A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age (20 page)

A detailed report of Ada’s funeral appeared in the
Nottinghamshire Guardian
on Wednesday December 8 1852. The report reads as follows:

On Friday last the remains of the Hon. Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the … remains of the deceased countess were conveyed privately from Great Cumberland Place, London, where she expired, to the George the Fourth Hotel, Nottingham. The body lay in state during Thursday night, and was visited by a large number of the inhabitants of the town.

The ceremony had a very pleasing and solemn effect. The room was draped with black cloth, and the floor, where the body lay, was covered with the same. The coffin was placed in the centre, bearing a silk velvet cushion with her ladyship’s coronet resting at the foot, and the Lovelace arms richly emblazoned at the head.

Twelve wax tapers were kept burning, six on either side of the coffin. On the following morning the body was conveyed by the old road to Hucknall Torkard. The mourners consisting of the Earl of Lovelace, Lord Byron, the Hon. Locke King, Sir G. Crauford, Mr King, Dr Lushington [Lady Byron’s lawyer], Col. Wildman, Woronzow Greig, Esq. [Ada’s lawyer], and Mr C. Noel were brought by special train to Hucknall. The funeral
cortege
was formed in the station yard in the following order:

Two mutes on horseback.

Her Ladyship’s Coronet, upon a crimson velvet cushion, covered with black crape, borne by an attendant upon a richly caparisoned and plumed horse.

the hearse
, drawn by four horses, profusely caparisoned with feathers, velvet equipments and velvet hammer-cloths, on which were large coronets, decorated also with plumes of ostrich feathers, and emblazoned with the hatchments of the deceased.

mourning coach
, drawn by four horses, containing the Earl of Lovelace, Lord Byron, the Honourable Locke King, and Sir G. Crauford.

mourning coach
, drawn by four horses, containing – King, Esq., Dr Lushington, and Woronsow [sic] Greig, Esq.

mourning coach
, drawn by four horses, containing Colonel Wildman, Mr C. Noel, and Sir George Wilkinson.

The private carriage of Colonel Wildman, of Newstead Abbey.

The procession then moved forward at a funeral pace through the village to the parish church, at the entrance to which it was received by the Rev. Curtis Jackson, perpetual curate, who, reading the funeral service, preceded the procession into the church, where the body was placed in the centre aisle.

The coffin was covered with rich puce coloured silk velvet, with silver furniture, bearing a massive raised shield, upon which were chased the emblazonments and family arms, surmounted with the Countess’s coronet, in silver. The plate bore the following inscription:

The Right Honourable Augusta Ada, wife of

william, earl of lovelace
, and only daughter of
george gordon noel, lord byron

Born December 10th, 1815,

Died November 27th, 1852.

Aged 37 years. [This is an error: when she died Ada was only 36, like her father; the family must have thought she would survive another two weeks to reach her 37th birthday when they commissioned her tombstone.]

The service was proceeded with amidst the deepest silence and the most reverential attention of the numerous spectators, many of whom were much affected. The body was then placed in the vault adjoining the remains of the father. In the vault there are now seventeen coffins. The first that attracts the eye is the coffin of the late poet-lord, placed on that of his mother, at the head of which stands the urn which contains his heart and brains, as brought from Greece. On the top of the coffin is his coronet, very much decayed and reduced. The coffin is in a very good state of preservation. Close to it is now laid the body of the late Countess, having the coronet placed in the centre of the coffin. Many of the coffins are now very much decayed, nothing being left but the leaden shells, some of which very plainly show their antiquity.

After giving some biographical information about Ada, the report goes on to give a description of the location of the village and of the words on the tablet to Byron’s memory. The report concludes:

After the funeral the numerous spectators of the ceremony were gratified with an inspection of the vault. Some of them, as we heard them afterwards boasting, succeeded in bearing away precious relics from the poet’s shrine, in the shape of small fragments of scarlet cloth, torn from his mouldering coffin.

Lady Byron did not attend the funeral of her daughter, perhaps preferring a cure to reports that she had forgiven her deceased husband. Nor did Babbage attend the funeral. Probably he felt that as he and Lady Byron had fallen out, it would not have been appropriate for him to attend. If he had heard rumours that Lady Byron might not attend, he doubtless did not want to meet her and cause a scene in case the rumours were untrue. Besides, the Ada he had known and maybe loved was gone now.

18

Lady Byron would live on until her death of breast cancer on May 16 1860, at the age of 67. She had told the story of Byron’s incestuous relationship to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published this account nine years later. The posthumous information she had given Beecher Stowe demolished Lord Byron’s acclaim as a romantic figure for Britain at large.

While it is tempting to cast Lady Byron’s role in Ada Lovelace’s life as a maternal equivalent of P.G. Woodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, in matters other than her daughter she was mellower. She remained steadfast in her support of the abolition of slavery and attended the second World Conference against Slavery in London, 1843 as a very small band of women despite having expressly been excluded from attending. She also appears to have been loved by her spa friends. Sophia de Morgan, the daughter of her tutor and wife of Augustus de Morgan wrote warmly:

Lady Byron was always shy with strangers, especially with those who excited her veneration. This shyness gave her an appearance of coldness, but she and my husband soon knew each other’s worth, and she never lost an opportunity of showing her regard for him and trust in his judgment. He was rather surprised to find in one commonly reputed to be hard and austere, qualities of quite an opposite nature. She was impulsive and affectionate almost to a fault, but the expression of her feelings was often checked by the habitual state of repression in which the circumstances of her life had placed her.

And Babbage?

He continued to labour on his dream of cogwheel computers for almost another twenty years, but his heart had gone out of the enterprise, and it never bore any fruit. He was, indeed, still working on his designs for the Analytical Engine when, after a short illness, he died on October 18 1871, aged nearly eighty.

Lady Byron had died on May 16 1860. William, who married again in 1865 and had another child, a son, by his second wife Jane Jenkins, lived until December 29 1893.

In Babbage’s last years he was plagued by headaches and the noise of urban life. He socialised little, spending much time alone in his London home, living among the ghosts of his dreams.

A precious but tragic insight into Babbage’s forlorn later life was provided at a mathematical conference in July 1914 by Lord Moulton, a man born in 1844 who enjoyed all the privileges of his class and became a prize-winning mathematician, barrister, judge and statesman. Recalling a visit he had made to Babbage many years earlier, apparently in the late 1860s, Moulton painted a dismal picture of the price the gods had extracted from Babbage for having bestowed on him a vision of a computer, without granting him the tools – technological, financial, and diplomatic – to make his dreams come true.

One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work rooms. In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before. I asked him about its present form.

‘I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.’

After a few minutes’ talk we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it.

‘I have never completed it,’ he said, ‘because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.’ Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine.

Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.’

I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart. When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete to be capable of being put to any useful purpose.

The ‘kind and sympathetic scientific men’ were wrong and their decision may be described as one of the greatest blunders in the history of science – with the benefit of hindsight. It would take a hundred years for scientists to understand what Ada had grasped when scientists finally resumed the leap forward that could have been made in the 1840s. Ironically, Ada’s
Notes
would play a key role in the rehabilitation of Babbage’s reputation.

The (cultural) myopia of the kind men was mirrored by the somewhat condescending tone in which Ada’s tutor Augustus de Morgan had judged her
Notes
on Babbage’s machine. Lady Byron had sent some of Ada’s early drafts to him in 1841:

The tract about Babbage’s machine is a pretty thing enough, but I could I think produce a series of extracts, out of Lady Lovelace’s first queries upon new subjects, which would make a mathematician see that it was no criterion of what might be expected from her.

As things turned out, Babbage had
left behind enough plans and drawings for a complete, working version of one of his machines to be constructed by an epoch that was better equipped to understand his vision. All he had really needed was access to an effective and efficient precision engineering industry: not because the technology of his own time was not up to the job of producing components to the requisite tolerances – it was – but because Babbage required a reliable source of thousands of identical cogwheels to be supplied relatively promptly, and at a reasonable cost.

If Babbage had let Ada manage his affairs, as she so much wished to do, everything he had hoped to achieve might have been achieved. She would have been better suited to direct his engineers and even his financial affairs with greater charm, clarity and effectiveness, getting the best value for money from those who helped him make his cogwheels and his other spare parts.

As for Ada’s vision of a machine that could process and memorise calculations, algebraic patterns and even all types of symbolic relationships as adeptly as the Jacquard loom could weave silk, that was a dream just waiting to come true.

She had seen the computer age clearly ahead. She just was never allowed to act on what she saw.

The dream began to start coming true in 1881, when a young engineer, William J. Hammer, who was working in Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, made an accidental discovery that turned out to be of great importance. He discovered an inexplicable current in an evacuated vacuum tube that turned out to lead to the discovery of electrons.

The modern computer evolved from an electromagnetic device, the Harvard Mark 1, sponsored by IBM, which was built and first operated in 1944. It is arguable that there is a link between the Jacquard loom and this machine, because IBM, formerly International Business Machines, was a direct descendant of a company founded by a German-born inventor, Herman Hollerith, which pioneered the use of ‘tabulators’ that processed punched cards. The idea for these tabulators was probably inspired by the Jacquard loom.

One of the strangest things about Babbage’s work is that there is no direct line of descent between the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine and the modern computer. When Howard Aiken, the brains behind the Harvard Mark 1, announced its completion to an astonished world at a press conference in 1944, he paid a fulsome tribute to Babbage and famously said:

If Babbage had lived seventy-five years later, I would have been out of a job.

However, at that point in the history of science, Babbage was a close to forgotten figure, only remembered by a few computer pioneers.

Alan Turing, the British mathematician and code-breaker who in the 1940s and 1950s laid many of the intellectual foundations necessary for the invention of the modern computer, was aware of Ada’s writings.

Turing discussed the assertion that computers are incapable of originality. He called this the ‘Lovelace objection’, because, according to Ada, machines are incapable of independent learning. We have already seen that Ada wrote the following:

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to
originate
anything. It can do whatever we
know how to order it
to perform. It can
follow
analysis; but it has no power of
anticipating
any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making
available
what we are already acquainted with.

Turing suggested that Ada’s comment can be reduced to the assertion that computers ‘can never take us by surprise’. Turing said, however, that on the contrary, computers could still surprise humans, in particular where the consequences of different facts are not immediately recognizable. Turing also suggested that Ada was hampered by the context from which she wrote, and that in truth the way the brain stores and processes information would be quite similar to that of a computer.

Babbage’s work came under fresh scrutiny in the 1970s, partly as a result of the devoted research of the late Dr Allan Bromley. Any book that looks at Babbage’s work and what the modern world has made of it owes a debt to Dr Bromley.

The successful building, in 1991, of a full-size working version of the Difference Engine – the version Babbage himself called Difference Engine number 2 – is unquestionably one of the most wonderful stories in the history of science.
The Cogwheel Brain
, by Doron Swade, who master-minded and led the project to build the machine – and nine years later, a no less thrilling project to build the printer – is a unique source of information about Babbage’s life and the modern realisation of Babbage’s dreams.

Babbage’s increased fame has led to Ada’s fame increasing too. Ada’s fame is, as we’ve seen, of a different order. It is no exaggeration to say that she understood where Babbage’s work would lead better than he ever did.