Yours most sincerely,
Ada Lovelace
When Babbage replied on November 29, 1839, he responds, perhaps playfully, to his ‘fairy.’
Dear Lady Lovelace
I make no most ungrateful returns for your kind letter from London. I have lately been ever more than usually occupied by the Engine.
I allowed myself ten days in Cheshire and finding this did not do I was obliged to go to Brighton for five days which restored me to the calculating state and have been working very hard ever since.
I have just arrived at an improvement which will throw back all my drawings full six months unless I succeed in carrying out some new views which may shorten the labour.
I have now commenced the description of the Engine so that I am fully occupied.
I think your taste for mathematics is so decided that it ought not to be checked. I have been making enquiry but cannot find at present any one at all to recommend to assist you. I will however not forget the search.
The London World is very quiet at present. Mrs De Morgan has just added a new philosopher to its population and Mr Sheridan Knowles has written a most popular play called ‘Love’ to which I have been a frequent attendant. I met the author yesterday at a dinner at Mr Rogers.’
I could not by possibility have visited you this year in the West, but I cherish the hope of getting a few days at Ockham when I can indulge in a little recreation.
Pray forgive my epistolary negligence and believe me with best regards to Lord Lovelace.
Ever very sincerely yours.
C Babbage
Knowles’s play concerns a countess who is in love with her serf called Huon but her father the duke is opposed to this marriage. Was it intended as an allusion to Babbage’s true feelings, and did Ada read it that way?
Alas, most likely we will never know. But as so often happens while looking at the hard evidence available for telling the nonfiction story of Ada and Babbage, it’s clear that far more was going on, and far more was being felt, than the surviving documentary material, which is all we have to go on, could possibly reveal.
Lady Byron certainly thought so. Soon after Ada married, her mother wrote to her: ‘But has Babbage cut you since your marriage?’
In any event, Babbage didn’t cut Ada or her husband, but remained as fond of Ada after her marriage as he was before it.
* The exact date of the death of his daughter, Georgiana, isn’t found in Anthony Hyman’s standard biography of Babbage; Hyman just gives the year 1834. But Anne Christensen, researching the details of Georgiana’s death for this book, found a reference to it in the London newspaper The Standard for September 30, 1834. (Admittedly, Hyman did not have the advantage of access to on-line newspaper archives.)
1. The bridge at Bifrons that Ada almost certainly walked over when she stayed at Bifrons as a girl.
(Photograph: Alan Atkinson)
2. Patrixbourne in 1917.
3. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron.
4. Ada Byron, after a miniature.
5. Mary Somerville, 1834.
(Thomas Phillips)
6. Woodcut of the demonstration piece for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 1. The piece shown, assembled in 1832, is one-seventh of the calculating section of whole machine.
7. Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, Science Museum, London. Designed 1847–49, completed 2002. Built to the original designs, the Engine consists of 8,000 parts, weighs 5 tonnes and measures 11 feet long and 7 feet high.
(Photograph: Doron Swade)
8. Doron Swade, 2008, Library of the Computer History Museum, California. Studying one of the manufacturing drawings for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2., Swade masterminded the construction of Difference Engine No. 2, the first complete Babbage engine built in its entirety.
(Photograph: Doron Swade)
9. Ada Lovelace, 1838.
(A. E. Chaton, RA)
10. Augustus de Morgan.
11. Charles Dickens.
12. Luigi Federico Menabrea.
13. Col. Thomas Wildman, 1831.
(Thomas Lawrence)
13
The Jacquard Loom
Ada received Babbage’s letter about seeing the play Love in December 1839. Whatever she felt exactly about Babbage, in the same month she would write another letter that would have important consequences for their work together.
The year 1839 was not a good one for England. With riots happening almost every day in the countryside and towns over high food prices and low wages, many feared that England was in danger of sliding into anarchy. By modern standards, the vast majority of people in Britain were poor; suffering routinely from malnutrition, and illness. The small proportion of the population who were well-fed and privileged slept uneasily in their comfortable beds, only too aware of what happened in France a few decades ago.
So here we are on a December day at Number One Dorset Street, Babbage’s London home. The man himself, forty-seven years old, is sitting at his writing desk in his study. He takes out his pen, dips it into an inkwell, and starts to write a letter to a Parisian friend.
The particular friend Babbage is writing to is the French astronomer and scientist, François Jean Dominique Arago. Babbage got to know Arago in Paris back in 1819 when he travelled there with John Herschel. Babbage and Arago hit it off at once and had remained friends ever since. When Babbage corresponds with Arago he does so in English, while Arago replies in French. They both understand each other’s native languages, but prefer to express themselves in their own.
‘My dear sir,’ Babbage writes:
I am going to ask you to do me a favour.
There has arrived lately in London … a work which does the highest credit to the arts of your country. It is a piece of silk in which is woven by means of the Jacard [sic] loom a portrait of M. Jacard sitting in his workshop. It was executed in Lyons as a tribute to the memory of the discoverer of a most admirable contrivance which at once gave an almost boundless extent to the art of weaving.
It is not probable that that copy will be seen as much as it deserves and my first request is, if it can be purchased, that you will do me the favour to procure for me two copies and send them to Mr Henry Bulwer at the English Embassy who will forward them. If, as I fear, this beautiful production is not sold, then I rely on your friendship to procure for me one copy by representing in the proper quarter the circumstance which makes me anxious to possess it.
The portrait of Jacquard was indeed fascinating as it was essentially a digitised image. Made using 24,000 punched cards, it wove an image of the inventor of the loom on which it was woven. Babbage had become fascinated by the Jacquard loom and he sensed the importance of the portrait in relation to his own work. Also, back in 1836 he had noted briefly in one of his notebooks that the Jacquard loom punched cards – or rather, cards very much like them – could be utilised to act as a way of – as Babbage expressed it – making the Analytical Engine ‘special,’ by which he meant making it ready to carry out a particular calculation. This terminology of making his machine ‘special’ was the closest Babbage got to describing the modern concept of programming a computer.
Babbage was so fascinated with the Jacquard loom and the portrait that in the same letter, he asked Arago to send ‘any memoir about it which may be published.’ Clearly, no information was available to him as yet, as he continued the misspelling of ‘M. Jacard.’ Money was no object to Babbage, so keen was he to get what he wanted. Although he was misspelling Jacquard’s name, he had no misapprehension about the revolution the Jacquard loom had created in the story of technology. As Babbage wrote:
Whatever these things may cost, if you will mention to me the name of your banker in Paris I will gladly pay the amount into his hands and shall still be indebted to you for procuring for me objects of very great interest.
Babbage’s letter then proceeds to the hub of the matter. The Englishman explains exactly why he is so fascinated
by the Frenchman’s work.
You are aware that the system of cards which Jacard [sic] invented are the means by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to weave any pattern that may be desired. Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated. But I have also advanced one stage further and without making all the cards, I have communicated through the same means orders to follow certain laws in the use of those cards and thus the Calculating Engine can solve any equations, eliminate between any number of variables and perform the highest operations of analysis.
Among Babbage’s many contributions to the birth of information technology, the most significant was that he spotted a way to adapt Jacquard’s punched-card programming to a completely new purpose: mathematical calculation.
At a technical level, Babbage really did borrow Jacquard’s idea lock, stock and barrel. Babbage saw that just as Jacquard’s loom employed punched cards to control the action of small, narrow, circular metal rods which in turn governed the action of individual warp threads, he himself could use the same principle to control the positions of small, narrow, circular metal rods that would govern the settings of cogwheels carrying out various functions in his calculating machine.
Ada was at this time still looking for a tutor. In the summer of 1840, Lady Byron came to the rescue. She arranged for her daughter to be instructed by the well-known mathematician and logistician Augustus De Morgan, another Trinity graduate from Cambridge and friend of Babbage’s. Under his guidance, Ada made rapid progress in studying her favourite subject. For the first time in her life she seems to have felt some real intellectual fulfilment. She was relentless in her questions to him. In fact when she fell ill, De Morgan wrote with great concern to Lady Byron that Ada’s constitution might be temperamentally unsuited to mathematics. The formidable Lady Byron, as well as Lord Lovelace, seem to have promptly disabused De Morgan of that notion. As Lady Byron wrote:
I have received your note and should have answered no further than that I was very glad to find my apprehension … is unfounded in the opinion of yourself and Lord Lovelace who must be better than I am.
But Augustus De Morgan didn’t want to let it go and wrote ‘at the same time it is very necessary that the one point should be properly stated.’ More specifically he was the expert in one thing. He pointed out politely that they knew Ada ‘on every point of the case but one, and may be on that one.’ Here lay his deep worry: Ada’s voracious attack on his subject. She was not satisfied with merely taking lady-like instruction from De Morgan, she questioned him widely, well beyond what he put on her plate and he anxiously avoided encouraging her in this. As he wrote to Lady Byron:
I have never expressed to Lady Lovelace my opinion of her as a student of these matters. I always feared that it might promote an application to them which might be injurious to a person whose bodily health is not strong. I have therefore contented myself with very good, quite right, and so on. But I feel bound to tell you that the power of thinking on these matters which Lady L. has always shown from the beginning of my correspondence with her, has been something so utterly out of the common way for any beginner, man or woman, that this power must be duly considered by her friends with reference to the question whether they should urge or check her obvious determination to try not only to reach but to get beyond, the present bound of knowledge.
Putting his point more De Morgan rated Ada’s performance as if she was a Trinity student. He asserted that Ada was unlikely to have gained the top first in her first year at Cambridge (called the senior wrangler).
Had any young beginner, about to go to Cambridge, shown the same power [as Ada] I should have prophesied first that his aptitude at grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles would have very much lowered his chance of being senior wrangler; secondly, that they would have certainly made him an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of firstrate eminence.
It was the point that followed hereafter that really carried the nub of De Morgan’s concern. It reads now as unadulterated misogyny, but its sentiment was accepted by most if not all at the time: the concern he really had was that the foundations of science and mathematics should remain out of bounds for women.
De Morgan wrote this despite the fact that his own wife Sophia Frend De Morgan had been extremely well educated by her father, the former Cambridge don William Frend (Ada and Lady Byron’s tutor) and was a social reformer – education for women, opposition to vivisection, assistance of ‘gutter children’ – as well as a journalist and children’s writer.
The questions Ada was asking De Morgan were, he believed, simply not appropriate for any woman in the world to ask, not even Mary Somerville – on whose work a recent book of his relied. He might, he wrote, allow one exception (but not really): the mathematician Maria Agnesi. Maria was the author of a huge two-volume work on mathematics in 1748 that earned her a professorship at the University of Bologna by appointment of Pope Benedict XIV, and she is today credited as the first female mathematician. What worried De Morgan hard and deep was the fact that Ada thought like a man. As De Morgan wrote:
All women who have published mathematics hitherto have shown knowledge, and the power of getting it, but no one, except perhaps (I speak doubtfully) Maria Agnesi has wrestled with difficulties and shown a man’s strength in getting over them. The reason is obvious: the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application. Lady L has unquestionably as much power as would require all the strength of a man’s constitution to bear the fatigue of thought to which it will unquestionably lead her … Perhaps you think that Lady L. will, like Mrs. Somerville, go on in a course of regulated study, duly mixed with the enjoyment of society, the ordinary cares of life, &c., &c. But Mrs. Somerville’s mind never led her into other than the details of mathematical work; Lady L will take quite a different route. It makes me smile to think of Mrs. Somerville’s quiet acquiescence in ignorance of the nature of force … “and that is all we know about the matter” – and to imagine Lady L. reading this, much less writing it. Having now I think. quite explained that you must consider Lady L’s case as a peculiar one I will leave it to your better judgment, supplied with facts, only begging that this note may be confidential.
To their credit, Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace must have been unimpressed. Ada’s studies continued.
On January 24, 1840, Babbage received a reply, in French, to the letter he’d written to his friend Arago, who wrote back amicably and helpfully:
My dear friend and colleague
I fear that the person from Lyons of whom I have made enquiries for information about the Jacquard portrait must be out of town. I haven’t had any answer to my queries … Please be assured that I will completely fulfil, con amore, the commission with which you have charged me. I do not want you to have the slightest reason to doubt the high esteem in which I hold your talents and your character, nor the importance I attach to our friendship.
Your devoted friend Jean Arago.
Arago was as good as his word. He stuck to the task, and by the spring appears to have been successful in obtaining at least one of the woven portraits that Babbage longed to own.
Driven on by curiosity and admiration, Babbage made a personal pilgrimage to Lyons later that year, while travelling on the Continent to see Jacquard’s loom in action.
Buried in the Babbage papers at the British Museum there is an invoice, dated September 8, 1840, issued by the French Society for the Manufacture of Fabrics for the Furnishing and Decoration of Churches. This relates to the purchase of a ‘tableau’ (that is, the woven portrait) of Jacquard produced by the Lyons firm of Didier Petit & Co. The invoice is made out to ‘Monsieur Babbage.’ It is quite clear that Babbage kept it as a record of having purchased the woven portrait and of how much it cost him. The invoice is for 200 francs. The daily average wag
e of an artisan in 1840 was about four francs, one-fiftieth of what Babbage paid for the portrait. Today in France, the average daily wage of a workman would be about £100, so while certainly we need to take into account rises in living standards since 1840, it is still perhaps reasonable to assume that Babbage paid about £5,000 at modern prices for his woven portrait of Monsieur Jacquard, the great inventor.
It is natural to assume that the invoice in Babbage’s papers relates to the woven portrait of Jacquard that Babbage obtained through Arago, and which he put on show at his soirées. But in fact this was not the case. Instead, the invoice turns out to be for a second portrait of Jacquard that Babbage obtained while visiting Lyons. The Lyons silk industry had sprung up there partly because of the city’s proximity to Italy, and now Babbage was exploiting that very fact to combine his excursion to Turin with a stop in Lyons.
There, he bought a second woven portrait of Jacquard (Babbage already possessed the one he had procured via Arago), and it is this second woven portrait to which the invoice relates. When Babbage was subsequently in Turin, he made a gift of the Jacquard portrait he had bought in Lyons to the Queen of Piedmont and Sardinia. Her brother Leopold II, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, had been friendly and hospitable to Babbage when Babbage visited Italy during his European tour, which had been made to console himself over the death, in childbirth, of his beloved wife Georgiana in 1827.
In June or July 1840, Babbage was invited at fairly short notice by the Italian mathematician Giovanni Plana to attend a meeting of Italian scientists scheduled to take place in September in Turin, the city Ada and Lady Byron had visited during Ada’s continental tour. Babbage had been invited to a similar meeting the previous year but had declined, pleading that he was too busy with his work on the Analytical Engine. This time he accepted. Very likely he did so because of the extraordinary insight into the importance of the Analytical Engine shown by Plana in his letter of invitation. It was on this visit to Turin in the summer of 1840 that Babbage stopped in Lyons, where he spent some time watching a Jacquard portrait being woven and, as we’ve seen, bought another copy of the portrait and gifted it to a queen.
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