Ada Lovelace Was Brilliant And Doomed
Ada Lovelace Was Brilliant And Doomed
While lying on her deathbed, Ada Lovelace made a mysterious confession to her husband that was so profoundly disturbing he left and never returned. Ada Lovelace never stood a chance at a mundane or predictable life, particularly with a father like hers. Lord Byron was the Regency equivalent of a modern rock star, defined by his scandalous affairs, public drama, and relentless gossip. Born on December 10, 1815, Augusta Ada Byron was her father’s only legitimate child. His marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Ada’s mother, was a societal shock; while Byron was an incorrigible scoundrel, Annabella was his polar opposite: stiff, deeply moral, and remarkably adept in the sciences.
Ada Lovelace inherited her predilection for numbers from her mother. Lord Byron, always the poet, famously called his new wife the “Princess of Parallelograms.” Just a month after Ada’s birth, Lord Byron and his wife separated. Shortly thereafter, crushing debts forced Byron to flee England for mainland Europe. He would never see his home shores nor his daughter ever again. Ada grew up without a father, and sadly, her cold and emotionally distant mother provided little solace or warmth.
Ada’s mother taught her mathematics and logic starting when she was just a small girl. She hoped that a strict, disciplined schooling in numbers would help suppress her daughter’s dangerous imagination. Her mother worried incessantly that if she granted Ada even a taste of the creative arts or romanticism, she would inevitably succumb to the same volatile madness that plagued her father. In public, Lady Byron appeared to be the image of a loving, doting mother, but it was largely a performative display. Perhaps young Ada reminded her too much of the ex-husband she despised; regardless, Lady Byron spent as little time as possible with her daughter.
As if her childhood was not miserable enough, Ada constantly suffered from painful, debilitating illnesses. For years, she experienced terrible headaches that were so intense they made it difficult for her to see. As a teenager, she contracted a bout of measles that was so severe it left her paralyzed and confined to bed for almost a year. All this physical pain and emotional loneliness might have broken another child, but Ada was anything but ordinary. Even from the beginning, it was clear that she possessed something truly special. At 12 years old, she announced that she was going to learn how to fly, and her precocious young mind dove into the project with incredible gusto. She tested out different materials, from feathers to papers to silk, and she closely studied avian anatomy for clues as to how birds achieved flight. She ultimately compiled her research into a remarkably detailed book she titled Flyology.
Ada Byron’s mother lived in constant fear that her daughter would end up a “fiend” like her father, and to be fair, her fears were not entirely unfounded. It turned out Ada had a hidden wild side, and it began to surface as she grew into a young woman. She embarked on a secret affair with one of her tutors when she was 17, and the two of them hatched a desperate plot to elope together. However, when Ada presented herself to her tutor’s family, they instantly recognized her as the infamous daughter of Lord Byron and contacted her mother, who dragged her home and suppressed the entire scandal. Ada must have been devastated, but little did she know that, not long after her failed escape, her life was going to change forever.
Ada did not try to marry all of her tutors; some of them simply became close friends and intellectual confidants. Such was the case with the brilliant Mary Somerville, who educated Ada in science and mathematics. The two of them forged a strong bond and would stay in touch for many years. Most importantly, at an extravagant party in 1833, Somerville introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, the man with whom the rest of her life would be inextricably entwined. There undoubtedly would have been many dashing and adventurous men at this ball, but Charles Babbage was not one of them. He was in his early 40s and largely unemployed, making ends meet by giving public lectures, publishing fairly unremarkable scientific papers, and by dipping into his personal inheritance. Not too many people considered Babbage particularly interesting, but Ada immediately saw him for what he was: a visionary whose radical ideas would eventually change the world.
Back then, a “computer” was a human being—someone who performed manual computations. A team of these human computers would split up a complex problem and write out each aspect by hand, eventually arriving at the answer through grueling, complex mathematics. It was slow, work-intensive, and fundamentally inefficient. Charles Babbage assumed there must be a better way and set about to prove it. When he first laid eyes on her, Babbage did not peg the 17-year-old Ada Lovelace for a proto-computer scientist, but when he started talking about his work, her eyes lit up. He began describing his “Difference Engine,” an intricate machine that could perform complex calculations automatically. Ada was fascinated, and the two of them discussed the machine for the entire night. They would have made an odd pair—the young, brilliant rebel and the middle-aged lecturer excitedly talking about the future of mathematics and mechanics. Finally, Babbage invited Lovelace to come to his house and see his prototype Difference Engine.
Once Ada saw Babbage’s difference machine, she became obsessed, visiting him to discuss it as often as she could. Babbage quickly realized that Ada had an amazing, rare gift for mathematics; he called her his “Enchantress of Numbers,” and the two of them forged a lifelong partnership. But while she spent many hours discussing analytics with Babbage, Ada was still a young woman in the prime of her life, and the allures of London high society kept calling. She quickly became a regular in the London party scene and started to make a name for herself. She was her father’s daughter—a consummate charmer who loved to dance and was never afraid to speak her mind. London gossips followed her every move; they were desperate to find out whom the scandalous daughter of Lord Byron would marry. Yet, Lovelace could be extremely secretive, and that is how she shocked all of England when she suddenly announced her marriage to William, 8th Baron King, a wealthy English noble.
Ada became Lady King, and she and her husband lived a charmed life, splitting their time between three extravagant homes. By all accounts, William was a complete gentleman, albeit rigid and deliberate. Like any good Victorian couple, he and Ada set about having children immediately. They wed in 1835, and Ada gave birth in 1836, 1837, and 1839. But with children came a new set of health problems for her; in particular, after the birth of her second child, Annabella, she suffered from a painful illness that lasted for months. Ada was descended from the Barons Lovelace, an ancient and extinct line of nobles, and eventually, someone decided it was time they made a comeback. William became the new Earl, making Ada the Countess of Lovelace—the name that would eventually go down in history.
In the early years of her marriage, Ada was too busy to think much about mathematics or Babbage’s machine, but after the birth of her third child, she became restless. The allure of numbers called her back, and she wanted to help Babbage in his work. However, such a thing was practically unheard of for an aristocratic lady like Ada, so she did her best to keep her interests a secret. In a letter to Babbage, she wondered if he could use a mathematical formula to play card games like solitaire. This kind of thinking was radical for the day, but it was the exact kind of vision that would earn Lovelace her place in the history books.
Babbage often told Ada that she should publish a paper, but she always hesitated. Perhaps she feared that the scientific community would reject a woman’s work, or maybe she thought the London gossips would faint at the thought of a countess doing complex math. Either way, she refused Babbage every time. She did, however, agree to translate a paper written by Italian author Luigi Menabrea regarding Babbage’s analytical engine. As she did, she also added some notes. Actually, she added a lot of notes. In the end, her additions were three times longer than Menabrea’s original work. But it was her final note—Note G—that would change the world.
Lovelace understood Babbage’s machine better than just about anyone, and in Note G, she explained one of its practical uses. She described in perfect detail how to use the analytical engine to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. Note G was, in effect, the first computer program ever written, making Ada Lovelace the world’s first computer programmer. Few people in the 19th century could appreciate just how important Note G was. Babbage’s analytical engine was something the world had never seen before, and few people understood how it worked. Fortunately, one of the few who did was Lovelace, and she had a special gift for interpretation. Her translation of Menabrea’s article was, by far, the best explanation of the concept ever written at the time, and it introduced the idea of the mechanical computer to the world. After she had spent countless hours writing it, Babbage tried to add a preface complaining about how the government had not given enough support to his work. Ada thought this was a terrible idea and did not want to risk overshadowing her hard work with a petty squabble. Eventually, she published the paper without the preface, and her friendship with Babbage was strained for years afterward.
While Ada did not receive proper support from Babbage, and many in English society thought it was scandalous for a woman to be writing scientific papers, at least she had the support of her husband. William could not have been more proud of his wife, and he recognized the paper for what it was: a work of genius. Every great woman from history has her fair share of men trying to downplay her accomplishments, and Lovelace was no different. Some historians attribute all of the breakthroughs to Babbage and claim that Lovelace was pretty much just along for the ride. Others, however, give her the credit she truly deserves. Before Ada, no one was able to explain Babbage’s work with such elegance and sophistication. Note G, in particular, was undeniably written by Ada and was a more detailed use of the analytical engine than even Babbage had created before. Before her, everyone assumed that the theoretical computer would simply be used to perform mathematical calculations. She predicted that a computer could be used for any number of applications, such as creating music.
English society believed that science was a man’s work, and that made it extremely difficult for Ada to get what she needed as a woman. The Royal Society denied her access to their prestigious library and the resources it contained, despite the fact that her far less talented husband was a member. Though Lovelace devoted her life to science and mathematics, she still had a little bit of her father’s flare. Her paper should have been dry and boring, but she could not help but add her own poetic license. Her knack for the dramatic helped make what should have been a bunch of mathematical mumbo-jumbo something that people could actually understand.
Science was not the only so-called “manly” pursuit that Lovelace enjoyed. She also indulged in gambling, and it eventually got out of control. In the 1840s, she apparently blew over £3,000 betting on horse racing—approximately £300,000 in today’s money. Ada’s love of mathematics and gambling eventually came together with disastrous consequences. She fell in with a group of men who made increasingly large bets, and Lovelace came up with an ingenious plan: she would create a mathematical model to “game” the system and dupe her friends out of their money. The only problem was that her model failed spectacularly. Lovelace bet the farm and lost. Up to this point, she had managed to keep her gambling losses a secret, but this hole was too big to cover up. She was finally forced to come clean to her husband, who was, understandably, furious.
The health problems that had plagued Ada throughout her life returned, and she spent months on end traveling from one doctor to the next. Unfortunately, this was Victorian England, and medicine was more of an art than a science. She tried everything, but her health just kept getting worse and worse, leaving her in terrible pain at all times and requiring her to take opiates to try to numb the agony. By the 1850s, Ada’s doctors had an explanation for her deteriorating health: she had cancer, and it was too late to save her. As she grew more and more frail, she became increasingly obsessed with the mechanics of the human brain. She dreamed of creating a mathematical model for the structure of the brain—a “calculus of the nervous system,” as she called it. In this pursuit, she visited scientist Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn about his pioneering experiments with electricity. She never did achieve her goal, but it occupied her thoughts throughout her final years.
Ada Lovelace ended up having a strained relationship with her children, just as she had had with her own mother. Her eldest son, Byron, left to join the Navy and never contacted his family again. Ada held out hope that her son had traveled to America and was living a good life, but she never learned the heartbreaking truth. After deserting the Navy, Byron ended up working in a shipyard in England, where he died unmarried and childless at just 26 years old. Ada was not particularly close with her daughter, either, though Annabella did a little bit better for herself than her brother; she moved to the Middle East, where she became one of the world’s best-known breeders of Arabian horses. Only Ada’s youngest child, Ralph, stayed close to home. He inherited the family title and lived out the rest of his life on their estates.
By 1852, there was nothing that could be done to save the 36-year-old Ada Lovelace. In one of her final correspondences, she mourned for life, writing, “I begin to understand death, which is going on quietly and gradually every minute, and will never be a thing of one particular moment.” Though her mother had never really been there for her in life, Lady Byron completely took over Ada’s final months, and she spent them like she had spent her childhood—almost entirely alone. Soon, her husband abandoned her as well. On August 30, 1852, Lovelace called William to her bedside. She confessed something to him on that day, a deep and dark secret that she had never revealed before, and when William heard it, he left her bedside and never returned.
There is a theory among some historians that Ada confessed to her husband that she had been unfaithful during their marriage. As for who the candidate was, one of Ada’s relationships in particular was strangely secretive. Remember Andrew Crosse, the scientist whom Ada visited to learn more about electricity? She had kept in touch with his son, John, since 1844, and he was one of the few people she demanded to see as she lay dying. He had also agreed to destroy their correspondence after her death, and she bequeathed to him all of her father’s possessions.
Though her husband abandoned her and her mother isolated her, Ada Lovelace still hung on for three more agonizing months. Among the people who managed to visit her before she died was her friend Charles Dickens, who read a passage from one of his novels at her request. She finally passed away on November 27, 1852, of uterine cancer. In a surprising move, one of Ada Lovelace’s last requests was to be buried next to Lord Byron, the father she had never met. Maybe it was out of genuine affection for the man, or maybe it was just one last middle finger to her mother. She was buried in an extremely small ceremony. Neither Charles Babbage, her longtime friend, nor her own mother attended the ceremony.
Ada Lovelace may only have lived for 36 years, but in that short time, she managed to leave a profound legacy. It took 100 years for her work to be fully appreciated, although Ada had no doubts that, in time, everyone would know of her genius. In a letter to Babbage, Ada had written, “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.”
What aspects of Ada Lovelace’s complex life and relationship with her mother do you find most compelling, and would you like to explore further?
