by Dixe Wills
In 1835, at the age of 19, she married William King. When her husband was made Earl of Lovelace three years later, she became Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She is known today as Ada Lovelace, which is something of a mutilation of the correct form of her name.
However, although her marriage was a happy one that resulted in the birth of three children, an arguably more significant event occurred in her life when she was just 17. In June 1833, she was introduced to a man named Charles Babbage by her mentor, Mary Somerville, herself a very gifted mathematician and astronomer. Babbage, who was 42 at the time of his meeting with Lovelace, was an inventor and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He and Ada, drawn together by their admiration of each other’s mind, soon became firm friends.
Babbage was working on the design of a machine he called a Difference Engine, which would be able to work out logarithms and trigonometric functions. Despite acquiring very generous government funding for his research, he abandoned his attempts to construct such a contraption in order to concentrate on a far more complex device he named the Analytical Engine. On paper, this was the forerunner to the modern-day computer. It contained a component that could carry out calculations; a form of memory; and a means of programming (using punch cards). Unfortunately, it only ever remained on paper – Babbage spent the rest of his life improving the Analytical Engine without ever actually building it. No one – Babbage included – knew the workings of this ever-evolving theoretical machine to such a deep and forensic level than Lovelace.
In 1842, an Italian mathematician called Luigi Menabrea wrote a brief paper based on notes he had taken when Babbage had given a lecture on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. Lovelace was asked to translate the paper into English (from French). Since her understanding of the machine was so much deeper than Menabrea’s, she ended up correcting a lot of the paper. The following year she shared her work with Babbage. He was thrilled with what he read and asked her to carry on developing it. She promptly wrote twice as much again.
What is most astonishing about the paper Lovelace came up with is just how far ahead of its time it was. She set out in it the first computer programs ever to be published, even though the computer they were intended for had not been built. Indeed, it would not be until 1943, a century later, that the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer – Bletchley Park’s code-breaking Colossus – would see the light of day. Lovelace’s programs were not as unsophisticated as one might imagine, either. For instance, one of them would have enabled the Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a series whose very definition goes way above the head of anyone not deeply immersed in the intricacies of higher mathematics.
Furthermore, while those few scientists who had concerned themselves with such machines had seen them as little more than number-crunching devices, Lovelace predicted that they could be used for a much wider range of applications, including the composition of music ‘of any degree of complexity’, the generation of graphics and the manipulation of symbols. This last capability is precisely what permits modern computers to carry out enormously complicated calculations. Her paper explains:
The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred, and the Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere “calculating machines”. It holds a position wholly its own; and the considerations it suggests are most interesting in their nature. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.
It’s a tragedy that one so evidently brilliant died so young. She contracted uterine cancer and spent many months in pain, nursed by her mother, until her death on 27 November 1852 at the age of 36.
In a letter to Michael Faraday, Babbage declared that Ada was ‘…that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it…’
Although the young Ada clearly also possessed an exceptional natural talent as a mathematician and a logician, because of her sex the conventions of her day would ordinarily have seen these gifts quashed in favour of pursuits deemed more ladylike. Indeed, in the early 1800s it was unusual for girls to receive anything approaching a formal education as we would know it today. The highly exceptional circumstances of her upbringing nurtured and developed that talent.
Nearly a hundred years after she wrote the paper on the Analytical Engine, a mathematician, logician and cryptanalyst called Alan Turing came across it. Lovelace’s exploration not only helped shape Turing’s ideas on the development of computers but also influenced his work on the cracking of the Enigma Code. As such, one could argue that not only was Ada Lovelace the world’s first computer programmer, she also helped the Allies win World War II.
Given her obvious genius and importance in the world of science, it may be difficult to understand why Ada Lovelace isn’t a household name. Aside from the usual misogyny that routinely undervalues the achievements of women while exaggerating those of men, Lovelace’s reputation has been tarnished because she is her mother’s daughter. Annabella Milbanke has been repeatedly smeared by Byron’s fans and biographers, who have preferred to view their hero as the victim of the relationship and Annabella as the bitter and scheming wife. Ada simply became guilty by association. ‘Lovelace’s story is so often printed on paper made from her parents’ dirty laundry,’ as Suw Charman-Anderson so adroitly put it.
Charman-Anderson is the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration that occurs on the second Tuesday of October each year. After a century and a half of neglect, it’s only right that we should honour the woman who may have been saved from replicating the wild passions of her father, but whose wild passion for mathematics, logic and computers has had such an impact on the modern world.
Three friends take a bet in a coffee house
Casual wagers among male friends tend to home in on the trivialities of human existence. They are usually taken in order to resolve questions that are of no importance to anyone but the gamblers themselves. For example, a bet might arise from a sudden and compelling need to determine which of the assembled company can drink a pint of beer the quickest. Or there’s the perennial jousting over whose football/rugby/netball/cricket/hockey/synchronised swimming team will prevail in the coming season, followed by a demand to put one’s money where one’s mouth is.
Doubtless much the same thing went on in the taverns, inns and coffee houses of London in late 17th-century England. However, it was at one particular coffee house – a famous hang-out for academics and scientists called The Grecian – that three friends cut from a different cloth were about to agree on a wager that would change the face of science forever. The three, all of whom were members of the Royal Society, were Edmond Halley (he of the comet), architect Christopher Wren (of St Paul’s fame) and the natural philosopher (i.e. scientist) Robert Hooke.
When a trio with such brilliant minds finds itself in close proximity, the conversation is likely to be highbrow, and indeed the three men were famous for their coffee-house discussions on the scientific and philosophical issues of the day. However, on one occasion in 1684 they managed to outdo even their own lofty standards of erudition, for they ended up laying money on which of them could show the workings for why the path of planets around the Sun was elliptical. In more precise terms, the winner of the wager would be the first of them to produce a mathematical description of the path of an orbiting planet around the Sun if the force of attraction on the planet exerted by the Sun were reciprocal to the square of the distance between them.
It’s a problem we’ve probably all wrestled with ourselves at some point. The difference in this case is that Halley, Wren and Hooke not only had the motivation of the bet to drive them towards an answer
, but they also all shared a mistaken belief that no one had managed to come up with one before. It was, they felt, long overdue that someone should, for it had been 75 years since the astronomer Johannes Kepler had shown by observation that the course of Mars around the Sun was elliptical. Beyond that, virtually nothing was known about the path of planets. On account of some work done by Christiaan Huygens on centrifugal force, the three coffee drinkers at The Grecian had a hunch that the answer lay in the relationship between gravity and the square of the distance between the planet and its Sun, and were mustard-keen to set out the maths behind it.
Hooke showed his hand first, claiming that he had come up with the solution, but his workings rather fell apart on closer examination by his two associates. Halley was so energised by the problem that he took himself off to Cambridge – still something of an undertaking in the 1680s – to seek out a certain man at the university who had garnered a name for himself as a mathematician. That man was Isaac Newton.
Newton was 41 years old, a farmer’s son from a hamlet in Lincolnshire. He was born prematurely, barely survived his first few months, and was then dumped on his grandmother at the age of three when his mother remarried (his father having died before he was born). It was not an auspicious start in life and he was dogged thereafter by a sense of insecurity. Things turned around when he went to stay with an apothecary while attending the King’s School in Grantham. This was his introduction to chemistry, a subject to which the 12-year-old Isaac took immediately and in which he was evidently naturally gifted. Six years later, his uncle, Rev William Ayscough, talked Isaac’s mother into letting him study at Cambridge University as he himself had done. Newton was duly granted a place as a subsizar, a student who worked his passage by acting as a waiter and valet for other students.
He continued his studies at the university until 1665, when the Great Plague forced a retreat to Lincolnshire. Newton was not one to let the grass grow under his feet, however. It was there that he formulated his method of infinitesimal calculus and had an apple fall on or near his head – if the legend be true – triggering his ‘Eureka!’ moment with regard to gravity. He returned to Cambridge in 1667 and two years later became a professor, lecturing on light and its colours, his favourite topic of the moment. His work Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light was virulently attacked by one Robert Hooke, sparking a bitter rivalry that would last for years.
By the time of his meeting with Edmond Halley, Newton had gone through a nervous breakdown, not helped by the subsequent death of his mother, which had seen him withdraw from public life for six years. However, during this time Hooke had written to him with the suggestion that the path of planetary orbits might be worked out with a formula that contained inverse squares, an idea that was to resurface in the coffee-house wager.
The story of the encounter between Halley and Newton is recorded by Abraham De Moivre, who heard it from the lips of Newton himself:
In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit him at Cambridge. After they had been some time together, the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the planets supposing the force of attraction towards the sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.
Sir Isaac replied immediately that it would be an ellipse. The Doctor, struck with joy and amazement, asked him how he knew it. Why, saith he, I have calculated it. Whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without any farther delay. Sir Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it, but he promised him to renew it and then to send it him…
Newton’s scientific investigations were somewhat haphazard and sometimes bordered on the eccentric. His fascination with alchemy, for example, often diverted him from what might have been more fruitful avenues of research. However, Halley’s visit stung him into action. He sat down and began to lay out a comprehensive solution to the mathematical problem he had been posed. As he worked on it, the scope of his response widened as, for the first time, he set down in a methodical way the ideas he had had over the years on universal gravitation and mechanics.
The first Halley knew of this came three months later in November 1684. A messenger knocked on his door in London and handed him a nine-page exposition entitled De Motu Corporum In Gyrum (On the Motion of Bodies in Orbit). The scientist was gripped by what he read, immediately recognising its importance. He raced back up to Cambridge and cajoled, coaxed and finally convinced Newton that he should expand the treatise into a paper that he could deliver to the Royal Society at the earliest possible opportunity.
Newton abandoned his more arcane pursuits and concentrated on the task Halley had persuaded him to take on. Over the following two years he wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), a three-volume work of extraordinary genius.
It is at this point, just as this revolutionary masterpiece is delivered to the Royal Society, that the story descends into bathos. The society regretted that it could not publish Mr Newton’s work because it was financially embarrassed: all its funds had just been spent on a book about fish that had sunk like a stone.
Although far from being a rich man, Halley immediately stepped in, organising and paying for the publication, an event that took place in 1687. It did not take long for the scientific community to realise that nothing quite like Principia (as it is better known today) had been attempted before.
It was a breathtaking achievement: its author had methodically explained the physics behind so much of what happened not only on the Earth, but in the universe beyond.
Among the vast catalogue of achievements in Principia are laws which, over 300 years later, are still found to be valid. Its three laws of motion have formed the bedrock for classical mechanics. It also includes an explanation of the behaviour of orbiting celestial bodies; his law of universal gravitation; the reasons for the movements of the tides; and even the evidence for the Earth not being the perfect sphere that scientists of the time believed it to be but a planet that is slightly flattened at both poles. And all of this in Latin.
Principia remains a towering landmark in the scientific landscape, undiminished by the passing years and the advances in the understanding of our universe that have been made since its publication. It formed the groundwork for a revolution in not just one but three realms: physics, mathematics and astronomy. Furthermore, the clarity with which he expressed his ideas set the standard for those who came in his wake. The three volumes – which he updated twice – have been the basis on which scientists have made myriad discoveries of their own, thus shaping our world today. And they simply wouldn’t have been written if it hadn’t been for a bet that Newton himself didn’t even take part in.
It’s also intriguing to note that, given the extraordinary scope of Principia and its roots in Halley’s visit to Newton, nowhere in the pages of the first edition will you find a solution to the problem posed in the Grecian wager. Newton delivers the maths that shows that a planet is subject to the inverse-square force as set out in the bet, but not the maths that describes the ellipsis itself. The author merely states that one follows from the other. Newton later made the claim that he had left out the solution to the problem simply because it was ‘very obvious’. If you’re a genius, that’s the kind of excuse you can get away with.
A naturalist turns down an offer from Captain Cook
One of humanity’s most important scientific breakthroughs came about as a result of an invitation to go on a voyage, an offer that was accepted (see Captain Robert FitzRoy is in need of a dinner companion). However, it’s also true that one of the most important medical breakthroughs in history only came about because an invitation to go on another great voyage was turned down.
Edward Jenner was a 23-year-old surgeon when he was asked to join Captain James Cook’s second voyage of discovery in 1772. He had worked on material brought back by Cook from his first voyage and was an obvious choice of naturalist to accompany the gr
eat explorer on his next journey. This was supposed to settle the argument once and for all as to whether a vast southern land mass – Terra Australis – existed or not. It was a great honour to be asked to take part in such a major expedition, especially one led by such a renowned figure. Along with medicine, natural history was Jenner’s abiding passion, and the voyage was the sort of opportunity that would not only expose him to an exciting array of flora and fauna, but it might also make his name. After agonising over his decision, Jenner opted to eschew life as a full-time naturalist to concentrate on making his career in medicine. ‘I will decline Captain Cook’s offer,’ he declared to his tutor and friend John Hunter. ‘When I was 13 I chose to be a surgeon, and a surgeon I’ll remain.’
He settled down in Berkeley, the small Gloucestershire town where, in 1749, he had entered the world. He was a vicar’s son, the penultimate of nine children, and had begun his career in medicine at the age of 14 – a year after his decision to become a surgeon – when he started his seven-year apprenticeship to a surgeon called Daniel Ludlow in the market town of Chipping Sodbury. This was followed by a couple of years of further training at St George’s Hospital in London. It was here that he came under the tutelage of John Hunter, a surgeon whose radical medical researches led him to carry out pioneering work in the realm of tooth transplants and venereal diseases.
As Berkeley’s resident doctor, Jenner protected the town’s inhabitants from the deadly smallpox virus – which killed about one in three of those who caught it and left horribly scarred those who survived – by practising something called variolation. This involved introducing a very small amount of smallpox-infected material into a patient (usually via a superficial scratch) so that they contracted the disease in a mild enough form to survive it. Once they had recovered, they were henceforth inoculated. It was a technique introduced to Britain from Turkey in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and had been used for hundreds of years in China, Sudan and other countries. Closer to home, a survey conducted in 1791 on the island of Easdale, one of the Slate Islands off the west coast of Scotland, found that the community had freed itself of smallpox by employing just such a system of inoculation. However, there was always a danger that too much of the smallpox virus was given to a patient, leading to death or disfigurement.
