Reading the tender letters that the Lovelaces exchanged during this time, it becomes clear that, despite their many spats and disagreements, Ada and her husband remained powerfully attached to each other. Lovelace had been infuriated by Dr Carpenter’s suggestion that Ada was an unfeeling wife. But it was always easier for a diffident and reclusive man to demonstrate emotion through his fanciful buildings than in words. In the Great Hall of the newly transformed Horsley Towers, Crede Byron was proudly chiselled into one of the mighty beams that William himself had engineered (Brunel was pleasingly complimentary). Fretting about the absent Ada’s health – he was alone down at Ashley Combe in the summer of 1844 – Lovelace set out to create a new sea pool and elaborate grotto for a wife who now placed her faith in swimming to cure her ailments. Visiting Brighton that summer, while the children went to Somerset and Carpenter took time off for his own career, Ada lodged herself at 38 Bedford Square, adjoining the seafront. Taking dutiful daily immersions from a bathing machine in a daring black one-piece, rounded off with a pair of stout leather boots, the novice sea nymph was soon envisaging herself as ‘an independent & skilful swimmer . . . Perseverance will do the business, I feel no doubt.’
Exercise was the solution, or so a hopeful Ada now persuaded herself. In between despatching instructions about the proper strength and length of gymnastic ropes to be installed in their various homes, she diverted William with accounts of her visit to a travelling circus (where the appearance of an elephant was an exciting novelty) and Brighton’s zoo, where an adventurous monkey ripped through her sleeve and drew blood. ‘This is my year of accidents,’ poor Ada sighed, having already managed to break her nose and undergo ‘some hours’ of dental surgery.
Exercise did not mean that Ada had weaned herself off the combination of claret and drugs prescribed by her favourite doctor. Ada’s mother – Annabella had a horror of opiates – argued for the safer route of mental control. Harriet Martineau, a woman for whose industry and intelligence Lady Byron had considerable respect, attributed her recovery from uterine cancer entirely to the power of mesmerism. The letters about her unconventional cure were published the following year, but in 1844, they were already being shared and widely discussed among Martineau’s friends. Here, surely, was the answer to Ada’s predicament, one that would protect her uncommon and precious mind from being needlessly addled by stimulants?
Used to having her way, Lady Byron found herself on this occasion in the minority. Neither Dr Locock, nor his medical colleagues, nor even the opinionated William Carpenter believed that mesmerism could cure physical illness. Moreover, as Ada sharply informed her mother on 10 October 1844, the doctors believed that the experiments with mesmerism that she had voluntarily undergone back in the summer of 1841 might even have caused her current ills. It wouldn’t do. In fact, Miss Martineau might herself benefit from the advice of a young lady who now wrote with brimming confidence of ‘my advancing studies on the nervous system’ and of ways that the world might yet benefit from her suffering.
And with that, Ada was off, overpowering her mother with a verbal extravaganza of all the thoughts and schemes that coursed unchecked through her shifting, skimming mind. She wrote of the authority with which she had learned to discipline Annabella’s small namesake. (‘Gentle as I am in general, yet when she is naughty, I am well aware that I give no quarter . . . I am a changed being at once.’) Ada went on to predict her personal destiny. She would become either a sun or a vagrant star. (‘Solemn decree’.) The Sun, perhaps. And what planets should she permit to orbit her solar self?
Oh! I must arrange some Comets too, by & bye. No complete planetary system without. Heavens! How shall I get any comets? I think I must myself be the chief Comet & not merely one of the Planets. Yes – that will do.
At least I am an amusing Bird, if not a very wise one, with my repentances, my Suns, Planets, Comets, &c, &c, &c.
I really believe that you hatched me simply for the entertainment of your old age, that you might not be ennuyée.
In part, Ada was simply playing with ideas and seeking to entertain a mother who she knew was going through sad times. To whom else, she sweetly asked, could she rattle on in such a lunatic vein, and yet be understood? ‘I grow so fond of my old Hen, who understands all I can say & think so much better than any one.’
Annabella was in need of consolation. The summer of 1844 had been blighted by a bitter quarrel with Edward and Fanny, her favourites among all the Noels, when they jointly attacked Lady Byron for undervaluing Edward’s skills as an educationalist.* (Ada had acted as the peacemaking go-between, but without success.) And then, within a single month, death robbed Annabella of Harriet Siddons, of a beloved godson, Hugo de Fellenberg Montgomery, and of the Swiss school reformer for whom the late Mr Montgomery had been named. Advising Hugo’s young widow, while comforting Mrs Siddons’s bereaved daughter, Annabella wore herself out. Gossipy Mrs Jameson, visiting the woman she now regarded as her closest friend, was dismayed. Lady Byron had been ‘more white and tremulously weak than I had ever seen her,’ she confided to the American author, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, the following year. ‘I was shocked . . . Of all human beings she is the one most necessary to my heart & to my mental and moral well-being . . . uniting in her extraordinary character and peculiar destiny all I most love with all I most reverence.’
To Annabella’s grieving friends, it seemed as if the delicate, waxen-faced little widow had reached the end of her journey. They should have known better. If we look for one quality shared by Lord Byron, his wife and his daughter, it is the ability to take us by surprise. Byron could shift from love to hate within the space of a sentence. Ada and Annabella could lie at death’s door on one day and be shaping destinies on the next. By mid-November, Lady Byron was well enough to visit Ockham and form a view of her grandchildren’s progress. Ada, while persuaded that the ‘many exciting expeditions, and irregular amusements’ devised by Dr Carpenter had proved the ‘very making’ of her firstborn, was less than impressed by the tutor’s influence over her daughter: (‘her spirits are too much for her; she speaks in a coarse vulgar voice, walks with a heavy masculine brusque step . . . is nothing short of perfectly odious’.)* Lady Byron, who was extremely fond of her little namesake, disagreed. ‘I think Dr Carpenter is on the right track,’ Annabella announced. By way of reward for his good work, she offered to pay the tutor a thousand-pound bonus in lieu of lost lecture work, and to fund necessary renovations to his house at Ockham. (Carpenter had complained that it was both poky and damp.) Always shrewd, Lady Byron made it clear that the money would be paid only when Dr Carpenter had satisfactorily completed his term of trial.
And Ada? Brilliant, impetuous, magnificently ambitious Ada? It’s hard to withhold admiration from a young woman who resolved to turn her personal battle against debilitating illness into a journey of discovery that would reap benefits for the world. While Charles Darwin would transform the garden of his country home into a vast outdoor laboratory, Ada – increasingly restricted to hobbling around the interior of a bedroom or study for her daily exercise – set out to make a clinical study of her own afflicted body. Writing to her mother in November 1844, Lady Lovelace bravely dwelt upon the value of possessing
a frame so susceptible that it is an experimental laboratory always about me, & inseparable from me. I walk about, not in a Snail-Shell, but in a Molecular Laboratory. This is a new view to take of one’s physical frame, & amply compensates me for all the sufferings, had they been even greater.
Ada had made her anonymous debut in the world of science in the late summer of 1843. By November 1844, Lord Byron’s daughter was known to be the clever young woman who had written the ‘Notes’ expanding upon Menabrea’s description of Babbage’s unbuilt Engine. Mary Somerville had sent compliments upon the clearness with which she had illustrated a very difficult subject (a real homage from the translator of the fiendishly difficult writings of Laplace). Augustus De Morgan had not only written to praise Ada to herse
lf. Answering a question from Lady Byron about his opinion of her daughter’s intellect, De Morgan had boldly stated that Ada was, if the risk to her delicate health could be taken, capable of going beyond them all, of looking into realms of knowledge that were not yet apparent. It was as if De Morgan had intuited the then unimaginable fact that his former pupil would be perceived, over a century later, as the predictor of modern computer technology.
Buoyed by such an encouraging reception, but held back by recurrent ill health, Ada resolved to make a laboratory of her own frail body. But how was it to be done? To whom could she look for help?
By 1844, interest in Babbage’s projected machine was already being overtaken by the growing impact of Michael Faraday’s discovery, back in 1831, of electromagnetic induction, establishing the principles upon which the first electrical generator and transformer could be built. Professor Charles Wheatstone, Faraday’s close friend, had meanwhile developed the first telegraphic system to be put into use in England. By November 1844, the Wheatstone telegraph was already being described as the ‘nervous system’ of the nation. It was an image that chimed precisely with Ada’s bold new plan to use electricity and magnetism to create ‘a calculus of the nervous system’. This was the intriguing proposal that she had submitted to Woronzow Greig on 15 November. Two weeks later, she invited Charles Wheatstone to her home for a discussion that lasted for five hours. It was the possibilities opened up by Wheatstone’s electrical transmission systems – rather than the railway tracks in which her canny mother had started to invest – that had captured Ada Lovelace’s enterprising imagination.
It may have been because Charles Wheatstone did not have to answer for the consequences to Lady Byron (whom he had never met) that he felt less anxiety than Augustus De Morgan about encouraging his protégée – Ada was thirteen years younger than himself – to push her enquiring intelligence to its limits. Ada looked upon her well-received ‘Notes’ as the foundation for a future and much larger career. It was Wheatstone – the instigator and first reader of Ada’s Menabrea translation, the kindly advisor on how best to deal with Babbage’s ill-conceived anonymous preface – who now appeared most eager to assist that career into life.
The connection that Wheatstone wanted Ada to explore was with German science. He had already encouraged her to translate certain papers by Georg Ohm, the German analyser of Wheatstone’s ingenious device for measuring electrical usage. (It is still referred to as ‘the Wheatstone bridge’.) Wheatstone next proceeded to the unexpected proposal that Lady Lovelace should use her social position to become the secret scientific advisor and mediator for the queen’s German husband.
Wheatstone knew what he was talking about. His father, a maker of musical instruments, had taught music to Princess Charlotte. (Wheatstone himself invented a primitive form of the concertina and later presented one to Ada.) Acting in his role as the first professor of experimental philosophy (or applied science), at King’s College London, the ingenious Wheatstone had contrived an electrically triggered cannon salute across the Thames to greet Prince Albert on his first visit to the college in 1843. The crushing failure of that dramatic salvo from the new riverside Shot Tower (the galvanic battery that should have triggered it was damp) bore unexpected fruit: it caused the sympathetic prince to ask the inventor about his technique. A friendship formed. By the time of his November discussion with Ada, Wheatstone understood how intensely frustrated Albert felt about his exclusion from the world of English science. The prince longed to contribute. ‘Wheatstone says none but some woman can put him in the right way, & open the door to him towards all he desires,’ Ada reported to her husband, before explaining the plan that their friend had unfolded to her.
. . . if I can take a certain standing in the course of the next few years, the Prince would on some occasion speak to me about science, and that in that case, if I happily seize the moment, I may do for science an inestimable benefit; for all the Prince wants is a sensible advisor & suggester, to indicate to him the channels for his exercising a scientific influence.
The idea of acting as a royal advisor was intriguing. Closer to Ada’s own line of interest was the fact that Charles Wheatstone’s closest friend in the world of science was the very man she was currently urging to become her collaborator. Electricity was what quickened Ada’s interest now. Nobody in England knew more about electricity in 1844 than Michael Faraday.
Faraday had first seen Ada Lovelace back in 1839, the year in which Alfred Chalon’s prettified portrait of the young countess was being displayed in the windows of London’s most fashionable print shops. Faraday liked the look of her so much that the superstar of electrical science persuaded Charles Babbage to secure an image for him from the sitter herself.
It was Babbage who gave the relationship its first friendly nudge. Observing Faraday and Ada deep in conversation at one of his soirées on 9 September 1843, he sat down that same night to send Faraday the recently published Menabrea ‘Notes’, while adding a glowing tribute to ‘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 (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it’.
Silence followed.
In October 1844, Ada took the initiative into her own hands. Presenting herself to Faraday as ‘the bride of science’, she asked permission, not only to work alongside him, but to become his soulmate. ‘For many years,’ she informed the startled scientist, ‘I have desired to be admitted to intercourse & friendship with you; & to become in some respects your disciple.’
Ada was not exaggerating. She had been hearing about Michael Faraday, a man old enough to be her father, since childhood. Ada was eleven when Faraday began giving his famous Christmas lectures for the young at the Royal Institution. At the time when little Ada was first pondering the span of a rainbow’s arc, Faraday was already experimenting with electromagnetism. Self-taught and with no formal knowledge of mathematics, Faraday was the principal advisor on electricity and magnetism for Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Faraday’s name appeared at least fifteen times over in Somerville’s index. (Babbage, by contrast, appeared just once.)
‘I have a spell of some sort about me . . .’ Ada had boasted to Woronzow Greig in 1841. Returning to the idea in a letter sent to her mother shortly before her first appeal to Faraday, Lady Lovelace remarked again upon ‘the power I know I have over others’. It was to this most Byronic aspect of Ada’s seductive personality that a dazed Michael Faraday was about to be subjected.
The silence which had ensued after their first meeting at Babbage’s home was partly due to a crisis in Faraday’s personal life. A nervous breakdown had been followed by the enigmatic dismissal of himself and members of his family from the strict Sandemanian sect in which Faraday himself had long served as a respected elder. (The rupture was serious; Faraday was not reappointed for sixteen years.) The feyness apparent in Ada’s first overture may have appealed to a man who, while reading the Bible, marked out the passage in Daniel that states: ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people . . .’ More likely, Michael Faraday, a keen admirer of Lord Byron’s poetry, was genuinely impressed by Wheatstone’s praise for a young woman who combined imaginative intelligence with what seemed to him (but not John Herschel) to be a first-rate mathematical mind.*
Faraday may have been intrigued by Ada’s background and her blandishments, but he was not to be so easily conquered as William Carpenter. Faraday had recently turned down a request from the elderly and eminent Maria Edgeworth to visit his home. Ada was firmly informed that he was not well enough for collaborative endeavours. Neither did Faraday share her declared belief in the bond between religion and science: ‘there is no philosophy [science] in my religion’. However, where many would have laughed at Ada’s proclaimed desire to become ‘High-Priestess of God’s works as manifested on this earth’, Faraday recei
ved the news of her ambition with pleasing gravity. Really, there could be no doubt that ‘with your deep devotion to your subject you will attain it,’ he wrote back in this same long letter, while adding kind hopes – clearly, he had been briefed about Ada’s poor health – that her life would be sufficiently prolonged to do so. But he did not want a collaborator.
Faraday had underestimated both Ada’s perseverance and her complete disregard for conventional behaviour. On 24 October (her second letter crossed Faraday’s response to her first), she wrote again, begging the esteemed scientist only to write when it felt comfortable, and to regard her ‘as a mere instrument’. Three days later, she hailed Faraday as ‘one of the few whom it is an honour & privilege to know on this earth’. On 8 November, Ada sought permission to visit ‘your philosopher’s cell, just to look about me there’. More boldly, Ada announced her plan to make Faraday’s own researches into ‘my hinge & centre for an Electrical Article’ that she planned to write in the coming year for the Quarterly Review. (References to other unidentified articles already in the pipeline also appear in this same letter.)
By now, Lady Lovelace had almost achieved her goal. A bewitched Faraday – in a letter that is missing from this intriguing correspondence – seemingly compared the endeavours of himself, a mere ‘tortoise’, to the dazzling ‘elasticity of intellect’ of her ladyship (a tribute that Ada swiftly shared with an impressed Lady Byron). Ada, whose physical diminishment of herself formed a regular part of her epistolary flirtations, now briskly shrank into ‘a little brown bird’ who would sit quietly at his side, but only if Mr Faraday would first promise to let the little bird pay a visit, and promise not to be cross at receiving such a giddy letter. ‘I mean it to make you laugh. At any rate you must, I am sure, perceive that you have a very good-natured creature to deal with in yours most sincerely AAL.’
In Byron's Wake Page 31
