Ada's Algorithm Read online

  Advance Praise for Ada’s Algorithm

  “[An] absorbing biography … Essinger’s tome is undergirded by academic research, but it is the author’s prose, both graceful and confident, that will draw in a general readership. Readers are treated to an intimate portrait of Lovelace’s short but significant life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Praise for the British Edition

  “[Ada’s Algorithm] will have us forever wondering what might have been.”

  —The Independent

  “Entertaining and illuminating.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Essinger displays not only verve and affection … but also great scholarship.”

  —Times Educational Supplement

  Praise for Jacquard’s Web

  “Essinger tells his story with passion and with a gracious willingness to help the lay reader grasp the intricacies of technology.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “With wit and imagination, Essinger has woven … a marvelous tapestry.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Fascinating.”

  —The Economist

  “Essinger does more than weave together science, history, and business: he sheds light on the nature of innovation … His book deftly shows how even the most surprising breakthroughs are based on the work of others, and need a host of enabling factors to take root … His tale of cultural, economic, and personal factors that enable ideas to become real tools makes this book a welcome addition to the literature of innovation.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “An important and highly readable addition to an essential history.”

  —CERN Courier

  “Essinger travels down some fascinating byways in the history of technology … A compelling narrative that links past and present in surprising and illuminating ways.”

  —Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  ALSO BY JAMES ESSINGER

  Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling

  Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age

  ADA’S ALGORITHM: HOW LORD BYRON’S DAUGHTER ADA LOVELACE LAUNCHED THE DIGITAL AGE

  Copyright © 2014 by James Essinger

  Originally published by Gibson Square, Ltd, London, 2013

  First Melville House printing: October 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Essinger, James, 1957–

  Ada’s algorithm : how Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace launched the digital age / James Essinger.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61219-408-0 (hardback)

  ISBN 978-1-61219-409-7 (ebook)

  1. Lovelace, Ada King, Countess of, 1815–1852. 2. Babbage, Charles, 1791–1871. 3. Women mathematicians—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Mathematicians—Great Britain—Biography. 5. Computers—History—19th century. I. Title.

  QA29.L72E87 2014

  510.92—dc23

  [B]

  2014021837

  Design by Christopher King

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated

  in friendship and admiration

  to

  Dr Doron Swade MBE

  and

  Dr Betty Alexandra Toole

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. Poetic Beginnings

  2. Lord Byron: A Scandalous Ancestry

  3. Annabella: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

  4. The Manor of Parallelograms

  5. The Art of Flying

  6. Love

  7. Silken Threads

  8. When Ada Met Charles

  9. The Thinking Machine

  10. Kinship

  11. Mad Scientist

  12. The Analytical Engine

  Photo Insert

  13. The Jacquard Loom

  14. A Mind with a View

  15. Ada’s Offer to Babbage

  16. The Enchantress of Number

  17. A Horrible Death

  18. Redemption

  Afterword

  Sources

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Preface

  Maybe you’re fascinated by Ada Lovelace already. If not, I hope by the end of Ada’s Algorithm you will be.

  I became intrigued by Ada myself – and soon enthralled by her – while writing my book Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004), by which time a general interest in Ada’s work was well established. There is a popular software language called Ada, which was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1970s to unite a host of different programming languages. In 2009, an international Ada Lovelace Day was launched on London’s Southbank to celebrate the achievement of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. There is a Hollywood movie about Ada (written by Shanee Edwards), Enchantress of Numbers, in development.

  It would, at least at first glance, appear that science has a chequered record of treating women as equals of men. Indeed, female staff at Bletchley Park, the wartime decryption headquarters that cracked German ciphers, were largely unrecognised for their painstaking work. Meanwhile Rosalind Franklin, who did much of the Nobel Prize–winning work on DNA, was ignored in all official recognition of the deduction of the existence of the double helix, to the embarrassment of the male scientists involved.

  Whether this is historically a case of sexism or social conditioning of both genders is beyond the scope of this book. (Change is afoot for the future – as Elinor Ostrom quipped on becoming in 2009 the first female Nobel Prize winner for economics, ‘I won’t be the last.’) What is clear, though, is that there is a surging interest in the history of women who have contributed to and been involved with science.

  While Lord Byron, Ada’s father, cast a long shadow over her life, she was just over a month old when they parted company forever and so she never met him in any meaningful sense. A much more durable person in her life was Lady Byron, who had been well educated by her enlightened parents and brought up to move in liberal circles. Lady Byron maintained a ferocious control over her daughter’s life and, as it would turn out, death.

  Ada Lovelace’s story is most closely interwoven with that of her close friend Charles Babbage, the scientist who invented the first mechanical computer. Like Babbage, Ada was tireless in the pursuit of knowledge. On Monday, August 14, Ada wrote to him:

  I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.

  Ada and Babbage’s letters became so intimate that they clearly suggest that they had what was essentially a romantic friendship.

  Unlike Babbage himself, Ada Lovelace saw beyond the immediate purpose of his inventions. He had little interest in such speculations and appears to have seen his inventions as mere calculators. But Ada believed that a whole new area of discovery awaited once real-world and abstract mathematics could be linked through calculations that were beyond the scope of human abilities. She had a vivid, thri
lling and disturbingly prescient vision that such a computer, for example, might handle ‘pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent’: a familiar and even everyday truth over a century and a half later but inconceivable to scientists at the time.

  Ada was passionate, kind, imaginative, excitable and emphatic. She loved emphasising words in the letters and documents she wrote by underlining them (such words are italicised in this book where she is quoted). She was regularly in poor health and used mathematics as a way to regain her focus. Later in life, when she was in severe pain from cancer, she would use medication we now recognise as mind-altering drugs. After a long and excruciating battle with the disease that she appears to have suffered without complaint, she died of cancer at thirty-six, the same age at which her father Lord Byron passed away.

  One of the fiercest criticisms of Ada is found in The Little Engines That Could’ve (1990), a thesis by Bruce Collier. This thesis, an otherwise shrewd and useful account of Babbage’s work, contains much highly informed technical material. But Collier wrote this about Ada:

  There is one subject ancillary to Babbage on which far too much has been written, and that is the contributions of Ada Lovelace … It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic-depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine … To me, this familiar material seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter … I will retain an open mind on whether Ada was crazy because of her substance abuse … I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.

  I was keen to contact Collier to enquire whether he would, more than twenty years later, still subscribe to this opinion about Ada but unfortunately he passed away some years ago.

  In comparison to this modern opinion from someone who never knew Ada, let’s see what Charles Babbage himself thought of her. On September 9, 1843, he wrote these words to Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century polymath who discovered electrolysis and magnetic induction:

  [T]hat 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.

  As for claims that Ada was mentally unstable, there simply is no reliable evidence for this and I believe such claims are made, at heart, because some computer historians in the past have not liked the idea that a woman could have to some extent stolen Babbage’s thunder, though from posterity’s perspective this is exactly what Ada to some extent did. I do think that towards the end of her life, when she was dying in great pain and only had laudanum (a tincture of opium) as an inadequate palliative to ease her desperate situation, Ada was often not herself, but anyone, of either sex, so afflicted would be unlikely to be themselves.

  Moreover, on the website of ‘The Ada Initiative,’ which states its aim as supporting women ‘in open technology and culture,’ there are some extremely wise and justifiable words on the matter that Ada was mentally unstable or even insane and could not therefore have done any useful intellectual work to help Babbage. As ‘The Ada Initiative’ points out:

  Interestingly, these arguments are rarely used to question men’s authorship of joint works; indeed, mental instability or difficult personalities sometimes seems to add to the reputation of male scientists and mathematicians: Nikola Tesla, John Nash and Isaac Newton to name just a few.

  I think this point is very well made. I do indeed believe that accusations of Ada being mentally unstable are unsustainable based upon the documentary evidence available today (which, to be fair to the late Bruce Collier, he may not have fully known about) and that such criticisms are often uttered by men for sexist reasons rather than for having any rational basis. But should we be surprised that men, who have after all often for centuries been putting women down and relegating women to a secondary role in politics, culture and all branches of the arts and sciences, often feel profoundly uncomfortable about allowing Ada a highly significant place in the pantheon of the greats of the history of computing?

  I hope that this book will make clear that Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, should without doubt be included in that pantheon and on the list of overlooked women who were not encouraged to fulfil their potential merely because of their gender. There has certainly so far been no biography of Ada that fully defends the genius of her thinking, that genius that prompted me to write this book. Ada’s grasp of complex questions came with such ease that she was able to see beyond it to regions of speculation and prescience where others needed to work hard to even understand the questions themselves.

  In order to make insightful comparisons between Ada’s times and ours, we must understand the modern equivalent of the sums of money mentioned in the documentary evidence from her epoch.

  A reasonable rule of thumb is that for the first seventy years or so of the nineteenth century (when there was little price inflation), sums of money should be multiplied by about one hundred times to give an approximate idea of what they would be worth today. It is only possible to give an approximate sense; we are dealing with a different economy from our own, and food, drink and the cost of domestic service were disproportionately cheaper than they are now; a fact that was both a cause of, and a reflection of, the great disparity in means between the rich and the poor.

  I use this ‘hundred times’ rule as the basis for the financial comparisons in this book.

  1

  Poetic Beginnings

  Four miles southeast of the city of Canterbury, home to the great Norman cathedral famous the world over, you’ll find the small village of Patrixbourne. Pretty and well manicured, the village nestles amidst some of the loveliest countryside in the county of Kent, which has long been known as the ‘Garden of England.’ Among the many who have praised the county is Charles Dickens, who in The Pickwick Papers wrote affectionately of Kent’s ‘apples, cherries, hops and women.’

  Today, on the outskirts of Patrixbourne, a muddy, rutted lane leads to a large field featuring two long parallel rows of lime trees that date back to the late nineteenth century. The trees once bordered a long driveway. A few hundred yards south, a narrow stream called the Nailbourne – a local legend holds that it flows only once every seven years – is spanned by a little bridge made from stone and wood. The bridge dates back to the eighteenth century.

  The lime trees and the bridge are the only signs today that there was once a splendid country house here known as Bifrons. The driveway led down to the house and in its day would have been used by horse-drawn coaches heading to the house or leaving it. As for the bridge, and the stretch of the Nailbourne it spans, these were once part of Bifrons’ extensive grounds.

  Sixty miles from the smoky hubbub of London, Bifrons was an unlikely setting to have nurtured the intellectual development of the most famous woman in the history of technology.

  Yet if you’d been visiting the house in the early spring of 1828 and had taken a stroll along one of the footpaths that passed through its grounds, you might have caught a glimpse of a pretty and precocious twelve-year-old girl called Ada Byron playing outside.

  Ada had a turbulent and exotic background. She was the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron, in his day one of the most famous men in the world, notorious for his love affairs with both sexes, for the scandal of his passion for his half-sister Augusta and for his disastrous marriage to Ada’s mother, a well-born young woman named Anna Isabella, shortened to Annabella, Milbanke, who had married Byron on the morning of January 2, 1815.

  When Byron married Annabella, he was already famous throughout Britain, Europe and beyond, as much for his amorous adventures as for his poetry.

  Annabella put up with him for only a short period. During what was a nightmarish twelve months for her, but business as usual for Byron, the young couple were constantly harassed by creditors chasing debts incurred by Byron’s
fabulously extravagant expenditure on anything that caught his fancy.

  The couple had a major cash-flow crisis because a dowry Annabella’s parents had promised hadn’t yet arrived. Her parents may have worried that once Byron got his hands on it, he’d leave her – and the dowry never did arrive during the one year and a fortnight that Annabella and Byron were together.

  He himself regularly harangued his wife during the marriage with crazy outbursts, including declarations that she made him feel he was ‘in hell.’ He made love to Annabella whenever he could, but he was also comprehensively unfaithful to her, notably with his half-sister Augusta and an actress named Susan Boyle, though probably with other women too.

  Augusta and Byron shared a father rather than a mother. Incest was by no means rare at the time, when poverty, overcrowding and cold houses meant that several people often slept in the same bed, even in large aristocratic houses. In fact, the aristocracy regarded incest between non-uterine siblings as reasonably acceptable. Byron saw Augusta as fair game. Augusta herself wasn’t much concerned by the technicalities either. She just adored her half-brother.

  Ada was born on Sunday, December 10, 1815. Annabella, having decided she could take no more of her husband, stole away with Ada from a sleeping Byron in the early morning of Monday, January 15, 1816.

  Annabella and Byron had made love on the night before her morning departure. Despite having fled her husband, Annabella initially retained some affection for him. She and Ada went to stay with Annabella’s parents in Seaham, County Durham. From there, she wrote doting letters to Byron, but her parents heard how he had treated their daughter, and slowly turned her against him.

  Details of the disastrous marriage soon got out, not directly from Annabella herself but from her lady friends. Annabella knew this, and had realised when she ‘confided’ in them that they would tell the world. Within a month after Annabella had fled from Byron, the disastrous marriage was the talk of the nation’s drawing-rooms. Soon, fresh rumours began to circulate that Byron had slept with Augusta during the marriage.