The Philosophical Breakfast Club (48 page)

After departing from England, Byron passed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine River. In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, John William Polidori. Also staying at the villa were the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s future wife Mary Godwin, the daughter of the social reformer William Godwin. The stay at the Villa Diodati provided fodder for one of the century’s momentous literary events. Because the group was kept indoors by the “incessant rain” of “that wet, ungenial summer” over three days in June, the five decided to try their hands at devising fantastical stories. Mary Shelley produced what would become
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
, and Polidori, inspired by a story of Byron’s, produced
The Vampyre
, the first in a long line of gothic vampire tales.

Eventually, Byron moved on to Italy, and then to Greece, where he died of a fever in April 1824. His body was sent to England, but Westminster Abbey refused to accept it for reasons of “questionable morality.” He was buried instead in Nottingham. Byron’s friends raised £1,000 to commission a statue of the writer. For ten years the statue could find no home: the British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the National Gallery all refused to display it. Finally, in 1844, Whewell accepted Byron’s statue on behalf of Trinity College, and had it placed in the Wren Library, where Byron’s statue stands today, welcoming researchers to the Readers’ Desk.
⁶⁶

Ada (whose mother promptly dropped the first part of her name, Augusta, as soon as Byron left the country) never saw her father again. But he was ever present in her upbringing, as the antithesis of what Annabella wished Ada to become. To protect her daughter from inheriting the wild, impulsive nature of the poet, Annabella forced Ada to study mathematics,
as she had done. From the age of four, Ada studied from dawn until dusk. Her mother supervised her studies with a firm hand; if she misbehaved during her lessons, Ada was placed in a closet.
⁶⁷

Soon after meeting Ada, who was about the same age as his beloved daughter, Georgiana, the charmed Babbage invited her and her mother to one of his soirées, where they could see the demonstration model of his Difference Engine. Lady Byron told a friend that “we both went to see the
thinking
machine, for such it seems.”
⁶⁸
Ada was enchanted by Babbage’s creation. As one acquaintance later recalled, “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—if, indeed, they had as strong an idea of its marvellousness—Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”
⁶⁹
When her mother took her on her factory tour in the fall of 1834, Ada thought of Babbage’s machine, telling Mary Somerville (whom she had met the previous spring) that “this Machinery reminds me of Babbage and his gem of all machinery.”
⁷⁰
Ada and her mother, together with Somerville, went frequently to Babbage’s soirées, especially during the London season of 1835.
⁷¹

The London season was generally considered to be in full swing between May and August. This was the time that young women were on display at parties, balls, dinners, and breakfasts in the hopes that they would find a husband. First, though, a young lady had to be presented at court; titled ladies, as well as the wives and daughters of clergy, military and naval officers, physicians and barristers, could be presented. During a single season a young lady might attend sixty parties, fifty balls, thirty dinners, and twenty-five breakfasts! After two or three seasons of such exposure, if no suitable proposals cropped up, a lady was deemed a spinster.

This was not to be Ada’s fate. In July 1835 she married William, Lord King, who was elevated to the Earl of Lovelace at the queen’s coronation in 1838 (at which point Ada became known as the Countess of Lovelace). They were already corresponding in the spring of 1834, when Ada wrote to William, “Mamma and I are reading Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise. How interesting it is!”
⁷²
The couple would have three children.

In 1839, Ada, now Lady Lovelace, desired to return to her mathematical studies; she approached Babbage and asked him to recommend a tutor for her, perhaps hoping that he would take on the job (he would
not).
⁷³
By the summer of 1840 she had resumed her studies after a four-year hiatus.
⁷⁴
Lovelace’s husband was encouraging, and seemed to agree with her mother that studying math would provide a kind of tranquilizer for her manic tendencies.
⁷⁵

Lady Byron had the idea of asking Augustus De Morgan—a friend of Whewell’s since De Morgan’s undergraduate years at Trinity College—to tutor her daughter; in a sense it was all in the family, as De Morgan was married to Sophia Frend, the daughter of Lady Byron’s old tutor William Frend. Sophia Frend and Lady Byron had become close friends in childhood. Lady Byron had lent the De Morgans her house, Fordhook, near Acton, for ten weeks in 1838, so De Morgan could finish his
Essay on Probabilities
without distraction.
⁷⁶

De Morgan was a first-rate mathematician who had graduated from Cambridge as fourth wrangler. Today he is known as one of the founders of symbolic logic, and the one who formalized rules known as “De Morgan’s laws”: namely, that negating an AND results in an OR and vice versa [that is, not (A and B) = (not A) or (not B), and not (A or B) = (not A) and (not B)]. These laws are widely used today in computer programming. De Morgan is also known, less academically, for composing “The Astronomer’s Drinking Song,” sung at the dinners of the old Mathematical Society, one stanza of which is:

De Morgan added a footnote to this stanza, explaining that “Dr. Whewell, when I communicated this song to him,” stated his opinion that drinking a bottle of wine a day “was a very good idea, of which too little was made.”
⁷⁷

De Morgan assigned Lovelace work from textbooks, and met with her about every two or four weeks. She quickly mastered differential and integral calculus (on which topics De Morgan was in the midst of writing a
textbook). Lovelace would send him letters when she was having trouble working through problem sets, and needed his assistance.
⁷⁸
The two got on exceedingly well; Lovelace told her mother that “no two people ever suited better,” and that she could never repay De Morgan’s kindness and patience.
⁷⁹
Although De Morgan did occasionally take private pupils because he needed the extra income, it appears that he tutored Lovelace for free; her husband would, on occasion, send De Morgan a gift of game from his estate, which was a sign of social parity and so not embarrassing to either party.
⁸⁰

Once Lovelace resumed her mathematical studies, she conceived a plan to help bring about the result that Babbage had failed to manage: getting the government to commit to providing the funds for building the Analytical Engine. She wrote to Babbage:

“I am very anxious to talk to you. I will give you a hint on
what
. It strikes me that at some future time … my
head
may be made by you subservient to some of
your
purposes and 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 and most invaluable friend to
me;
and I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare to exalt myself as to hope however humbly, that I can ever be intellectually worthy to attempt serving you.”
⁸¹

With her intoxicating blend of flattery and self-regard, Lovelace could not help but be appealing to Babbage—who, after all, had been completely unsuccessful in getting what he wanted for his engines, and so was willing to entertain the grand visions of a young woman. She told him, “I am now studying attentively the
Finite Differences …
and in this I have more particular interest, because I know it bears directly on some of
your
business.”
⁸²
Lovelace’s plan for how, exactly, to help Babbage was vague. It was only when Menabrea’s article finally appeared in October of 1842 that she had her chance.

The idea was suggested to her by Charles Wheatstone, a mutual friend of Lovelace’s and Babbage’s. Wheatstone was one of the inventors of the electric telegraph, the electromagnetic clock, the stereoscope (by which two photographs of the same object taken from different points of view are combined to make the object appear to “stand out” in a three-dimensional aspect), and numerous other ingenious devices. Wheatstone recommended that Lovelace turn her talents toward translating the article into English, so that British readers could be introduced to
Babbage’s remarkable invention. A whole journal,
Scientific Memoirs
, was devoted to the publication of translations of foreign scientific papers; her translation would find a natural home there. Lovelace was delighted with the idea, and began work immediately. When she finished the translation, she presented it as a gift to Babbage. He was pleased that the paper would appear in English, but he asked why she had not written an original paper about the engine. “To this Lady Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her,” Babbage recalled later. “I then suggested that she should add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir; an idea which was immediately adopted.”
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Finally, Babbage had a staunch supporter who was willing to do what he himself ought to have done: give the British scientific and political elite a detailed explanation of the workings and the advantages of his invention.

Between this suggestion and the eventual appearance of the translation, in August 1843, Babbage and Lovelace sent countless letters back and forth between her country estate and Babbage’s house in London. In her letters Lovelace is at times coquettish, at others demanding, at some points lecturing the machine’s inventor about how much better she understands it than does he. Babbage for the most part acquiesces in this treatment from his young friend, calling her “my dear and much admired Interpretress.” She in turn refers to herself as his “Fairy for ever.” Ultimately, Lovelace would think of herself as the “High-Priestess of Babbage’s Engine.”
⁸⁴

Lovelace added seven “translator’s notes,” from A to G, which together ran three times the length of Menabrea’s original discussion. In these notes Lovelace discussed the working and meaning of the Analytical Engine, in language meant to excite the reader to its potential. Beautifully describing the workings of the punched cards, she wrote that “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
⁸⁵

There has been vehement debate about Lovelace’s notes, some biographers of Lovelace exalting her to the position of the “first computer programmer” (the U.S. Department of Defense has named its programming language in her honor), some biographers of Babbage considering her little more than Babbage’s secretary, who merely took down his dictation, and who was, to boot, “mad as a hatter.” It is certainly the case that Lovelace had a vastly inflated view of her own abilities. In February 1841 she wrote to her mother about her “scientific Trinity,” her three great
gifts that distinguished her from all other mathematicians: intuition, “immense reasoning faculties,” and a “concentrative faculty.” Describing herself almost as a kind of calculating engine, Lovelace wrote, “Now these three powers … are a vast apparatus put into my power by Providence; and it rests with me by a proper course during the next 20 years to make the engine what I please.”
⁸⁶
She confided to Mary Somerville’s son, “I confess to you … that I have on my mind most strongly the impression that Heaven has allotted me some peculiar
Intellectual-moral
mission to perform.”
⁸⁷

Yet Lovelace did seem to possess mathematical skills beyond what nearly any woman, and many men, of her day possessed. De Morgan expressed candidly his views of Lovelace’s abilities to her mother: her aptitude for mathematics was “so utterly out of the common way for any beginner, man or woman,” he noted. Any young man about to go to Cambridge, having shown such talent, would have been prophesied by De Morgan to be “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” He even compared her natural talents favorably to those of Mary Somerville, thirty-five years her elder, whose acclaimed book on Laplace’s mathematics and mechanics was already a classic.
⁸⁸

Whatever Lovelace’s mathematical talents, her translation and notes did mark an important moment in the history of computing. Besides introducing English readers, for the only time during Babbage’s life, to the workings and importance of the Analytical Engine, Lovelace indisputably made two important contributions to computer science. In the last note, Lovelace included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the engine—the first computer program, as we would call it. Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers in which each is determined by the numbers that come before. The sequence of Bernoulli numbers can be calculated recursively, in the sense that a number in the sequence can be calculated using the ones that come before it. However, unlike other types of number sequences that can be recursively calculated, the Bernoulli numbers require that
all
the preceding numbers be used in order to obtain the value of the next one. So, for example, to get the 1,000th number in the sequence, one needs to perform a calculation using the previous 999 numbers. (This is unlike, say, the Fibonacci numbers, where only the two preceding numbers are needed.)