(New York Public Library)
Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today. To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I’ve been curious for a long time what the real story is. And in preparation for her bicentennial, I decided to try to solve what for me has always been the “mystery of Ada”.
It was much harder than I expected. Historians disagree. The personalities in the story are hard to read. The technology is difficult to understand. The whole story is entwined with the customs of 19th-century British high society. And there’s a surprising amount of misinformation and misinterpretation out there.
But after quite a bit of research—including going to see many original documents—I feel like I’ve finally gotten to know Ada Lovelace, and gotten a grasp on her story. In some ways it’s an ennobling and inspiring story; in some ways it’s frustrating and tragic.
It’s a complex story, and to understand it, we’ll have to start by going over quite a lot of facts and narrative.
The Early Life of Ada
Let’s begin at the beginning. Ada Byron, as she was then called, was born in London on December 10, 1815 to recently married high-society parents. Her father, Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) was 27 years old, and had just achieved rock-star status in England for his poetry. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, was a 23-year-old heiress committed to progressive causes, who inherited the title Baroness Wentworth. Her father said he gave her the name “Ada” because “It is short, ancient, vocalic”.
Ada’s parents were something of a study in opposites. Byron had a wild life—and became perhaps the top “bad boy” of the 19th century—with dark episodes in childhood, and lots of later romantic and other excesses. In addition to writing poetry and flouting the social norms of his time, he was often doing the unusual: keeping a tame bear in his college rooms in Cambridge, living it up with poets in Italy and “five peacocks on the grand staircase”, writing a grammar book of Armenian, and—had he not died too soon—leading troops in the Greek war of independence (as celebrated by a big statue in Athens), despite having no military training whatsoever.
Annabella Milbanke was an educated, religious and rather proper woman, interested in reform and good works, and nicknamed by Byron “Princess of Parallelograms”. Her very brief marriage to Byron fell apart when Ada was just 5 weeks old, and Ada never saw Byron again (though he kept a picture of her on his desk and famously mentioned her in his poetry). He died at the age of 36, at the height of his celebrityhood, when Ada was 8. There was enough scandal around him to fuel hundreds of books, and the PR battle between the supporters of Lady Byron (as Ada’s mother styled herself) and of him lasted a century or more.
Ada led an isolated childhood on her mother’s rented country estates, with governesses and tutors and her pet cat, Mrs. Puff. Her mother, often absent for various (quite wacky) health cures, enforced a system of education for Ada that involved long hours of study and exercises in self control. Ada learned history, literature, languages, geography, music, chemistry, sewing, shorthand and mathematics (taught in part through experiential methods) to the level of elementary geometry and algebra. When Ada was 11, she went with her mother and an entourage on a year-long tour of Europe. When she returned she was enthusiastically doing things like studying what she called “flyology”—and imagining how to mimic bird flight with steam-powered machines.
But then she got sick with measles (and perhaps encephalitis)—and ended up bedridden and in poor health for 3 years. She finally recovered in time to follow the custom for society girls of the period: on turning 17 she went to London for a season of socializing. On June 5, 1833, 26 days after she was “presented at Court” (i.e. met the king), she went to a party at the house of 41-year-old Charles Babbage (whose oldest son was the same age as Ada). Apparently she charmed the host, and he invited her and her mother to come back for a demonstration of his newly constructed Difference Engine: a 2-foot-high hand-cranked contraption with 2000 brass parts, now to be seen at the Science Museum in London:
Ada’s mother called it a “thinking machine”, and reported that it “raised several Nos. to the 2nd & 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a Quadratic Equation”. It would change the course of Ada’s life.
Charles Babbage
What was the story of Charles Babbage? His father was an enterprising and successful (if personally distant) goldsmith and banker. After various schools and tutors, Babbage went to Cambridge to study mathematics, but soon was intent on modernizing the way mathematics was done there, and with his lifelong friends John Herschel (son of the discoverer of Uranus) and George Peacock (later a pioneer in abstract algebra), founded the Analytical Society (which later became the Cambridge Philosophical Society) to push for reforms like replacing Newton’s (“British”) dot-based notation for calculus with Leibniz’s (“Continental”) function-based one.
Babbage graduated from Cambridge in 1814 (a year before Ada Lovelace was born), went to live in London with his new wife, and started establishing himself on the London scientific and social scene. He didn’t have a job as such, but gave public lectures on astronomy and wrote respectable if unspectacular papers about various mathematical topics (functional equations, continued products, number theory, etc.)—and was supported, if modestly, by his father and his wife’s family.
In 1819 Babbage visited France, and learned about the large-scale government project there to make logarithm and trigonometry tables. Mathematical tables were of considerable military and commercial significance in those days, being used across science, engineering and finance, as well as in areas like navigation. It was often claimed that errors in tables could make ships run aground or bridges collapse.
Back in England, Babbage and Herschel started a project to produce tables for their new Astronomical Society, and it was in the effort to check these tables that Babbage is said to have exclaimed, “I wish to God these tables had been made by steam!”—and began his lifelong effort to mechanize the production of tables.
State of the Art
There were mechanical calculators long before Babbage. Pascal made one in 1642, and we now know there was even one in antiquity. But in Babbage’s day such machines were still just curiosities, not reliable enough for everyday practical use. Tables were made by human computers, with the work divided across a team, and the lowest-level computations being based on evaluating polynomials (say from series expansions) using the method of differences.
What Babbage imagined is that there could be a machine—a Difference Engine—that could be set up to compute any polynomial up to a certain degree using the method of differences, and then automatically step through values and print the results, taking humans and their propensity for errors entirely out of the loop.
(Museum of the History of Science)
By early 1822, the 30-year-old Babbage was busy studying different types of machinery, and producing plans and prototypes of what the Difference Engine could be. The Astronomical Society he’d co-founded awarded him a medal for the idea, and in 1823 the British government agreed to provide funding for the construction of such an engine.
Babbage was slightly distracted in 1824 by the prospect of joining a life insurance startup, for which he did a collection of life-table calculations. But he set up a workshop in his stable (his “garage”), and kept on having ideas about the Difference Engine and how its components could be made with the tools of his time.
In 1827, Babbage’s table of logarithms—computed by hand—was finally finished, and would be reprinted for nearly 100 years. Babbage had them printed on yellow paper on the theory that this would minimize user error. (When I was in elementary school, logarithm tables were still the fast way to do multiplication.)
Also in 1827, Babbage’s father died, leaving him about £100k, or perhaps $14 million today, setting up Babbage financially for the rest of his life. The same year, though, his wife died. She had had eight children with him, but only three survived to adulthood.
Dispirited by his wife’s death, Babbage took a trip to continental Europe, and being impressed by what he saw of the science being done there, wrote a book entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, that ended up being mainly a diatribe against the Royal Society (of which he was a member).
Though often distracted, Babbage continued to work on the Difference Engine, generating thousands of pages of notes and designs. He was quite hands on when it came to personally drafting plans or doing machine-shop experiments. But he was quite hands off in managing the engineers he hired—-and he did not do well at managing costs. Still, by 1832 a working prototype of a small Difference Engine (without a printer) had successfully been completed. And this is what Ada Lovelace saw in June 1833.
(Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library)
Back to Ada
Ada’s encounter with the Difference Engine seems to be what ignited her interest in mathematics. She had gotten to know Mary Somerville, translator of Laplace and a well-known expositor of science—and partly with her encouragement, was soon, for example, enthusiastically studying Euclid. And in 1834, Ada went along on a philanthropic tour of mills in the north of England that her mother was doing, and was quite taken with the then-high-tech equipment they had.
On the way back, Ada taught some mathematics to the daughters of one of her mother’s friends. She continued by mail, noting that this could be “the commencement of ‘A Sentimental Mathematical Correspondence carried on for years between two ladies of rank’ to be hereafter published no doubt for the edification of mankind, or womankind”. It wasn’t sophisticated math, but what Ada said was clear, complete with admonitions like “You should never select an indirect proof, when a direct one can be given.” (There’s a lot of underlining, here shown as italics, in all Ada’s handwritten correspondence.)
Babbage seems at first to have underestimated Ada, trying to interest her in the Silver Lady automaton toy that he used a conversation piece for his parties (and noting his addition of a turban to it). But Ada continued to interact with (as she put it) Mr. Babbage and Mrs. Somerville, both separately and together. And soon Babbage was opening up to her about many intellectual topics, as well as about the trouble he was having with the government over funding of the Difference Engine.
In the spring of 1835, when Ada was 19, she met 30-year-old William King (or, more accurately, William, Lord King). He was a friend of Mary Somerville’s son, had been educated at Eton (the same school where I went 150 years later) and Cambridge, and then had been a civil servant, most recently at an outpost of the British Empire in the Greek islands. William seems to have been a precise, conscientious and decent man, if somewhat stiff. But in any case, Ada and he hit it off, and they were married on July 8, 1835, with Ada keeping the news quiet until the last minute to avoid paparazzi-like coverage.
The next several years of Ada’s life seem to have been dominated by having three children and managing a large household—though she had some time for horse riding, learning the harp, and mathematics (including topics like spherical trigonometry). In 1837, Queen Victoria (then 18) came to the throne, and as a member of high society, Ada met her. In 1838, William was made an earl for his government work, and Ada become the Countess of Lovelace.
(Powerhouse Museum Sydney)
Within a few months of the birth of her third child in 1839, Ada decided to get more serious about mathematics again. She told Babbage she wanted to find a “mathematical Instructor” in London, though asked that in making enquiries he not mention her name, presumably for fear of society gossip.
The person identified was Augustus de Morgan, first professor of mathematics at University College London, noted logician, author of several textbooks, and not only a friend of Babbage’s, but also the husband of the daughter of Ada’s mother’s main childhood teacher. (Yes, it was a small world. De Morgan was also a friend of George Boole‘s—and was the person who indirectly caused Boolean algebra to be invented.)
In Ada’s correspondence with Babbage, she showed interest in discrete mathematics, and wondered, for example, if the game of solitaire “admits of being put into a mathematical Formula, and solved”. But in keeping with the math education traditions of the time (and still today), de Morgan set Ada on studying calculus.
(British Library)
Her letters to de Morgan about calculus are not unlike letters from a calculus student today—except for the Victorian English. Even many of the confusions are the same—though Ada was more sensitive than some to the bad notations of calculus (“why can’t one multiply by dx?”, etc.) . Ada was a tenacious student, and seemed to have a great time learning more and more about mathematics. She was pleased by the mathematical abilities she discovered in herself, and by de Morgan’s positive feedback about them. She also continued to interact with Babbage, and on one visit to her estate (in January 1841, when she was 25), she charmingly told the then-49-year-old Babbage “If you are a Skater, pray bring Skates to Ockham; that being the fashionable occupation here now, & one I have much taken to.”
Ada’s relationship with her mother was a complex one. Outwardly, Ada treated her mother with great respect. But in many ways she seems to have found her controlling and manipulative. Ada’s mother was constantly announcing that she had medical problems and might die imminently (she actually lived to age 64). And she increasingly criticized Ada for her child rearing, household management and deportment in society. But by February 6, 1841, Ada was feeling good enough about herself and her mathematics to write a very open letter to her mother about her thoughts and aspirations.
She wrote: “I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.” She talked of her ambition to do great things. She talked of her “insatiable & restless energy” which she believed she finally had found a purpose for. And she talked about how after 25 years she had become less “secretive & suspicious” with respect to her mother.
But then, three weeks later, her mother dropped a bombshell, claiming that before Ada was born, Byron and his half-sister had had a child together. Incest like that wasn’t actually illegal in England at the time, but it was scandalous. Ada took the whole thing very hard, and it derailed her from mathematics.
Ada had had intermittent health problems for years, but in 1841 they apparently worsened, and she started systematically taking opiates. She was very keen to excel in something, and began to get the idea that perhaps it should be music and literature rather than math. But her husband William seems to have talked her out of this, and by late 1842 she was back to doing mathematics.
Back to Babbage
What had Babbage been up to while all this had been going on? He’d been doing all sorts of things, with varying degrees of success.
After several attempts, he’d rather honorifically been appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge—but never really even spent time in Cambridge. Still, he wrote what turned out to be a fairly influential book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, dealing with such things as how to break up tasks in factories (an issue that had actually come up in connection with the human computation of mathematical tables).
In 1837, he weighed in on the then-popular subject of natural theology, appending his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise to the series of treatises written by other people. The central question was whether there is evidence of a deity from the apparent design seen in nature. Babbage’s book is quite hard to read, opening for example with, “The notions we acquire of contrivance and design arise from comparing our observations on the works of other beings with the intentions of which we are conscious in our own undertakings.”
In apparent resonance with some of my own work 150 years later, he talks about the relationship between mechanical processes, natural laws and free will. He makes statements like “computations of great complexity can be effected by mechanical means”, but then goes on to claim (with rather weak examples) that a mechanical engine can produce sequences of numbers that show unexpected changes that are like miracles.
Babbage tried his hand at politics, running for parliament twice on a manufacturing-oriented platform, but failed to get elected, partly because of claims of misuse of government funds on the Difference Engine.
Babbage also continued to have upscale parties at his large and increasingly disorganized house in London, attracting such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Michael Faraday and the Duke of Wellington—with his aged mother regularly in attendance. But even though the degrees and honors that he listed after his name ran to 6 lines, he was increasingly bitter about his perceived lack of recognition.
Central to this was what had happened with the Difference Engine. Babbage had hired one of the leading engineers of his day to actually build the engine. But somehow, after a decade of work—-and despite lots of precision machine tool development—the actual engine wasn’t done. Back in 1833, shortly after he met Ada, Babbage had tried to rein in the project—but the result was that his engineer quit, and insisted that he got to keep all the plans for the Difference Engine, even the ones that Babbage himself had drawn.
But right around this time, Babbage decided he’d had a better idea anyway. Instead of making a machine that would just compute differences, he imagined an “Analytical Engine” that supported a whole list of possible kinds of operations, that could in effect be done in an arbitrarily programmed sequence. At first, he just thought about having the machine evaluate fixed formulas, but as he studied different use cases, he added other capabilities, like conditionals—and figured out often very clever ways to implement them mechanically. But, most important, he figured out how to control the steps in a computation using punched cards of the kind that had been invented in 1801 by Jacquard for specifying patterns of weaving on looms.
(Museum of the History of Science)
Babbage created some immensely complicated designs, and today it seems remarkable that they could work. But back in 1826 Babbage had invented something he called Mechanical Notation—that was intended to provide a symbolic representation for the operation of machinery in the same kind of way that mathematical notation provides a symbolic representation for operations in mathematics.
Babbage was disappointed already in 1826 that people didn’t appreciate his invention. Undoubtedly people didn’t understand it, since even now it’s not clear how it worked. But it may have been Babbage’s greatest invention—because apparently it’s what let him figure out all his elaborate designs.
Babbage’s original Difference Engine project had cost the British government £17,500 or the equivalent of perhaps $2 million today. It was a modest sum relative to other government expenditures, but the project was unusual enough to lead to a fair amount of discussion. Babbage was fond of emphasizing that—unlike many of his contemporaries—he hadn’t taken government money himself (despite chargebacks for renovating his stable as a fireproof workshop, etc.). He also claimed that he eventually spent £20,000 of his own money—or the majority of his fortune (yes, I don’t see how the numbers add up)—on his various projects. And he kept on trying to get further government support, and created plans for a Difference Engine No. 2, requiring only 8000 parts instead of 25,000.
By 1842, the government had changed, and Babbage insisted on meeting with the new prime minister (Robert Peel), but ended up just berating him. In parliament the idea of funding the Difference Engine was finally killed with quips like that the machine should be set to compute when it would be of use. (The transcripts of debates about the Difference Engine have a certain charm—especially when they discuss its possible uses for state statistics that strangely parallel computable-country opportunities with Wolfram|Alpha today.)
Ada’s Paper
Despite the lack of support in England, Babbage’s ideas developed some popularity elsewhere, and in 1840 Babbage was invited to lecture on the Analytical Engine in Turin, and given honors by the Italian government.
Babbage had never written a serious account of the Difference Engine, and had never written anything at all about the Analytical Engine. But he talked about the Analytical Engine in Turin, and notes were taken by a certain Luigi Menabrea, who was then a 30-year-old army engineer—but who, 27 years later, became prime minister of Italy (and also made contributions to the mathematics of structural analysis).
In October 1842, Menabrea published a paper in French based on his notes. When Ada saw the paper, she decided to translate it into English and submit it to a British publication. Many years later Babbage claimed he suggested to Ada that she write her own account of the Analytical Engine, and that she had responded that the thought hadn’t occurred to her. But in any case, by February 1843, Ada had resolved to do the translation but add extensive notes of her own.
Over the months that followed she worked very hard—often exchanging letters almost daily with Babbage (despite sometimes having other “pressing and unavoidable engagements”). And though in those days letters were sent by post (which did come 6 times a day in London at the time) or carried by a servant (Ada lived about a mile from Babbage when she was in London), they read a lot like emails about a project might today, apart from being in Victorian English. Ada asks Babbage questions; he responds; she figures things out; he comments on them. She was clearly in charge, but felt she was first and foremost explaining Babbage’s work, so wanted to check things with him—though she got annoyed when Babbage, for example, tried to make his own corrections to her manuscript.
It’s charming to read Ada’s letter as she works on debugging her computation of Bernoulli numbers: “My Dear Babbage. I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration with these Numbers, that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. …. I am now going out on horseback. Tant mieux.” Later she told Babbage: “I have worked incessantly, & most successfully, all day. You will admire the Table & Diagram extremely. They have been made out with extreme care, & all the indices most minutely & scrupulously attended to.” Then she added that William (or “Lord L.” as she referred to him) “is at this moment kindly inking it all over for me. I had to do it in pencil…”
William was also apparently the one who suggested that she sign the translation and notes. As she wrote to Babbage: “It is not my wish to proclaim who has written it; at the same time I rather wish to append anything that may tend hereafter to individualize, & identify it, with the other productions of the said A.A.L.” (for “Ada Augusta Lovelace”).
By the end of July 1843, Ada had pretty much finished writing her notes. She was proud of them, and Babbage was complimentary about them. But Babbage wanted one more thing: he wanted to add an anonymous preface (written by him) that explained how the British government had failed to support the project. Ada thought it a bad idea. Babbage tried to insist, even suggesting that without the preface the whole publication should be withdrawn. Ada was furious, and told Babbage so. In the end, Ada’s translation appeared, signed “AAL”, without the preface, followed by her notes headed “Translator’s Note”.
Ada was clearly excited about it, sending reprints to her mother, and explaining that “No one can estimate the trouble & interminable labour of having to revise the printing of mathematical formulae. This is a pleasant prospect for the future, as I suppose many hundreds & thousands of such formulae will come forth from my pen, in one way or another.” She said that her husband William had been excitedly giving away copies to his friends too, and Ada wrote, “William especially conceives that it places me in a much juster & truer position & light, than anything else can. And he tells me that it has already placed him in a far more agreeable position in this country.”
Within days, there was also apparently society gossip about Ada’s publication. She explained to her mother that she and William “are by no means desirous of making it a secret, altho’ I do not wish the importance of the thing to be exaggerated and overrated”. She saw herself as being a successful expositor and interpreter of Babbage’s work, setting it in a broader conceptual framework that she hoped could be built on.
There’s lots to say about the actual content of Ada’s notes. But before we get to that, let’s finish the story of Ada herself.
While Babbage’s preface wasn’t itself a great idea, one good thing it did for posterity was to cause Ada on August 14, 1843 to write Babbage a fascinating, and very forthright, 16-page letter. (Unlike her usual letters, which were on little folded pages, this was on large sheets.) In it, she explains that while he is often “implicit” in what he says, she is herself “always a very ‘explicit function of x’”. She says that “Your affairs have been, & are, deeply occupying both myself and Lord Lovelace…. And the result is that I have plans for you…” Then she proceeds to ask, “If I am to lay before you in the course of a year or two, explicit & honorable propositions for executing your engine … would there be any chance of allowing myself … to conduct the business for you; your own undivided energies being devoted to the execution of the work …”
In other words, she basically proposed to take on the role of CEO, with Babbage becoming CTO. It wasn’t an easy pitch to make, especially given Babbage’s personality. But she was skillful in making her case, and as part of it, she discussed their different motivation structures. She wrote, “My own uncompromising principle is to endeavour to love truth & God before fame & glory …”, while “Yours is to love truth & God … but to love fame, glory, honours, yet more.” Still, she explained, “Far be it from me, to disclaim the influence of ambition & fame. No living soul ever was more imbued with it than myself … but I certainly would not deceive myself or others by pretending it is other than a very important motive & ingredient in my character & nature.”
She ended the letter, “I wonder if you will choose to retain the lady-fairy in your service or not.”
At noon the next day she wrote to Babbage again, asking if he would help in “the final revision”. Then she added, “You will have had my long letter this morning. Perhaps you will not choose to have anything more to with me. But I hope the best…”
(New York Public Library)
At 5 pm that day, Ada was in London, and wrote to her mother: “I am uncertain as yet how the Babbage business will end…. I have written to him … very explicitly; stating my own conditions … He has so strong an idea of the advantage of having my pen as his servant, that he will probably yield; though I demand very strong concessions. If he does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot water; & to bring his engine to consummation, (which all I have seen of him & his habits the last 3 months, makes me scarcely anticipate it ever will be, unless someone really exercises a strong coercive influence over him). He is beyond measure careless & desultory at times. — I shall be willing to be his Whipper-in during the next 3 years if I see fair prospect of success.”
But on Babbage’s copy of Ada’s letter, he scribbled, “Saw AAL this morning and refused all conditions”.
Yet on August 18, Babbage wrote to Ada about bringing drawings and papers when he would next come to visit her. The next week, Ada wrote to Babbage that “We are quite delighted at your (somewhat unhoped for) proposal” [of a long visit with Ada and her husband]. And Ada wrote to her mother: “Babbage & I are I think more friends than ever. I have never seen him so agreeable, so reasonable, or in such good spirits!”
(New York Public Library)
Then, on Sept. 9, Babbage wrote to Ada, expressing his admiration for her and (famously) describing her as “Enchantress of Number” and “my dear and much admired Interpreter”. (Yes, despite what’s often quoted, he wrote “Number” not “Numbers”.)
The next day, Ada responded to Babbage, “You are a brave man to give yourself wholly up to Fairy-Guidance!”, and Babbage signed off on his next letter as “Your faithful Slave”. And Ada described herself to her mother as serving as the “High-Priestess of Babbage’s Engine”.
After the Paper
But unfortunately that’s not how things worked out. For a while it was just that Ada had to take care of household and family things that she’d neglected while concentrating on her Notes. But then her health collapsed, and she spent many months going between doctors and various “cures” (her mother suggested “mesmerism”, i.e. hypnosis), all the while watching their effects on, as she put it, “that portion of the material forces of the world entitled the body of A.A.L.”
She was still excited about science, though. She’d interacted with Michael Faraday, who apparently referred to her as “the rising star of Science”. She talked about her first publication as her “first-born”, “with a colouring & undercurrent (rather hinted at & suggested than definitely expressed) of large, general, & metaphysical views“, and said that “He [the publication] will make an excellent head (I hope) of a large family of brothers & sisters”.
When her notes were published, Babbage had said “You should have written an original paper. The postponement of that will however only render it more perfect.” But by October 1844, it seemed that David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope, among other things) would write about the Analytical Engine, and Ada asked if perhaps Brewster could suggest another topic for her, saying “I rather think some physiological topics would suit me as well as any.”
And indeed later that year, she wrote to a friend (who was also her lawyer, as well as being Mary Somerville’s son): “It does not appear to me that cerebral matter need be more unmanageable to mathematicians than sidereal & planetary matter & movements; if they would but inspect it from the right point of view. I hope to bequeath to the generations a Calculus of the Nervous System.” An impressive vision—10 years before, for example, George Boole would talk about similar things.
Both Babbage and Mary Somerville had started their scientific publishing careers with translations, and she saw herself as doing the same, saying that perhaps her next works would be reviews of Whewell and Ohm, and that she might eventually become a general “prophet of science”.
There were roadblocks, to be sure. Like that, at that time, as a woman, she couldn’t get access to the Royal Society’s library in London, even though her husband, partly through her efforts, was a member of the society. But the most serious issue was still Ada’s health. She had a whole series of problems, though in 1846 she was still saying optimistically “Nothing is needed but a year or two more of patience & cure“.
There were also problems with money. William had a never-ending series of elaborate—and often quite innovative—construction projects (he seems to have been particularly keen on towers and tunnels). And to finance them, they had to turn to Ada’s mother, who often made things difficult. Ada’s children were also approaching teenage-hood, and Ada was exercised by many issues that were coming up with them.
Meanwhile, she continued to have a good social relationship with Babbage, seeing him with considerable frequency, though in her letters talking more about dogs and pet parrots than the Analytical Engine. In 1848 Babbage developed a hare-brained scheme to construct an engine that played tic-tac-toe, and to tour it around the country as a way to raise money for his projects. Ada talked him out of it. The idea was raised for Babbage to meet Prince Albert to discuss his engines, but it never happened.
William also dipped his toe into publishing. He had already written short reports with titles like “Method of growing Beans and Cabbages on the same Ground” and “On the Culture of Mangold-Wurzel“. But in 1848 he wrote one more substantial piece, comparing the productivity of agriculture in France and England, based on detailed statistics, with observations like “It is demonstrable, not only that the Frenchman is much worse off than the Englishman, but that he is less well fed than during the devastating exhaustion of the empire.”
1850 was a notable year for Ada. She and William moved into a new house in London, intensifying their exposure to the London scientific social scene. She had a highly emotional experience visiting for the first time her father’s family’s former estate in the north of England—and got into an argument with her mother about it. And she got more deeply involved in betting on horseracing, and lost some money doing it. (It wouldn’t have been out of character for Babbage or her to invent some mathematical scheme for betting, but there’s no evidence that they did.)
In May 1851 the Great Exhibition opened at the Crystal Palace in London. (When Ada visited the site back in January, Babbage advised, “Pray put on worsted stockings, cork soles and every other thing which can keep you warm.”) The exhibition was a high point of Victorian science and technology, and Ada, Babbage and their scientific social circle were all involved (though Babbage less so than he thought he should be). Babbage gave out many copies of a flyer on his Mechanical Notation. William won an award for brick-making.
But within a year, Ada’s health situation was dire. For a while her doctors were just telling her to spend more time at the seaside. But eventually they admitted she had cancer (from what we know now, probably cervical cancer). Opium no longer controlled her pain; she experimented with cannabis. By August 1852, she wrote, “I begin to understand Death; which is going on quietly & gradually every minute, & will never be a thing of one particular moment”. And on August 19, she asked Babbage’s friend Charles Dickens to visit and read her an account of death from one of his books.
Her mother moved into her house, keeping other people away from her, and on September 1, Ada made an unknown confession that apparently upset William. She seemed close to death, but she hung on, in great pain, for nearly 3 more months, finally dying on November 27, 1852, at the age of 36. Florence Nightingale, nursing pioneer and friend of Ada’s, wrote: “They said she could not possibly have lived so long, were it not for the tremendous vitality of the brain, that would not die.”
Ada had made Babbage the executor of her will. And—much to her mother’s chagrin—she had herself buried in the Byron family vault next to her father, who, like her, died at age 36 (Ada lived 254 days longer). Her mother built a memorial that included a sonnet entitled “The Rainbow” that Ada wrote.
The Aftermath
Ada’s funeral was small; neither her mother nor Babbage attended. But the obituaries were kind, if Victorian in their sentiments:
William outlived her by 41 years, eventually remarrying. Her oldest son—with whom Ada had many difficulties—joined the navy several years before she died, but deserted. Ada thought he might have gone to America (he was apparently in San Francisco in 1851), but in fact he died at 26 working in a shipyard in England. Ada’s daughter married a somewhat wild poet, spent many years in the Middle East, and became the world’s foremost breeder of Arabian horses. Ada’s youngest son inherited the family title, and spent most of his life on the family estate.
Ada’s mother died in 1860, but even then the gossip about her and Byron continued, with books and articles appearing, including Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s 1870 Lady Byron Vindicated. In 1905, a year before he died, Ada’s youngest son—who had been largely brought up by Ada’s mother—published a book about the whole thing, with such choice lines as “Lord Byron’s life contained nothing of any interest except what ought not to have been told”.
When Ada died, there was a certain air of scandal that seemed to hang around her. Had she had affairs? Had she run up huge gambling debts? There’s scant evidence of either. Perhaps it was a reflection of her father’s “bad boy” image. But before long there were claims that she’d pawned the family jewels (twice!), or lost, some said, £20,000, or maybe even £40,000 (equivalent to about $7 million today) betting on horses.
It didn’t help that Ada’s mother and her youngest son both seemed against her. On September 1, 1852—the same day as her confession to William—Ada had written, “It is my earnest and dying request that all my friends who have letters from me will deliver them to my mother Lady Noel Byron after my death.” Babbage refused. But others complied, and, later on, when her son organized them, he destroyed some.
But many thousands of pages of Ada’s documents still remain, scattered around the world. Back-and-forth letters that read like a modern text stream, setting up meetings, or mentioning colds and other ailments. Charles Babbage complaining about the postal service. Three Greek sisters seeking money from Ada because their dead brother had been a page for Lord Byron. Charles Dickens talking about chamomile tea. Pleasantries from a person Ada met at Paddington Station. And household accounts, with entries for note paper, musicians, and ginger biscuits. And then, mixed in with all the rest, serious intellectual discussion about the Analytical Engine and many other things.
What Happened to Babbage?
So what happened to Babbage? He lived 18 more years after Ada, dying in 1871. He tried working on the Analytical Engine again in 1856, but made no great progress. He wrote papers with titles like “On the Statistics of Light-Houses”, “Table of the Relative Frequency of Occurrences of the Causes of Breaking Plate-Glass Windows”, and “On Remains of Human Art, mixed with the Bones of Extinct Races of Animals”.
Then in 1864 he published his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher—a strange and rather bitter document. The chapter on the Analytical Engine opens with a quote from a poem by Byron—”Man wrongs, and Time avenges”—and goes on from there. There are chapters on “Theatrical experience”, “Hints for travellers” (including on advice about how to get an RV-like carriage in Europe), and, perhaps most peculiar, “Street nuisances”. For some reason Babbage waged a campaign against street musicians who he claimed woke him up at 6 am, and caused him to lose a quarter of his productive time. One wonders why he didn’t invent a sound-masking solution, but his campaign was so notable, and so odd, that when he died it was a leading element of his obituary.
Babbage never remarried after his wife died, and his last years seem to have been lonely ones. A gossip column of the time records impressions of him:
Apparently he was fond of saying that he would gladly give up the remainder of his life if he could spent just 3 days 500 years in the future. When he died, his brain was preserved, and is still on display…
Even though Babbage never finished his Difference Engine, a Swedish company did, and even already displayed part of it at the Great Exhibition. When Babbage died, many documents and spare parts from his Difference Engine project passed to his son Major-General Henry Babbage, who published some of the documents, and privately assembled a few more devices, including part of the Mill for the Analytical Engine. Meanwhile, the fragment of the Difference Engine that had been built in Babbage’s time was deposited at the Science Museum in London.
Rediscovery
After Babbage died, his life work on his eng