The Information (17 page)

Fascinated with his own celebrity, he kept a scrapbook—“the pros and cons in parallel columns, from which he obtained a sort of balance,”
^♦
as one visitor described it. “I was told repeatedly that he spent all his days in gloating and grumbling over what people said of him.”

But progress on the engine, the main source of his fame, was faltering. In 1832 he and his engineer Clement produced a working demonstration piece. Babbage displayed it at his parties to guests who found it miraculous or merely puzzling. The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.

He and his engineer fell into disputes. Clement demanded more and more money from Babbage and from the Treasury, which began to suspect profiteering. He withheld parts and drawings and fought over control of the specialized machine tools in their workshops. The government, after more than a decade and £17,000, was losing faith in Babbage, and he in the government. In his dealing with lords and ministers Babbage could be imperious. He was developing a sour view of the Englishman’s attitude toward technological innovation: “If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”
^♦
They no longer saw the point.

“What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?” Prime Minister Robert Peel wrote one of his advisers in
August 1842. “Surely if completed it would be worthless as far as science is concerned.… It will be in my opinion a very costly toy.” He had no trouble finding voices inimical to Babbage in the civil service. Perhaps the most damning was George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal, a starched and methodical figure, who with no equivocation told Peel precisely what he wanted to hear: that the engine was useless. He added this personal note: “I think it likely he lives in a sort of dream as to its utility.”
^♦
Peel’s government terminated the project. As for Babbage’s dream, it continued. It had already taken another turn. The engine in his mind had advanced into a new dimension. And he had met Ada Byron.

In the Strand, at the north end of the Lowther shopping arcade, visitors thronged to the National Gallery of Practical Science, “Blending Instruction with Amusement,” a combination toy store and technology show set up by an American entrepreneur. For the admission price of a shilling, a visitor could touch the “electrical eel,” listen to lectures on the newest science, and watch a model steamboat cruising a seventy-foot trough and the Perkins steam gun emitting a spray of bullets. For a guinea, she could sit for a “daguerreotype” or “photographic” portrait, by which a faithful and pleasing likeness could be obtained in “less than One Second.”
^♦
Or she could watch, as young Augusta Ada Byron did, a weaver demonstrating the automated Jacquard loom, in which the patterns to be woven in cloth were encoded as holes punched into pasteboard cards.

Ada was “the child of love,” her father had written, “—though born in bitterness, and nurtured in convulsion.”
^♦
Her father was a poet. When
she was barely a month old, in 1816, the already notorious Lord Byron, twenty-seven, and the bright, wealthy, and mathematically knowledgeable Anne Isabella Milbanke (Annabella), twenty-three, separated after a year of marriage. Byron left England and never saw his daughter again. Her mother refused to tell her who her father was until she was eight and he died in Greece, an international celebrity. The poet had begged for any news of his daughter: “Is the Girl imaginative?—at
her
present age I have an idea that I had many feelings & notions which people would not believe if I stated them
now
.”
^♦
Yes, she was imaginative.

She was a prodigy, clever at mathematics, encouraged by tutors, talented in drawing and music, fantastically inventive and profoundly lonely. When she was twelve, she set about inventing a means of flying. “I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow,”
^♦
she wrote to her mother. She hoped “to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of
Flyology
illustrated with plates.” For a while she signed her letters “your very affectionate Carrier Pigeon.” She asked her mother to find a book illustrating bird anatomy, because she was reluctant “to dissect even a bird.” She analyzed her daily situation with a care for logic.

She was growing up in a well-kept cloister of her mother’s arranging. She had years of sickliness, a severe bout of measles, and episodes of what was called neurasthenia or hysteria. (“When I am weak,” she wrote, “I am always so exceedingly terrified, at
nobody knows what
, that I can hardly help having an agitated look & manner.”
^♦
) Green drapery enclosed the portrait of her father that hung in one room. In her teens she developed a
romantic interest in her tutor, which led to a certain amount of sneaking about the house and gardens and to lovemaking as intimate as possible without, she said, actual “connection.” The tutor was dismissed. Then, in the spring, wearing white satin and tulle, the seventeen-year-old made her ritual debut at court, where she met the king and queen, the most important dukes, and the French diplomat Talleyrand, whom she described as an “old monkey.”
^♦

A month later she met Charles Babbage. With her mother, she went to see what Lady Byron called his “thinking machine,” the portion of the Difference Engine in his salon. Babbage saw a sparkling, self-possessed young woman with porcelain features and a notorious name, who managed to reveal that she knew more mathematics than most men graduating from university. She saw an imposing forty-one-year-old, authoritative eyebrows anchoring his strong-boned face, who possessed wit and charm and did not wear these qualities lightly. He seemed a kind of visionary—just what she was seeking. She admired the machine, too. An onlooker reported: “While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression, and I dare say the sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”
^♦
Her feeling for the beauty and abstractions of mathematics, fed only in morsels from her succession of tutors, was overflowing. It had no outlet. A woman could not attend university in England, nor join a scientific society (with two exceptions: the botanical and horticultural).

Ada became a tutor for the young daughters of one of her mother’s friends. When writing to them, she signed herself, “your affectionate & untenable Instructress.” On her own she studied Euclid. Forms burgeoned in her mind. “I do not consider that I know a proposition,” she wrote another tutor, “until I can imagine to myself a figure in the air, and go through the construction & demonstration without any book or assistance whatever.”
^♦
She could not forget Babbage, either, or his “gem of
all mechanism.”
^♦
To another friend she reported her “great anxiety about the machine.” Her gaze turned inward, often. She liked to think about herself thinking.

Babbage himself had moved far beyond the machine on display in his drawing room; he was planning a new machine, still an engine of computation but transmuted into another species. He called this the Analytical Engine. Motivating him was a quiet awareness of the Difference Engine’s limitations: it could not, merely by adding differences,
compute every sort of number or solve any mathematical problem. Inspiring him, as well, was the loom on display in the Strand, invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, controlled by instructions encoded and stored as holes punched in cards.

What caught Babbage’s fancy was not the weaving, but rather the encoding, from one medium to another, of patterns. The patterns would appear in damask, eventually, but first were “sent to a peculiar artist.” This specialist, as he said,

The notion of abstracting information away from its physical substrate required careful emphasis. Babbage explained, for example, that the weaver might choose different threads and different colors—“but in all these cases the
form
of the pattern will be precisely the same.” As Babbage conceived his machine now, it raised this very process of abstraction to higher and higher degrees. He meant the cogs and wheels to handle not just numbers but variables standing in for numbers. Variables were to be filled or determined by the outcomes of prior calculations, and, further, the very operations—such as addition or multiplication—were to be changeable, depending on prior outcomes. He imagined these abstract information quantities being stored in cards: variable cards and operation cards. He thought of the machine as embodying laws and of the cards as communicating these laws. Lacking a ready-made vocabulary, he found it awkward to express his fundamental working concepts; for example,

He made clear, though, that information—representations of number and process—would course through the machinery. It would pass to and from certain special physical locations, which Babbage named a
store
, for storage, and a
mill
, for action.

In all this he had an intellectual companion now in Ada, first his acolyte and then his muse. She married a sensible and promising aristocrat, William King, her senior by a decade and a favorite of her mother. In the space of a few years he was elevated to the peerage as earl of Lovelace—making Ada, therefore, a countess—and, still in her early twenties, she bore three children. She managed their homes, in Surrey and London, practiced the harp for hours daily (“I am at present a condemned slave to
my harp
, no easy Task master”
^♦
), danced at balls, met the new queen, Victoria, and sat for her portrait, self-consciously (“I conclude [the artist] is bent on displaying the whole expanse of my capacious jaw bone, upon which I think the word Mathematics should be written”). She suffered terrible dark moods and bouts of illness, including cholera. Her interests and behavior still set her apart. One morning she went alone in her carriage, dressed plainly, to see a model of Edward Davy’s “electrical telegraph” at Exeter Hall