Authors: James Essinger
surely not something a mother is likely to write to her recently married daughter without cause. But there is no other evidence of Babbage’s feelings about the matter than this extremely oblique reference.
It didn’t take Ada long to realize that William, as well as being no intellectual, was not even very interesting. Rich as he 130
The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
was, there was always something slightly futile about him. To take just one example, he spent a great deal of time and money designing and ordering the construction of tunnels at his three country houses. The precise purpose of all these tunnels was never clear, and it is even possible there wasn’t one.
Early in the marriage, Ada started to find her husband’s lack of a proper occupation and any overall purpose intensely irritat-ing. This was evidently a problem throughout their marriage; one of the letters recently discovered in the north of England and penned by Ada on Christmas Day
1846
amounts to a ticking-off for Babbage for, as she saw it, obstructing the procurement of a possible appointment for William. ‘
You
can have no conception of what my husband is, when his home
alone
occupies his irritable energies,’ she writes. Ada was sure that an occupation, while certainly not necessary for William financially, would above all stop him hanging around the house and annoying her. She craved a husband who would do great things,
be
great, stride to fame and illustriousness with her by his side and understand her own pressing needs for an intellectual life. But William was not that man.
Yet Ada did what was expected of wives in those days: presented her husband with children. William and Ada’s son, Byron was born on
12
May
1836
; their daughter, Annabella, on
22
September
1837
. A second son, Ralph, appeared on
2
July
1839
.
Ada was often ill during these pregnancies. Her constitution was not strong; from the ages of thirteen to sixteen she had been partially paralysed and largely bedridden with an unidentified illness which may have been polio. Like most married ladies of her class, she found herself in charge of hiring and firing staff, balanc-ing the books, and specifying recipes for meals as well as being a good, compliant, and pliant wife.
For the first few years of her marriage, Ada devoted herself to life as a wife and mother. After Ralph’s birth, though, her thoughts returned with redoubled energy to her neglected mathematical studies. She became determined to find a distinguished 131
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mathematical and scientific tutor who would guide and accom-pany her on her intellectual quest.
Who better, she wondered, to fulfil this role than Babbage himself?
But Ada did not feel confident about approaching him directly. So, using what she thought was a cunning sleight of hand, she wrote to Babbage asking him to try to find a tutor for her.
Her hopeful optimism shines through in the tone of the letter; there is little doubt she hoped he would offer to carry out the job himself. Like a cunning old carp, Babbage replied courteously to her letter and promised to keep his eyes open, but did not rise to the bait. And as things turned out, he not only failed to pick up her hint, but he didn’t suggest anyone else, either.
In the summer of
1840
Annabella came to the rescue. She found a new tutor for her daughter: a well-known mathematician named Augustus De Morgan. Under his guidance Ada made rapid progress in studying her favourite subject. For the first time in her life she seems to have found some real intellectual fulfilment.
Buoyed by the success of her work with her new tutor, she looked around for a new intellectual challenge.
Menabrea’s paper on the Analytical Engine might have stayed as obscure as the learned Swiss journal in which it was published had not Ada decided that translating it into English would neatly achieve two objects she considered close to her heart. Firstly, it would give her the opportunity to publicize the important work being done by her close friend Babbage, of whom she was now seeing a good deal more than ever before. Secondly, the translation work would allow her to advance her dream of pursuing an intellectual career which would lift her above the demands of motherhood, running three homes, and looking after a wealthy but ineffectual husband.
Ada was conscious of the difficulty of her task, but was convinced she was more than equal to the job. She launched into it with characteristic energy. Her French was excellent, and her best writing has a fluency, clarity of expression, and mastery of 132
The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
metaphor and image that on occasion even recalls her father’s fluent and expressive prose.
Here is a flavour of Ada’s translation, from a section that discusses manual calculation machines (as opposed to Babbage’s planned
automatic
machines).
The chief drawback hitherto of most such machines is, that they require the continual intervention of a human agent to regulate their movements, and thence arises a source of errors; so that, if their use has not become general for large numerical calculations, it is because they have not in fact resolved the double problem which the question presents, that of correctness in the results, united with
economy
of time.
The paper then gets right down to the heart of the matter.
Struck with similar reflections, Mr Babbage has devoted some years to the realisation of a gigantic idea. He proposed to himself nothing less than the construction of a machine capable of executing not merely arithmetical calculations, but even all those of analysis, if their laws are known. The imagination is at first astounded at the idea of such an undertaking; but the more calm reflection we bestow upon it, the less impossible does success appear, and it is felt that it may depend on the discovery of some principle so general, that if applied to machinery, the latter may be capable of mechanically translating the operations which may be indicated to it by algebraical notation.
It is interesting how expertly Ada gives her translation a
‘feminine’ feel that embodies an affectionate regard for the invention. Her tone is lighter, more expressive, and generally more emotionally committed than that of Menabrea’s French.
She achieves this effect partly by using words that have something of the fascinated, even gushing, schoolgirl about them: ‘gigantic’
is an example. Of course, this part of her work is in fact a translation and she is not at this stage writing her own material, but 133
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this same enthusiastic, emotional, well-informed tone is carried into her Notes.
How exactly did her own contribution—the additional Notes—come about? Babbage explains this in his autobiography.
The passage in question is the only occasion in
Passages from the
Life of a Philosopher
when he mentions Ada’s name at all. The book is more an account of his scientific life than of his friendships or personal life. For example, he does not even mention his wife Georgiana
once
.
As Babbage says in
Passages
:
Some time after the appearance of his [Menabrea’s] memoir on the subject [the Analytical Engine] in the Bibliothèque Uni-verselle de Genève, the late Countess of Lovelace informed me that she had translated the memoir of Menabrea. I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on the subject with which she was intimately acquainted? To this Lady Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her. I then suggested that she should add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir: an idea which was immediately adopted.
We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernouilli [sic], which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.
The notes of the Countess of Lovelace extend to about three times the length of the original memoir. Their author has entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.
These two memoirs taken together furnish, to those who are capable of understanding the reasoning, a complete demonstration—
That the whole of the developments and operations
of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery
.
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The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
We see that Babbage is at pains here (the italics are his) to emphasize Ada’s authorship of the Notes. He is even happy to concede that she corrected one of his mistakes. Bernoulli numbers are regarded as important by mathematicians because they allow an exponential series to be derived. Ada uses them in her Notes to illustrate how the Analytical Engine could be used.
Incidentally, Babbage was not quite right about the length of the Notes compared to the original translation: the Notes were, as we have seen, about twice as long.
Babbage’s reference to Ada in
Passages
was supplemented by a paragraph Babbage wrote to Ada’s son Byron on
14
June
1857
, nearly five years after Ada’s death, and seven years before
Passages
was published. In the letter Babbage observed to Byron Lovelace, ‘In the memoir of Mr Menabrea and still more in the excellent Notes appended by your mother you will find the only comprehensive view of the powers of the Analytical Engine which the mathematicians of the world have yet expressed.’
There is no doubt about Ada’s enthusiasm for Babbage’s work.
But how much of the writing that formed her Notes was really hers? After all, Babbage—not Ada—had invented the Analytical Engine, and it is known she worked closely with him when she was working on her Notes. The Notes are often extremely technical: could Ada really have written them all from scratch?
Asking this question, which considerations of historical accuracy oblige us to ask, in no way patronizes Ada or women scientists. Even a modern computer scientist would have difficulty understanding the Notes at many junctures. We also need to bear in mind that Babbage wrote his autobiography more than twenty years after the collaboration with Ada actually took place.
Perhaps he had forgotten the extent to which he helped Ada with her Notes.
What other evidence is available to address this issue apart from what Babbage says in his autobiography?
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There are two types of evidence that can usefully be considered. Firstly, there is the circumstantial evidence based on what can be known about the working relationship of Babbage and Ada. Secondly, there is the evidence of the content of the Notes themselves.
As far as the working relationship between Babbage and Ada is concerned, there is a distinct indication that Babbage was the
second
party in the creation of the Notes. Ada ran the project herself and it was
she
who solicited
Babbage’s
help when she felt she needed it, not vice versa. Indeed, she was proprietorial about her work, and on more than one occasion told Babbage off when he made tentative efforts to suggest she present the content of the Notes in a slightly different way. But she did supply the drafts of her Notes to him for fact-checking, and she was prepared to defer to him when she got something factually wrong, as she did on occasion.
And the evidence of the content of the Notes themselves?
This, taken along with what is known about Ada’s mathematical abilities, tends to suggest that in the more technical content of the Notes, Babbage’s input was very likely substantial. It is difficult not to admire Ada, but the simple fact is that judging from the main evidence—Ada’s correspondence with her tutor, and also with Babbage himself—she was an
enthusiastic
amateur mathematician rather than an especially gifted one. To take just one example, here is a paragraph from a letter she wrote to Augustus De Morgan. It seems fair to use this evidence to assess her knowledge of mathematics.
Dear Mr De Morgan. I have I believe made some little progress towards the comprehension of the chapter on notation of functions, & I enclose you [sic] my demonstration of one of the exercises at the end of it …
I do not know when I have been so tantalised by anything,
& should be ashamed to say
how
much time I have spent upon it, in vain. These functional equations are complete will-o’-
the-wisps to me. The moment I fancy I have really at last got 136
The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
hold of something tangible & substantial, it all recedes further and further & vanishes again into thin air.
Evidence such as this, and there are several similar examples available, leads one to suspect that Ada may have been less good at maths than she thought she was. It is certainly difficult to believe that she originated the
technical
content of the Notes herself, especially as it is not just mathematics in itself that is being expressed, but a very specialized form of mathematics relating to the Analytical Engine. One hesitates to risk being unfair to Ada’s memory, but it is hard to believe that Babbage’s account that the entirety of the Notes was basically all Ada’s work can be accurate. He must have given her more help than he implies.
Yet the discursive element of the Notes, which is in fact a much larger proportion of the Notes than the technical material, is quite another matter.
Here, there really can be no doubt at all that Ada was the sole author. Indeed, the discursive material benefits enormously from her writing style, which is effusive, full of analogies, even on occasion slightly schoolgirlish. Babbage could write wittily, but his wit is never too far removed from pedantry, and he does not have Ada’s emotiveness and gusto.
A final clue to how Babbage regarded Ada can be seen in how he signs off some of the letters he wrote to her during the time when they were collaborating. For example, at the end of a letter he wrote to her on
9
September
1843
in which he talks of his plans to come to see her at her country house in Somerset, he says: Farewell my dear and much admired Interpreter