Four days later, however, Ada already backtracked and sent her mother a brief additional letter which contains these particularly illuminating lines:
You know I always must sermonise a little when I write to you. –
Like mother, like daughter. Ada could indeed be partial to sermonising, just as Lady Byron was.
7
Silken Threads
On June 5, 1833, London high society consisted of barely five thousand people, many of whom were related to one another by marriage or infidelity. They had substantial capital in the bank, enjoyed the best food and drink then available, mostly didn’t need to work and were waited on by a small army of servants for whom servility was an essential professional skill. Leisured society was a constant round of big lunches, frenetic amorous liaisons, leisurely afternoons and glittering soirées.
The million or so people who comprised the rest of London’s population, like the vast majority of Britons at the time, scraped by on a diet rarely much above starvation level, and did their best to snatch such grimy slivers of happiness and scraps of life as they could.
Fashionable society’s London was the comparatively small area of the capital that stretched southwards from Marylebone Road in the north to the River Thames in the south. Charles Babbage, the mathematician who was to become very important in Ada’s life, lived at number one Dorset Street, near Manchester Square, and dwelled only a few hundred yards inside that unmarked but comprehensively recognised northern boundary.
The aristocracy and the ordinary people were like different species. A commoner might rarely be elevated to nobility by acquiring great wealth or political influence, but the easiest way into the aristocracy – then as now – was through marriage. Most aristocrats married other ones, but occasionally a commoner might get lucky, just as sometimes happens today.
Many aristocrats had gained their fortune by inheritances that usually dated back to land taken by the invading Normans after 1066 from Britain’s Anglo-Saxons.
Three decades into the nineteenth century, social conventions of British life seemed, on the surface, to be stronger than ever. But in truth Britain was changing fast. One of the biggest causes of change was the enormous impact of machine technology that so fascinated Ada. In 1829, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle had written an essay that, by 1833, was famous. The essay, ‘Signs of the Times,’ elaborated on how Carlyle thought the epoch in which he found himself should be seen:
Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends … On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster … For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances … We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
In 1833, few would have disagreed with any of this, least of all Ada or her future friend Charles Babbage. Yet Carlyle could have said even more. It was not only that the machinery revolution was changing how goods were made and how things were done. Even more important, the revolution also helped to liberate people’s imaginations about how things might be done, and allowed creative thinkers to speculate on exciting possibilities for using one type of new mechanical technology in conjunction with another, or with several others, to imagine new uses that were not yet technologically possible. This was precisely the kind of thinking in which Ada excelled; indeed, she would arguably become one of the most innovative thinkers in this respect of her epoch.
As for the spirits of self-analysis and self-appreciation that had so thoroughly infused Carlyle’s essay, these were rife in a Britain that in 1815 had emerged from twenty years of war with France as the world’s richest economy, the most powerful nation in the world militarily and its self-appointed leader.
The man who had ruled this confident and energetic land since June 1830 was King William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, third son of the famously mad King George III. William, sixty-seven years old in 1833, was an avuncular, self-deprecating, rather comic, silvery-haired fellow, and the oldest person ever to have ascended the British throne. His record still stands today.
The Prime Minister was Lord Grey. His Whig party had convincingly won the first General Election held after the broadening of the electorate. Following the passage of the Reform Act in 1832, new constituencies were created to accommodate the burgeoning urban middle classes while tiny, barely inhabited constituencies known, appropriately enough, as ‘rotten boroughs’ were scrapped.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the fraction of the British population entitled to vote had grown more and more awkwardly at odds with how Britain was developing as a rapidly urbanising nation. In 1831, for example, just 4,500 people in Scotland out of a total of 2.6 million people were entitled to vote. In Britain in its entirety – which in the 1831 Census was recorded as having a population of 13.1 million – the electorate was only about 3 per cent of adult males.
But even after the passage of the Reform Act, there was a wealth qualification attached to the right to vote and the vast majority of men were still excluded from voting by it. Women were regarded as inherently undeserving of the suffrage. Princess Victoria, the daughter of William IV’s younger brother, was the heir to the throne and looked set to become queen before long, but women were otherwise dismissed in political life. Ada would never have Babbage’s opportunities in a world where women were regarded as providers of pleasure and babies.
With the 1832 Reform Act in the statute book, Britain’s ruling class felt the danger of revolution to be past. Those with money and health could relax; this was a good time to be British.
The British domestic economy had been growing fast over the past few decades, fuelled by the demands of the increasingly prosperous and populous middle class who wanted good clothes, quality furniture, fine cutlery and excellent ornaments. Yet what had really made Britain the world’s richest country was the immense success of British exports. No other country in the world controlled such vast overseas markets.
The expanding British Empire played a hugely important role in Britain’s surging prosperity. It was the largest the world had ever seen – the Roman Empire had been quite small by comparison – and the British Empire was still growing. By 1833, as well as including the entire British Isles (Ireland was part of Britain then), the Empire already consisted of Canada, India, New South Wales, Jamaica, British Honduras, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad, British Guiana, Gibraltar, Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Cape colony at the southern tip of Africa, various other small possessions and, in the Far East, Penang and Malacca.
The Empire was the overseas legacy of the same British spirits of adventure and inventiveness that had caused so many changes back home. In the 1830s, the British liked to see it as having a reforming and civilising influence, governing people who were supposedly not fit to govern themselves. But at heart the Empire was a vast, efficient machine for making money for Britain, and the same Britons who liked to preach the Christian virtues had little compunction about plundering property, land and other wealth from the peoples they governed.
At home, the British textile industry was enjoying particularly phenomenal growth. It had hardly featured in the export figures back in 1750, yet by 1833 about one-half of all British exports were textiles. The expansion of the textile industry needed the coal and iron industries, and these three industries all forged forward in a dynamic symbiosis. Coal powered the steam engines that operated much of the machinery used in making textiles, wh
ile iron was used to build the machinery itself and was an important building material of the manufactories that housed it. Water power was still important, but the British towns that had expanded the most were the ones located near the coalfields, especially the vast reserves in the northeast of England.
Britain’s war with ‘rude nature’ that Carlyle observed was, in particular, sustained by the success of its textile industry. New textile industry machinery had played and was still playing the leading role in the growth of the British economy.
About a century earlier, in May 1733, an ingenious inventor, John Kay, was granted a patent for his ‘flying shuttle.’ This did not actually fly, but involved the shuttle being shot through a loom along wheels in a track. The weaver pulled a cord to operate the flying shuttle. Kay’s invention speeded up the weaving process enormously, dramatically increasingly yarn consumption, so much so that the flying shuttle spurred the invention of new machines that would spin yarn from cleaned and combed wool more rapidly than ever before.
The invention in 1764 by James Hargreaves of the spinning jenny (named after his daughter) was the first major breakthrough in textile machinery that comprehensively met this new challenge. The spinning jenny greatly increased the rate at which yarn could be spun, though the thread produced by Hargreaves’s machine was coarse and lacked strength, making it suitable only for use as weft: that is, the threads woven at right angles across a warp when making fabric.
In 1771, Richard Arkwright, a former barber who had become interested in textiles while carrying on a sideline as a wig-maker, patented his ‘water frame’ which produced a yarn of a superior quality to that yielded by the spinning jenny. Arkwright built factories employing hundreds of people.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton’s ‘spinning mule’ or ‘mule jenny’ combined the main benefit of the water frame (the quality of its yarn) with the speed of the spinning jenny. Since about 1790 most of the yarn-spinning machines in Britain had been Crompton’s mules. Meanwhile, Edward Cartwright in 1784 had invented the first steam-powered loom. By 1833, almost all the garments produced in Britain were woven on powered looms.
In 1833, the motive ingredient of all new discoveries was considered to be steam power. Charles Babbage yearned to build a calculating machine driven by steam; a teenage Ada imagined a steam-powered flying machine. Steam power was the wonder of the age, offering the ability to get machines to work more quickly and much more reliably than the traditional sources – man, horses and water.
The inventor who had made steam truly the motive force of the British Industrial Revolution was James Watt, a Scottish instrument-maker. He hadn’t invented the first steam engine: that honour went to Thomas Savery, who patented a cumbersome steam pump in 1698. But Watt’s engines were easily the best. His successful endeavour to correct the inefficiencies of earlier machines had attracted the attention of Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham-based industrialist who manufactured decorative items and engaged Watt to build him a steam engine.
Boulton, a sort of brusque self-parody of what industrialists were supposed to be like and frequently were like, quickly grasped that steam engine manufacture could itself be a highly successful commercial venture. In 1775, Watt and Boulton went into business together. Their collaboration made Watt rich and Boulton richer still. By 1800, Boulton and Watt’s factory in Birmingham had produced more than 500 steam engines. Boulton liked to take influential guests around his factory, boasting that he sold ‘what every man desires: POWER.’
In 1833, factories throughout Britain were equipped with their own rotary steam engines, whose revolving shafts were connected by a network of drive wheels, belts and pulleys to dozens of individual looms, spinning mules, spindle mills and other machines.
While very efficient and complicated in design, Britain’s machinery was relatively plain in its purpose. The truth was that by 1833, the most sophisticated, fully operational machine ever devised was not a British invention at all. Neighbouring France – for several centuries Britain’s arch-enemy but by then, a somewhat strained political ally – too, was having its own ‘industrial revolution.’ The very expression was the invention of a Frenchman, the diplomat Louis-Guillaume Otto, who on July 6, 1799, had written to a friend to say that ‘une revolution industrielle’ had started in France.
In 1833, the most ingenious and versatile textile machine in the world was a French silk-weaving loom developed in the early years of the nineteenth century by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a master silk-weaver from Lyons, and patented by him in 1804. It was this machine that fascinated Ada.
The Jacquard loom was a mind-boggling invention. It was used by weavers who wanted to weave luxurious silk fabrics that featured images, such as portraits, still lifes or even landscapes. These ‘figured’ fabrics were enormously popular and commanded the highest prices round the world.
The silk business in Lyons had been so successful that by the early nineteenth century, about 30,000 people in Lyons – an actual majority of the working population – earned their living from silk. Brawny workmen would load heavy wrapped silk fabrics into the backs of horse-drawn carts for transportation along the two great rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, on whose convergence the city is built. Prosperous merchants lingered over their glasses of absinthe at streetside cafés, boasting to their business rivals of the latest deal they had made with wealthy customers, who might easily include a member of Europe’s many royal families.
Before the Jacquard loom was introduced, figured fabrics could only be created painfully slowly (at the rate of about an inch of fabric woven per day) by two weavers. One worked the shuttle, the other (known as the ‘draw-boy,’ though it was usually men who were employed in this role rather than boys) was perched on a platform above the loom and worked hundreds of strings to govern which warp threads should be raised and lowered for a particular woven image.
The Jacquard loom transformed this cumbersome process by allowing just one weaver to create the images automatically, using a long chain of punched cards that controlled the complex configuration of the warp threads when an image was being woven into silk. It allowed a lone weaver to work about twenty-four times as fast as before and produce around two feet of finished figured fabric every day. Everyone was happy except the draw-boys, who, reputedly, ambushed Jacquard in Lyons and tossed him into the Rhône.
By 1833, the new loom was already well known in Britain. Ada’s imagination was set alight by the idea of any machine, like the Jacquard loom, that, once designed and built, could give humankind revolutionary control over processes that had previously either been impossible to control or else only in an haphazard, erratic way.
From Ada’s teenage years onwards, Ada’s relationship with her mother was mostly fraught, but mother and daughter usually found ways to restore the harmony between them. At heart, they were fond of each other despite being only too aware of each other’s faults. Of course, their shared fascination with science surely helped their reconciliations.
In any event, on the evening of Wednesday, June 5, 1833, Ada went out with her mother, the both of them evidently at peace again, to a party in fashionable London. There, Ada was fated to meet that evening the one person in Britain who understood her utterly fascinated interest in mechanical questions that had so exhausted her mother, a man who was driven in much the same way as she was. His name was Charles Babbage.
As a result of their elective affinity, seventeen-year-old Ada Byron’s insight into the future of calculation would erupt into a new and most radical kind of imagining, and would give her a vision of a kind of Jacquard loom that wove, not silk thread, but arithmetic and mathematics.
In other words: a computer.
8
When Ada Met Charles
We know about the first time Ada met Babbage from Lady Byron’s letter to a Dr William King two days later. As we’ve seen, one of her reasons for educating Ada was the belief that if Ada’s imagination was not checked, she would cause disaster to herself and to those around h
er, just as Ada’s father Lord Byron had done. Lady Byron believed that if Ada studied mathematics, her imagination would be rendered harmless. Lady Byron appears to have recruited King for Ada’s moral improvement, especially to try to keep in check any thoughts that Lady Byron regarded as wayward.
Born in 1786, King was a British physician, philanthropist, lunatic asylum manager and devout Evangelical Christian from Brighton. He is best known today as an early supporter of the Co-operative Movement, a programme of communitywide social movements designed to bring members (usually of poor communities) the benefits of clubbing together to buy goods and services at better prices. Lady Byron maintained a lively correspondence with him on a number of subjects, and on that day wrote two pages on current medical obsessions and about an investment she had decided to make.
In 1833, Ada was about to turn eighteen and Lady Byron could be reasonably pleased with her daughter’s progress to adulthood. On Friday, May 10, 1833, less than a month before Ada met Babbage, she had been presented at court, a ritual most daughters of prominent members of London society went through to mark their passage into womanhood. After her presentation at court, Ada could be invited to ‘society’ events and would also be regarded as marriageable to the right man, or we should perhaps say, to the right title. Lady Byron was adamant that when her daughter Ada married, it would be to an aristocrat and ideally one whose nobility was at least a hundred years old, for such titles were accorded a specially elevated status among mothers of Lady Byron’s calibre, determination and sense of rank.
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