriel Connor; John Sullivan; Jonathan Smith and Sandy Paul of Trinity College, Cambridge; Joanna Corden and Keith Moore of the Royal Society in London; Colin Harris and his team at the Bodleian Library, Oxford and also to Mary Clapinson there; J.J. O’Connor and E.F. Robertson for their excellent work on Mary Somerville, from which I have drawn; the late Bruce Collier; Professor Anthony Hyman; Tony Redding; Philippa Redding; Ranjit Bolt OBE; Richard Gill, Mike Kinder and Neil Roberts, who all taught me at Wyggeston Boys’ Grammar School in Leicester; Evzen Kolar, the Hollywood producer of the movie
Enchantress of Numbers
; my computer consultant Mike Anderson; my brilliant and ever-helpful domestic colleague Kimmy Taylor; my tolerant and patient former bank manager Mike Hatton; Clair-Marie Slater; Bruce Todd; Sally Day; Sandy Baker; Barbara Lammers; Jennifer O’Leary; Heather Rowland; Marina George; my talented writer friend Valerie Cassar; Phyllis Grosskurth; Benita Eisler; Emily Howard; Ethan Lewis Maltby; Mo Pietroni; Peter Collinson; Steve Disleris-Beck; Barbara van Minnen; Allan Barr; Stephen Hewett; Dave Pickering; Kevin Waters; Melvyn Lesser; Patrick Carter; Alan Woodward; Julie Merry; Valerie Chouman; Andre Israel; Pritul Khagram; Amy Cohen; Jane Young; Kate Halliwell; Mike Waddington; Giles Halliwell; Elton Butcher; David Davies; Michael McCaw; Richard Wilcox; Anthony Adolph; Mark George; Diane Scrivens; Mark Bonthrone; Mark Stanton; Sheila Ableman; Zoe Killackey; Jovanka Houska IM; Stuart Conquest GM; Paul Crampton; Andrew Stucken; my brother Rupert Essinger and Joe Mooney; Wendy Mooney.

My thanks also to Eddie Jephcott, Jacqueline Rifai, Alex Rifai, Annie Strahm and Sharon and Zoe Retter for acting so well in the read-through of
Ada’s Thinking-Machine
, my screenplay about Ada.

I would additionally like to express my gratitude to my optician Kieran Minshull of L.K. Leon & Co, the eye surgeon Mr Wallace Poon and also to Dr Simon Ellis, who was my doctor for 27 years until his retirement in 2013.

Finally, my thanks to my friend the poet and critic Hilary Rouse-Amadi for the poems about Ada and Babbage that form an introduction to this book and which Hilary wrote after I introduced her to Ada’s world and said I was interested in commissioning a poem from her for this book. Hilary wrote not one poem but four, and I think they communicate a great deal of emotional and factual truth about Ada and Babbage.

As Hilary says: ‘In her relatively short lifespan, Ada’s position would, I am certain, have aroused envy among women belonging to other classes. Nonetheless, a luxurious lifestyle still barred her and other members of the female aristocratic elite from so many aspects of public life. In the poems, her dual role as insider and outsider conveys a consciousness of contradiction, especially the poverty of enforced female dependence, experienced even among the privileged minority to which she belonged, but in which it is likely she never felt herself to be truly at home.’