* * *
* The atmospheric railway scheme drove carriages uphill at 25 mph by means of a series of magnificently designed pumping stations and traction piping. Speeds of as much as 45 mph were achieved on the stretch of line in West Croydon visited by Ada. Lady Byron was unimpressed. Her eventual rail portfolio of £67,000 in 1860 (worth about £3 million today) did not include shares in the atmospheric railway.
* Medora’s revelation chimed with suspicious neatness with a letter that Miss Montgomery had written to Annabella in 1823 from Genoa, where she learned from the gossipy Lady Blessington that some vindictive correspondent was slandering the reputation of Byron’s wife (LP). Miss Montgomery, Medora and Lady Byron were all living under the same roof in Paris; the echo of the conversation preceding Medora’s wild claim is almost audible.
* Probably by measuring the speed at which a ball rolled down a sloping tray, which is still a popular experiment with budding mathematicians.
* Photographed in his late sixties, Lord Lovelace could still proudly squeeze into the tightly fitting cavalry officer’s uniform that he had worn upon his wedding day.
* Ada’s kindness is too often overlooked. In 1840, she turned down a personal invitation to the queen’s birthday party, preferring to accompany a nervous former children’s governess to the East London docks. (Miss Boutell was making her first visit to the Continent.)
* Ada’s suggestion was less insulting than it appears to have sounded to a furious Medora. In France, dentistry was regarded as an art that conferred upon its practitioners a high degree of social status. The dentist whom Ada named was French.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MY FAIR INTERPRETRESS
(1843–4)
Charles Babbage was a busy man and, despite his truculent manner, he was a popular one. In February 1843, he received, according to his own calculations, thirteen invitations for every day of the month. Among them, one of the most charmingly insistent came from Ada Lovelace. Hester King (‘so happy that I can scarcely hold my pen’, wrote Hester to Robert and Louisa Noel) was about to be married to Sir George Crauford. The wedding was to be held at Ockham, with a honeymoon to follow at Ashley Combe. Lady Byron was staying and nobody would complete the party more perfectly, Ada pleaded, than their own dear Charles Babbage himself. Would he come for a week?
or if you really cannot (tho I am sure you can, if you will) stay so long, then pray come for the night even . . . we all much desire your presence. For although our party for the occasion is very small & quiet, Miss King & ourselves feel that your long friendship with all of us, with myself most particularly, makes you especially to be remembered & wished for. So pray consider this & that weddings do not happen twice.
Yours ever,
AAL
Ada Lovelace – although her accuracy in dating correspondence can never be trusted even to be within the right year – appears to have written to Babbage on 6 February 1843. The following day, Babbage noted that he met with the young countess under what he succinctly described as ‘new circumstances’. Those changed conditions, it is fair to guess, related to Ada’s recent translation and to Babbage’s proposal as to what she should do next.
Babbage had always been his own worst enemy, and it was a trait he demonstrated with peculiar force in 1842. Visiting England at the beginning of the year to attend the christening of Queen Victoria’s first son, the King of Prussia was eager to inspect English technology. Urgently invited to the Royal Society on 30 January for an especially arranged morning meeting with this potential royal sponsor for his unbuilt machine, Babbage failed to show up. Later that year, when Ada was doing her best to bring Babbage together with journalists and editors who might drum up interest in the Analytical Engine – just as Dionysius Lardner, back in 1834, had done for the Difference Engine in the Edinburgh Review – the capricious inventor once again stayed away.
Babbage’s excuse to Ada for not joining her on this occasion was that he needed to keep himself free for ‘a possible discussion with Sir R. Peel’. Babbage’s behaviour during his meetings with the overworked Tory prime minister proved disastrous. Instead of allowing Sir Robert time to consider whether he could offer financial support from the government for Babbage to start building his second machine (its estimated size was equivalent to a small steam engine), Babbage began to hector him. Back in 1822, Peel had personally recommended a government subsidy for developing the Difference Engine. In November 1842, after two encounters with a furious Babbage, Peel folded his hands and walked out. There would be no further discussions.
Meanwhile, Count Luigi Menabrea, a brilliant young military engineer who had attended the 1840 Turin conference (where he may have heard Babbage lecture and certainly examined drawings of the unbuilt Analytical Engine), had published in a Swiss journal a lucid account of its projected appearance, workings and capability. (The choice of a French publication was reasonable at a time when French was still the common language of scientific reports; Menabrea himself spoke French well enough to serve later as an ambassador to Paris.)
Menabrea’s account, covering twenty-three pages, appeared in the respected Bibliothéque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Richard Taylor, editor of a London journal specialising in academic articles from abroad, approached not Babbage but his diminutive and fiercely ambitious friend Charles Wheatstone, when seeking a translator for the Italian’s work. Charles Wheatstone took the commission straight to Ada. To Babbage, the result of that meeting came in February 1843 as a complete – and seemingly delightful – surprise.
For Ada, Charles Wheatstone’s timing was excellent. Her health had been bad during 1842 (Hester King’s letters to Robert Noel’s wife in Dresden mentioned that Ada was suffering from a new digestive problem, following several months of undefined respiratory difficulties ‘which caused us all a good deal of uneasiness’). Ada’s health had not been improved by the news that Medora, out of funds and reduced to borrowing from the servants whom Ada had innocently recruited, had done a bunk from her rented chateau in Toulon and gone to seek legal redress in Paris. (The haste of her departure was underlined by the shocking information that Miss Leigh had undertaken the journey on public transport without wearing a hat.)
A distraction both from illness and her troublesome half-sister was always welcome to Ada. It’s hard to imagine any diversion that could have appealed to her more vividly than the proposal which Charles Wheatstone placed before her at St James’s Square.
Eight years earlier, back in the autumn of 1834, Ada had been an excited witness to Babbage’s discussions with Mary Somerville of a new and entirely different form of machine to the old and uncompleted Difference Engine. Since then, as Ada’s friendship with Babbage progressed, she had often declared her hopes of helping to bring this later project to completion. Talking with Wheatstone, she agreed upon the urgent need to present Menabrea’s description of what was by then known as the Analytical Engine to an English audience. Taylor had issued an end of July deadline. What mattered now was that an impartial and informed report should be made accessible. Ada accepted the commission. By the end of November 1842, she had set to work.
Nineteenth-century scientific translation did not have to be precise. Mary Somerville, as Laplace cordially acknowledged, had gone beyond him in her interpretation of his own major work. Ada, translating Menabrea, was more cautious. Fluent herself in French, she produced a clear English version in which one slip (too much has since been made of a misread ‘cas’ for the ‘cos’ of a cosine) was notably overlooked by both Wheatstone and even Babbage himself. Those two brilliant men saw no flaw; what they did approvingly note was the clarity of Ada’s single footnoted adjustment to Menabrea’s text.*
It was Babbage, according to his own entertaining (but frequently unreliable) autobiography, who now proposed that Ada should put to further use her exceptional knowledge of his cherished project. Menabrea had described the components of the machine based upon what he had been shown in Turin, engraved on wooden b
locks and also in stereotyped plans, drawn by Babbage’s son. The Italian mathematician and engineer explained how these components would be deployed (with particular attention to the innovative use of instruction cards carrying – as Menabrea was the first to note in print – the equivalent of algebraic formulae). He also observed the considerable simplification of time-consuming intellectual labour that would result from the Engine’s operations. ‘[W]ho can foresee the consequences of such an invention?’ Menabrea asked in his conclusion. Ada’s challenge was to answer that question, above all by showing that Babbage’s embryonic Engine was more than just an improved calculating machine. The bounds of ‘mere arithmetic’ had now been overstepped, Ada would write in the ‘Notes’ that formed her extended commentary on Menabrea’s report:
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 . . .
A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.*
Reading those visionary words today, it’s hard to accept that they were written a hundred years before the birth of electronic computers as we know them today.
Composing her notes to Menabrea’s article over the early spring and summer of 1843, Ada Lovelace aimed to describe and demonstrate the importance of Babbage’s invention in clear language. As the best popular science writing still does, she used visual analogies to illustrate her points.
As a mathematician, Ada had reached a level high enough to describe Babbage’s machine and discuss it with the inventor. But it is not as a mathematician that we respect her. What is remarkable about Ada Lovelace’s published ‘Notes’ – the only completed scientific writing that she appears to have produced – is the evidence they provide that, through the combination of an intuitive intelligence and her awareness of the years of discussions and planning that lay behind the unbuilt Engine, a young Victorian woman glimpsed its significance for a world that was not yet ready either for it or for her.
The birth of the computer did not depend solely upon Lady Lovelace, but she unquestionably belongs to the history of that genesis. Armed with hindsight, we see how close Ada came to predicting not only the arrival of the universal computer, but the potential of technology to transform the way we function. Her perception would prove to be as suggestive and retrospectively influential as Mary Shelley’s dark vision, in 1816 (after a memorable night of storytelling in the company of Ada’s exiled father, out in a rainswept villa overlooking Lake Geneva), of the birth of bio-engineering.
Neither woman changed the world in which they lived. Uniquely, both Lovelace and Shelley foresaw the role that technology might have to play in transforming a world they never knew.
Armed with a six-month deadline (Richard Taylor required copy by the end of the summer of 1843), Ada set to work on writing up the ‘Notes’ soon after Hester’s February wedding. Reading through her translation of Menabrea, Ada identified seven points at which to add a series of her own notes (A to G) correcting or augmenting the Italian engineer’s skilful exposition. In note A – by which Babbage was so delighted that he implored her not to change a single word – Ada used Menabrea’s account of the Difference Engine’s limitations as a stepping stone to her own perception of what the unbuilt Analytical Engine might potentially be enabled to achieve.
Among the longest of Ada’s seven commentaries (it covers ten printed pages), Note A introduced the possibility that the Engine would act upon other things besides number. Music, a subject close to Ada’s heart, offered a striking example.
Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds to the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. [694]
How would the engine succeed in doing this? Menabrea had explained the method of using numerous punched cards that Babbage had adapted from Jacquard’s celebrated loom. Ada, while thoughtfully advising readers in a later note (C), to visit one of the two London Science Halls at which a Jacquard loom could be observed in action, used the analogy of mechanised picture-weaving to create one of her own most striking images, while pointing to the technical advance upon Babbage’s earlier machine. The Difference Engine used cards only to print off the results of its (purely arithmetical) calculations:
The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. [696]
The image she had selected was both just and memorable. It paved the way for a more dramatic perception. Where Babbage had set out to design a superlative producer of tables, Ada glimpsed the possibility of programming a single piece of fixed hardware (a rather substantial one, admittedly) to do any form of computation. Always conscious that the purpose of her task was to attract project support, Ada hinted at the unforeseeable uses to which the Engine might be put, had she the space and ‘were it in actual existence’. [700] In Note A, she contented herself with declaring that the Analytical Engine would be both simpler to build than its predecessor and ‘much more powerful’. [701]
Simpler, perhaps, but there was no getting around the fact that the machine Babbage hoped to create was enormous. In Note B, without dwelling upon this point, Ada described what was to be far the largest element: a storehouse designed to contain (‘at least’) two hundred columns of discs. Here, Ada transformed Menabrea’s correct, but flat image of a column of circular discs into the more vivid ‘pile of rather large draughtsmen . . . each counter having the digits from 0 to 9 inscribed on its edge at regular intervals’. [701]
While Ada’s imaginative gift for making the invisible apparent is one of the most successful aspects of her ‘Notes’, this is not primarily what has led her to be seen as a significant figure in scientific history. Throughout her seven notes, over and again, Lady Lovelace returned to the idea of the Analytical Engine’s potential to meet the challenges of a future world. In Note E (requiring a detailed use of the trigonometry that she had only recently mastered), Ada again stressed this point through reference to the Engine’s adaptability. It might be supposed, Ada wrote, that a machine which gave its results in numerical form could work only with numbers. But this, she announced in the old assertive voice of her mathematical correspondence with De Morgan, was an error.
The engine can arrange and combine its numerical qualities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly. It might develope [sic] three sets of results simultaneously, viz. symbolic results (as already alluded to in Notes A. and B.); numerical results (its chief and primary object; and algebraical results in literal notation. [713]
Babbage, as Ada acknowledged in her next sentence, had actually made no plans for his Engine to do any such thing, but Babbage’s plans were never going to hold his more boldly imaginative interpreter back. As Stephen Wolfram has stated in a fine recent analysis of Ada’s ‘Notes’: ‘Babbage did not know what he had; Ada started to see glimpses and successfully described them.’
Ada Lovelace, in her personal correspondence, often made claims about her own powers that bordered on the preposterous. Where Babba
ge’s invention was concerned, she reined back that impulse. In Note F, she remarked that the engine could be used to determine ‘that which human brains find it difficult or impossible to work out unerringly’ [722]; in Note G, another ten-pager that has become the most famous of all Ada’s ‘Notes’, she cautioned the reader against any temptation to overrate Babbage’s invention.
To exaggerate the powers of the Analytical Engine, Ada wrote, would invite the reverse to take place. Certainly, Babbage had devised a means of improving the pace of scientific progress. Nevertheless, there must be no supposition that the inventor had created the ‘thinking machine’ that Lady Byron had loosely termed it back in 1833. ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretension whatever to originate anything,’ Ada wrote in one of her most quoted and discussed statements. Babbage agreed.
Having cut the machine (so to speak) down to size, Ada built it up again in a final and remarkable endeavour. Menabrea, indicating the Analytical Engine’s sophistication as a computer of numbers, had introduced the name of Jakob Bernoulli, the deviser, back in 1713, of a series of numbers which continue to play a basic theoretical role in surprisingly many aspects of mathematics. Working with this sequence of ugly-looking and increasingly complicated fractions, Bernoulli himself claimed to have been able to compute his first ten numbers in fifteen minutes; Ada, painstakingly drawing up what today looks like the first computer program (William Lovelace proudly inked it in before carrying it off to display to neighbours and friends), offered an example by which the Analytical Engine was shown to be capable of computing fifty Bernoulli numbers in a minute. This was a task which neither the earlier Difference Engine nor its precursors could have addressed.* It was Ada’s most striking demonstration – the chart showed informed readers how a string of instructions from punched cards would guide the machine through a progressive sequence of events – of the Analytical Engine’s potential value to any country willing to cough up the considerable funds required to build it.†
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