Ada's Algorithm

by James Essinger

  Secondly, Babbage is talking in the first paragraph about the need to leave behind and forget all his problems and to focus on the Enchantress of Number, which he depicts as a transforming influence in his life. It surely seems more likely that by that transforming influence he means Ada rather than the Analytical Engine, on which by then he had been working for about ten years.

  It also might reasonably be asked why, if Babbage was referring metaphorically to the Analytical Engine, there would be any need for him to describe it as feminine. Also, the Analytical Engine was not completed by 1843 (and indeed was never completed by the end of Babbage’s life), so why would Babbage personify the Analytical Engine as the ‘Enchantress of Number’ when it did not even exist? Furthermore, even though it’s true that Babbage continued to work on the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine until the end of his life, by 1843 – which was after all subsequent to his disastrous meeting with Sir Robert Peel – it seems likely that he had abandoned any realistic expectations of getting the Analytical Engine built within a short period of time, or indeed at all. This being so, why would he be thinking that he and Ada would want to spend time discussing the Analytical Engine?

  Thirdly, the very fact that in the third paragraph of the letter, Babbage refers to various mathematical books, suggests that he and Ada are planning to talk about books, rather than about the Analytical Engine.

  Finally, and possibly decisively, Babbage did refer to Ada as an enchantress on at least one verifiable occasion, and indeed on the same day he wrote the letter to Ada above: when he wrote to Michael Faraday, he described Ada as an ‘enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it.’

  Surely these four points add up to fairly conclusive evidence that Babbage most likely did mean Ada by the phrase ‘Enchantress of Number’?

  The letter also makes clear implicitly that Ada had taken very well indeed her rebuff from Babbage when he rejected her sensitive and thoughtful offer to help. Evidently, Babbage’s rejection had not dented her resolve to help the gestation of the Analytical Engine in any way she could as a ‘fairy.’ She was not serving mere mortals but the Enchantress herself. No wonder Babbage signed off warmly to the only one in the world who gave him unconditional help, despite all, and who saw the significance of what he was trying to achieve.

  Apart from Ada, there was another person in the nineteenth century who grasped, in its technical detail at least, the exceptional value of Babbage’s work. Federico Luigi Menabrea was a professor of engineering at the University of Turin when he wrote his essay on Babbage that Ada translated. Originally an army engineer before he became a professor, he would become involved in politics in the mid-1840s and enter the Italian cabinet in 1861 as navy minister.

  Menabrea’s rise to prominence at that time may well have been an important factor for Babbage to publish his memoir Passages from the Life of a Philosopher in 1864. Menabrea’s name was now commonly known in Britain’s government circles. However, whatever the demands of the Italian navy, the fiendishly complicated cogwheels of Italian unification now absorbed Menabrea (who was to become Italian prime minister a few years later, in 1867). There was little he could do personally – even if he had remembered his essay and wanted to use his position to advance Babbage’s now somewhat stale project.

  Thus the year 1864 was marked in the United Kingdom by the publication of Babbage’s Passages and also by a biting satire of the engine together with a portrait of Babbage’s odd, self-aggrandising pettiness in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round, showing the inventor to be relentlessly bullied by his neighbours who knew they could get a rise out of him simply by making noise in front of his house:

  Some of Mr Babbage’s neighbours have derived great pleasure from inviting musicians of various tastes and countries to play opposite his house, with the view of ascertaining whether there are not some kinds of instruments which he might approve; but their best efforts have had no other effect than to bring the philosopher out into the street in search of a policeman.

  What a misfortune it is to a man to have no taste for music! There goes Mr Babbage in search of an officer of the law followed by a crowd of young children, urged on by their parents and backed at a judicious distance by a set of vagabonds shouting forth uncomplimentary epithets, and making ridiculous rhymes on his name. When he turns round to survey his illustrious tail, it stops; if he moves towards it, it recedes; but, the instant he turns, the shouting and the abuse are resumed. In one case there were above a hundred persons, consisting of men, women, and boys, who followed him through the streets before he could find a policeman …

  A foolish young fellow purchased a wind instrument with a hole in it, with which he made discordant noises for the purpose of annoying him. A workman inhabiting an attic which overlooked his garden, blew a penny whistle out of his window every day for half an hour. When Mr Babbage took measures to put a stop to these proceedings he was threatened with vengeance. One correspondent kindly volunteered to do him a serious bodily injury, while a third, in a personal communication, intimated his intention of burning the house down with Mr Babbage in it. The smaller evils of dead cats thrown down his area, of windows from time to time purposely broken, or of occasional blows on the head from stones projected by unseen hands, Mr Babbage will not condescend to speak.

  All these things are trifles compared to being awakened at one o’clock in the morning (just as he has fallen asleep after a painful surgical operation) by the crash of a brass band. On a careful retrospect of the last dozen years of his life, Mr Babbage arrives at the conclusion that one-fourth part of his working power has been destroyed by street music which he regards as a twenty-five per cent income-tax on his brain, levied by permission of the government, and squandered among the most worthless classes. During eighty days he registered one hundred and sixty-five instances when he went out to put a stop to the nuisance. In several of these instances his whole day’s work was lost, for they frequently occurred when he was giving instructions to his workmen relative to some parts of his analytical engine.

  At the end of his life, Babbage truly had become the caricature of a mad scientist – even to his friend Dickens.

  17

  A Horrible Death

  After 1843, the most intellectually exciting year of Ada’s life, she continued (not always explicably) to be friends with Babbage and to have quite a busy social life among the higher echelons of Victorian intellectual society; her friends included Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday and many other literary and scientific luminaries of the age.

  Her mother was also busy with her social life and her various health preoccupations. It is possible that Ada met Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s former lover, who was travelling with her new husband, the Marquis of Boissy, and spent some time in London with him. The Marquis had pursued Teresa ardently before she succumbed to him, and he was always deeply proud that she had been Byron’s lover. Boissy liked to introduce Teresa to people as ‘Madame la Marquise de Boissy, autrefois la Maitresse de Milord Byron’ (Madam the Marchioness of Boissy, formerly the mistress of Lord Byron).

  Teresa evidently liked London and visited there on more than one occasion; she was interested in science and attended at least one lecture, in 1845, given by the well-known scientific populariser Dionysius Lardner (whose lectures Ada herself had attended avidly ten years earlier to understand the Difference Engine). The actor William Macready, who was probably the person who introduced Babbage to Dickens and vice versa, wrote in his diary on June 18, 1835, that he had gone to Dr Lardner’s house and met, among other people, Teresa Guiccioli.

  Ada wrote two letters to Babbage in 1844, asking him what to do about someone Ada seems to have called ‘Countess Italia-Italia,’ though the transcription is hard to be sure about.

  Much of Ada’s life during her last years is inadequately documented. It is k
nown that she became interested in the late 1840s in horse racing, and became quite addicted to this pursuit. She apparently lost large sums of money on gambling on horses at the beginning of 1850, as slips of paper with tips addressed to her maid can be found among her papers. According to her son Ralph, she lost about £3200, a vast sum at the time, and it is not clear how Ada paid it. She suffered almost continual money problems in the last few years of her life. William could not help her much as he himself had times when he was short of cash and was in any case parsimonious, and Lady Byron, while on occasion generous to Ada and in possession of a vast fortune, did not regularly help her financially.

  There have been some efforts to investigate whether she might have been trying to develop, perhaps with Babbage’s help, some kind of mathematical system for betting on horses. These efforts are spurred on by Ada and Babbage mentioning a ‘book’ (it is not known what kind of book they mean) in letters in 1848 and 1849. It has been speculated that the word referred to a book, a term used in horse racing. But it is more likely that it referred to a book that they perhaps planned to write together to continue their cooperation over the Notes.

  On September 7, 1850, not long before her death, Ada finally visited Newstead Abbey for the first and last time in her life. She was travelling with her husband William in the north of England and visited the Abbey, as well as the popular novelists Edward Bulwer Lytton and Walter Scott, and the owners of a racehorse she had mentioned to Lady Byron. Ada and William’s host was Colonel Wildman, who had been busily restoring Newstead Abbey after having bought it from Lord Byron. Lady Byron had herself made a visit to Newstead Abbey, alone without Ada, in 1818, and had written a feeble poem about being there:

  I remember when beside the bed

  Which pillowed last that too reposeless head,

  I stood – so undesert’d looked the scene

  As there at eve its inhabitants had been.

  Struck by that thought, and rooted to the ground,

  Instinctively I listen’d, look’d around,

  Whilst banish’d passion rushed to claim again

  Its throne, all vacant in my breast till then.

  And pardon’d be the wish, when thus deceiv’d

  To perish, ere of hope again bereav’d!

  Ada, for her part, was profoundly moved by her own visit to Newstead Abbey. After she and William arrived, Colonel Wildman gave them a tour of the main chambers, and they were then shown to their rooms, which were above the old cloister, overlooking the Gothic fountain. Ada and William appear to have had separate rooms at Newstead.

  Ada’s initial response to Newstead Abbey was that Wildman had done an excellent job of the renovations and spent money such as ‘no Byron could have afforded,’ but that the place seemed bereft of the spirit of her father. On September 8, she wrote gloomily to her mother that she felt:

  [L]ow and melancholy. All is like death round one; & I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race. What is the good of living, when thus all passes away & leaves only cold stone behind it? There is no life here, but cold dreary death only … I am glad to see the home of my ancestors but I shall not be sorry to escape from the grave. I see my own future continuing visibly around me … I have not yet seen my father’s rooms. No one is here but the Hamilton Greys, & we are perfectly quiet, & just like Goody Two Shoes!

  Only I feel as if I had become a stone monument myself. I am petrifying fast.

  However, on September 10, when Ada went for a walk by herself in the grounds of the abbey, she wandered among places such as the Devil’s Wood, a thick, dark grove of trees overlooking one of the fishponds. Walking in the grounds, Ada was haunted by feelings about the father she had never seen. Colonel Wildman encountered her there in the grounds, and while it is not clear what she and Wildman spoke about, it appears that she told him much about her feelings about her father, his Cambridge friend.

  On this meeting, Julian Hawthorne recounts in the biography of his father Nathaniel a letter from his mother in which she describes what her landlady at Newstead had told her during their visit to Byron’s former home. Wildman had invited Ada to Newstead, expecting a ‘pleasant knowledgeable guest’ and he had read up on his classics and mathematics to be well prepared for his well-read guest. Instead the Ada who turned up was ‘not beautiful, and did not resemble her father at all,’ she was ‘extremely careless in her dress … very silent and gloomy.’ Feeling disenchanted with Ada after two days of her mostly answering yes and no to his questions, Colonel Wildman finally followed Ada into the garden and ‘accosted her with resolute sociability.’ Under his friendly attack, Ada’s sepulchral mood finally broke down. She explained why she was so glum, and for the rest of the visit she was indeed the delightful guest he had hoped for.

  The experience Ada had at Newstead Abbey led to a rift between Ada and Lady Byron that probably never completely healed. Ada had received money before the trip from her, on this rare occasion, munificent mother. But neither she nor William were subsequently able to conceal the emotional closeness she had felt to her father while at Newstead, and Lady Byron became convinced that Ada was now taking the long-dead Byron’s side against hers, Lady Byron’s, which it appears Ada was indeed doing. There is evidence that after visiting Newstead Abbey, Ada was never again as close to her mother as she had been before going there.

  Her friendship with Babbage continued to be an important part of her life and his. In an undated letter Babbage sent her that was most likely written in 1851, Babbage even felt able to confide in Ada, rather self-pityingly but also movingly, about his loneliness. At the time, it was usual for wives whose husbands had left the marital home to place advertisements in newspapers offering forgiveness and reconciliation if the husbands would come home. In those days before the telephone and long before the internet, this was just about the only technique available to communicate to the ‘wandering lords,’ as Babbage described them. The husbands were, naturally, not referred to in the advertisements by their names but by initials.

  Babbage, seeing some of these advertisements one day, was seized with a consciousness of his own loneliness.

  My dear Lady Lovelace

  I sat last night reading the advertisements of deserted wifes to charm back their wandering lords.

  I am not a wanderer though I had none to charm me …

  Another glimpse of how he feels inwardly is provided by Babbage including on the title page of his autobiography the lines ‘I’m a philosopher. Confound them all! / Birds, beasts and men; but – no, not womankind’ which appear in Byron’s long poem Don Juan.

  The lines are at the start of Canto Six, stanza 22, but Babbage has misquoted the passage, which actually reads as ‘I’m a philosopher; confound them all – / Bills, beasts and men; and – no, not womankind!’

  But even though Babbage thought Byron had written ‘birds’ when he meant ‘bills’ (logical enough things for Byron to object to), the emphasis on a belief in womankind being the salvation is what really matters here, and Babbage obviously shares this belief.

  Here, as in the reference to the wandering lords and in the letter where he may be describing Ada as the Enchantress of Number, we encounter sudden depths opening up that give us peeks into the deeply feeling and even romantic man who seems much of the rest of the time to have kept this aspect of his personality in check.

  The misquotation may be due to Babbage confusing the lines in Don Juan with an extract from Byron’s poem Darkness, which reads:

  … and kept

  The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay.

  Did Babbage and Ada ever read Byron’s poetry together? It is a tantalising idea, but there is no record that they did. What they did most likely do is have many walks together discussing subjects that surely included mathematics, philosophy, Babbage’s engines and – perhaps – poetry. Part of the terrace at Ada’s country home Ashley in Somerset became known as ‘Philosopher’s Walk,’ as it was there that Ada and Babbage were reputed to have walked whil
e having their discussions.

  By the summer of 1851, Ada’s health was beginning to take a serious turn for the worse. She had never been very strong during her life, and the mid to late 1840s had been a period for her of intermittent illness, and she often suffered from nervous exhaustion and general debilitation almost as a matter of course. By the summer of 1851, however, Ada began to suffer from the first signs of uterine cancer. This initially manifested itself in frequent bleeding which, to start with, was painless. Ada knew she was not well, but at first she remained optimistic. On July 24, 1851, she wrote to her husband William:

  Now as to my health: I do not agree with you that the progress is slow. When we consider that I have not been quite 2 months under treatment, for a most serious complaint which had existed (more or less) for upward of a year, – I think we cannot call the present state other than very satisfactory. Not only is there an improvement in nerves & in general health which is obvious to everyone, & is most of all felt & known to myself – but the local condition is no longer vicious. Dr Locock explained to me yesterday how threatening & how morbid it had been.

  He said that tho’ now there is still an extense deep seated sore, yet it is a healthy sore.

  Within a month she started feeling less positive about things (the ‘healthy sore’ would turn out to be malignant), as in this letter she wrote again to her mother on Saturday, August 16, 1851:

  By the bye, Dr Cape said last time, that my complaint, such as it was, must have injured my mind, & greatly impaired its power & its clearness; because that for months previous, there had been as it were a continuous current drawn off from the Brain. I often feel great confusion & difficulty in concentrating my ideas; & also if I could only perceive one idea at a time. At other times I felt also as if I were dulled & indifferent.