by Julia Gray
And the person who was most right of all – as much as I am loath to admit it – was my mother. She may not have done the right things, always, in her attempts to help me, but she certainly did them for the right reasons.
I do see that now.
Just as I am turning away from Mrs Carpenter’s portrait, and quite ready to depart, one last person greets me. He looks the same as ever; a little greyer, perhaps, at the temples, but no less leonine.
‘Lady King.’
‘Mr Babbage!’ I can scarcely contain my delight.
‘I came,’ he says, ‘very much hoping that you would be here today. How is your son?’
‘He is remarkable.’ I am about to enter into a long list of the infant Byron’s accomplishments – I really do want to, but I don’t. ‘Tell, me, sir – what progress has there been with your Analytical Engine?’
‘Oh, you don’t want to speak of that here, surely.’
But I get the impression that these words are a pleasantry. ‘Surrounded by these works of exceptional skill and dexterity,’ I say, taking his arm, ‘I can think of no better place. Tell me, did you come up with a solution for the problem of the over-large drum? I still have your diagrams, you know. In fact, you must come to stay with us at Ockham Park, or else at Porlock. You’ll like William’s house overlooking the Bristol Channel – so secluded and high up; you’ll be able to do all sorts of wonderful work...’
We stroll through the gallery, hearing nothing now of the babble of the crowds, the excited exclamations as friends and acquaintances meet and greet; in the distance, I am amused to see Mamma and William, strolling in a similar fashion, their heads inclined at angles towards each other. My mother looks perfectly content, and so does my husband, and I am glad of this.
‘I have, just recently, made quite an interesting breakthrough as far as the Analytical Engine is concerned,’ says Mr Babbage. ‘It has to do with – of all things...’
‘The Jacquard loom?’ I say, suddenly remembering again that strange sequence of visions I had in Mary Somerville’s Chelsea parlour.
A look passes between us. He is older than me, and no relation of mine, and really, I do not know him terribly well, and yet in that moment, I am sure, Mr Babbage and I are thinking exactly the same thing.
‘Yes!’ he says. ‘The loom! The punched cards, you know, instead of the drum...’
‘It will work,’ I say. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘There are further investigations to be done—’
‘Of course, but what fascinating investigations they will be.’
He begins to speak, relating to me his newest ideas, his voice low but distinct against the echoing voices, and I listen, offering a nod here, a thoughtful interjection there. It is a conversation, a true one. Mr Babbage will develop this extraordinary machine of his – I have never been more certain of anything in all my life – and I, Ada, will do everything in my power to be of assistance.
On we go through the Royal Academy, past lush-leaved landscapes and stern-browed bronzes, until the portrait of Ada is forgotten, and far behind us.
Afterword
Family life and health
Ada’s story did not end there. Her marriage to William was a happy one, especially at the start. The couple had two more children, Anne Isabella (after Lady Noel Byron) in 1837 and Ralph Gordon in 1839. The births were difficult, and although Ada doted on her sons, Byron especially, she found her relationship with her daughter harder to manage. Ada had a difficult mother-in-law too: Lady Hester King, by all accounts an unpleasant woman, exploited a loophole in William’s father’s will in order to deprive him of property that was rightfully his. In order for Ada to be differentiated from her mother-in-law (they were both known as Lady King), Annabella petitioned for a change of title, and so William and Ada became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace in 1838.
In 1841, Ada discovered something that shocked her to the core: her father’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta had resulted in a child, Medora. This young woman was currently in Paris, and Annabella – ever-drawn to those things that reminded her of Byron – had taken her under her wing. Ada travelled to Paris at once and instantly liked the charming, dark-haired Medora, who bore a close resemblance to Ada herself. Unfortunately for both Ada and Annabella, Medora was a manipulative liar; after two uncomfortable years of Medora’s presence in England, both were relieved when she was dispatched back to France with a stipend from Annabella.
Ada and William’s often-diverging interests (he became increasingly preoccupied with architectural expansions of his properties, while she continued to devote herself to music and mathematics) meant that they drifted apart to some extent. Ada attracted a certain criticism for her fondness for riding in Hyde Park in the company of married men (a scandalous thing to do at the time), and it is likely that she had an affair with a man named John Crosse from about 1844 onwards, although their correspondence was destroyed. In the late 1840s, it seems that Ada became interested in horse-racing, and lost vast sums of money, possibly in her attempt to find a mathematical way to game the system. In spite of whatever difficulties the couple faced, William remained supportive of Ada and was proud of her work with Charles Babbage.
Ada’s health, as had been the case in her childhood, was never good. She has been retrospectively diagnosed with conditions ranging from manic depression to anorexia to an allergy to alcohol; several sources have mentioned her ‘staring’ facial expression which does suggest some underlying medical cause. No explanation has ever been found for the long illness, once thought to be complications arising from measles, that left her bedridden in 1829.
Ada became very ill with cholera not long after her daughter was born, and she often subjected herself to strenuous dieting. There remained a clear correlation between the intensity of Ada’s academic work and her periods of sickness that needed to be carefully monitored. Towards the end of her life, she took large quantities of laudanum and opium in order to manage her pain.
The Analytical Engine
Ada’s keen desire for intellectual development remained with her throughout her life. She set up two schools in 1838 that followed the same model as her mother’s (her relationship with Annabella had, by this time, grown easier) and she also continued to correspond with Mary Somerville.
When Mary moved abroad in 1838, a new tutor entered Ada’s life in the form of the mathematician Augustus de Morgan. A wise and patient teacher, de Morgan encouraged Ada to consolidate those basic skills that she had not yet developed before moving on to the harder concepts she wished to learn. Spurred on by her fortnightly studies with de Morgan, Ada wrote to Babbage in 1841, offering to help him with the ongoing development of his Analytical Engine.
In 1842, she did something that would prove to be quite extraordinary, and whose repercussions are still felt today. The Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea had written an article in French about Babbage’s as-yet-unbuilt Analytical Engine. Ada, who spoke French fluently, was commissioned by a friend of Babbage to translate the account into English. Her translation was an excellent one, but she did more than simply translate the article: she added various ‘Notes’ (labelled ‘A’ to ‘G’) at the end of it, which were longer than the article itself. In these, she carefully explained the difference in function between the Difference and Analytical Engines: ‘while the Difference Engine can merely tabulate, and is incapable of developing, the Analytical Engine can either tabulate or develope [sic]’.Speculating that the Engine could be used, for example, to compose ‘elaborate and scientific pieces of music’, Ada unmistakably foresaw, and tried to express, how the needs of a changing world could be served by the limitless functions of Babbage’s invention – far beyond what Babbage himself had imagined. This contribution was a credit to the working of a highly unusual mind. In addition to this, Ada constructed in ‘Note G’ a chart that demonstrated how the Engine could theoretically proc
ess a sequence of fifty Bernoulli numbers – a sequence of rational numbers that plays an important role in many mathematical computations; it is this chart that is recognised as the world’s first example of a machine algorithm – the same kind that is used in computing today. She also noted that the Analytical Engine was not capable of thinking for itself – something that Alan Turing, the founder of modern-day computing, would describe as ‘Lady Lovelace’s Objection’ (he disagreed with her on this point). The notes were not signed, merely attributed modestly to ‘A.A.L.’, but after the publication of the article in 1843 the identity of the author became widely known.
In demonstrating her deep and intuitive understanding of the potential of the Analytical Engine, Ada was also showing how greatly she wanted Babbage’s plans to be understood, and valued, by others. Unfortunately, Babbage did not always present his ideas in the most useful or engaging way. An interview with Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1842 in which Babbage had sought more money for the Analytical Engine had gone disastrously badly. Ada, who had a better understanding of the niceties of social interaction, and knowing that Babbage’s personality was not, perhaps, ideally suited to promoting his inventions, wrote to him and effectively offered to take on the role of a modern-day agent or publicist. Babbage refused; perhaps he simply disliked the idea of her taking on such a role, or else perhaps he did not fully understand the import of what Ada had contributed in her ‘Notes’. In spite of his refusal, their relationship continued on good terms, and he referred to her in a letter as his ‘Enchantress of Number’. It is very tempting to speculate about what might have happened in the history of computer science had Babbage accepted Ada’s offer.
Death and Legacy
In 1851, Ada began showing signs of uterine cancer. The disease rapidly worsened, and although she tried to remain positive in outlook, she became more and more frail and was in a great deal of pain. Soon she was bed-bound. Charles Dickens visited her at least once, and read to her the deathbed scene from his novel Dombey and Son.
On the 27th of November 1852, Ada died. She was thirty-six – the same age that Byron had been at his own death. At her request, she was buried with her father near his old home, Newstead Abbey – a place she had visited for the first and only time in 1850.
Annabella, who would live until the age of sixty-seven, continuing her philanthropic work, made a memorial for her daughter at Kirkby Mallory, on which a sonnet of Ada’s, entitled ‘The Rainbow’, is inscribed. Ada, whose fame in her own short life had been due to her famous father, died with no knowledge of how she would later come to be remembered. Her vital role in the development of computer science has only become recognised relatively recently, after Babbage’s own contributions were rediscovered in the 1970s.
Ada is now, and increasingly, given the credit that she always deserved. She has been commemorated in books and television programmes of all kinds and for all ages, both factual and fictionalised. There is a computing language, ADA, named after her. And the second Tuesday of October is a day in which the achievements of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are celebrated yearly. It is known as Ada Lovelace Day.
Author’s Note
Once, long ago, I went to a lecture on classical art in a university library. I remember almost nothing about it – only one thing, in fact: being handed by the lecturer a small pottery triangle called a sherd – a fragment of some antiquated amphora. It had a pattern on it, I think, or else part of a picture. With the sherd was a slip of paper with printed instructions; one instruction was this: ‘Imagine out from your sherd’. I don’t think I fully understood, at the time, the invitation to take a single piece of a picture and try to imagine out from it, to construct in my mind the rest of the picture, the whole artefact – and not just what it looked like, but what it was used for, and who made it, and who used it – from just one tiny fragment. But although I forgot everything else about that day, there was something about that phrase, and its invitation to imagine out, that I never forgot, and, oddly, in the writing of this book, I have thought about that strange little line many times.
From letters and maps; from old books and new ones; from pictures and diagrams and newspapers and poems, I have tried to take what is known, or what has been written, about the girl who was born Ada Byron and died the Countess of Lovelace and imagine out from there. As far as I can tell, there should be some kind of middle plane between fiction and non-fiction where books like this one must sit; no matter how deep my research, or how wide my reading on topics such as the history of the allotment movement in England, or the educational principles of Pestalozzi, there would always be questions that could only be answered by imagining (which also feels to me quite appropriate, given Ada’s own imagination) what might have happened.
Sometimes, therefore, I have added scenes or details that might have taken place, but most probably didn’t – for example, there really was a Roman shield on display at the public library in Geneva, but we can’t be sure whether Ada and Annabella visited it; and although the Houses of Parliament did burn down in October 1834, there is no evidence that Ada watched it happen. It is doubtful, though not impossible, that Lord Byron ever visited Kirkby Mallory Hall, but I loved the idea of his favourite tree so much that I decided it ought to have a place in the story. Not much is known about Ada’s affair with her shorthand tutor – indeed, we can’t know with certainty whether the young man was in fact her shorthand tutor; we do know, however, that the shorthand tutor’s contract was terminated rather abruptly, which does suggest that something untoward went on. That tutor’s name was William Turner, but due to the high frequency of Williams in I, Ada already, and the fact that so little survives about this entire chapter of Ada’s life, I have rechristened him James Hopkins. Ada’s ‘Numbers’ poem that she shares with Miss Stamp before their Grand Tour is fictionalised.
Lastly, I do not think that Lady Byron would ever have written to her daughter a letter such as the one at the end of the book, in which she explains so much of what took place in her marriage; but if she had ever decided to write such a letter, the details it relates are, I hope, accurate ones. The other letters in I, Ada(with the exception of the note in the prayer-book sent by Augusta) are, likewise, products of my imagination.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my editor, Chloe Sackur, for suggesting to me that I write this book and for being so encouraging at every point of the process. I also want to thank Louise Lamont, my agent, for her endless enthusiasm and thoughtful contributions. As always, huge thanks to the fantastic team at Andersen Press – Klaus Flugge, Paul Black, Charlie Sheppard, Sarah Kimmelman, Rob Farrimond, Jack Noel, and also to Sue Cook for the copyedit. My dear friend Paddy Thomas – we have spent over a year talking about Ada Lovelace and I still don’t think we have finished our discussion. I am in awe of your knowledge and generosity. Thank you to Nick Turner and the boys and girls in Creative Writing Club for listening to some chapters as they were written. Thank you also to Jennifer Johnson, Imogen Russell Williams and Laura Lankester for reading early extracts, and to Birdie Johnson for her help. I am grateful to the many authors, historians, researchers and writers whose books I consulted while writing I, Ada, and especially to Miranda Seymour for taking the time to answer my very specific questions, and offering advice. Thanks are also due to the staff of the British Library in King’s Cross and the Weston Library in Oxford; to the Society of Authors for their wonderful support; to Lord Lytton and Katy Loffman at Paper Lion for allowing me to quote from Ada’s work; to my family and friends; and to Calum and Jonathan, for everything.
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