In 1836, Crosse performed the infamous experiment that had first caught the interest of the Lovelaces. Mary Shelley, back in 1819, had published Frankenstein, a novel which dared to suggest that a scientifically constructed corpse could be shocked into a state of sensibility. Medical halls and lecture theatres had already offered show-stopping evidence of how electricity could cause a dead man (women’s bodies were never used) to raise an arm, clench a jaw, clasp a hand. Mary Shelley’s fiction raised the stakes by granting Victor Frankenstein’s unfortunate creature the power to feel emotions and to react to the experience of withheld parental love.
Andrew Crosse had done nothing so remarkable, but his discovery nevertheless created a public sensation. Speaking to a local electricity society in 1836, Crosse casually reported the emergence of tiny, living mites after he had dripped a chemical mixture on to electrified red ironstone. To Crosse, a devoutly Christian believer, it seemed clear that the Acarus crossii, as the mites came swiftly to be named, resulted from some unidentified contamination in his process. Simultaneously hailed as a modern Prometheus and hounded by death threats for having dared to challenge the laws of divine creation, the amateur scientist found it impossible to subdue the storm of excitement he had unwittingly provoked. While evidence backed Crosse’s denials (the results of the only attempt to replicate the experiment, conducted under an air-tight bell jar by a surgeon, W. H. Weekes, were never formally confirmed), the idea of spontaneous generation was too alluring to be abandoned. When Robert Chambers began to write Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and to suggest that life could be created in a laboratory, he had Crosse’s experiment in mind. The story of the seemingly life-generating crystals played a small but significant role in the daring survey of modern science that Chambers set before the public in 1844. (The Crosse family were understandably annoyed by this fresh exposure to a publicity they did not welcome.)
It was curiosity about the Acarus crossii that had caused the Lovelaces to escort that inquisitive houseparty to Fyne Court back in 1838. (Four years later, Ada had written to interrogate Crosse about the mysterious mites, but was simply referred to the experiment carried out by Weekes.) Later still, in the autumn of 1843, when Ada was away at Clifton with her mother, the reclusive squire and his younger son, Robert, had ventured back across Exmoor to visit the Lovelaces at Ashley Combe. Crosse’s conversation, according to a disappointed William Lovelace, had proved considerably less sparkling than his enthralling electric experiments had suggested.
Absorbed in embellishing his cliffside palace, Lovelace had been more eager to show off Ashley Combe’s towers and terraces than to listen to Andrew Crosse’s troubles in dealing with a household that could no longer be governed by his invalid wife. The visitor’s slowness of speech was enough to drive a man mad, William groaned to Ada before shifting his letter’s theme to a more engrossing topic: was his dear Bird keeping up her harp practice at Clifton? Never must she forget how much the Crow loved to hear her play.
A year later, Ada herself initiated a correspondence with Andrew Crosse. It was at precisely the same time that she first made contact with Michael Faraday. The countess was seeking any means she could find to further her scientific career, no easy thing in a world that strove to exclude women from any significant activity whatsoever. Ada’s reason for approaching both Crosse and Faraday was that both scientists were known to carry out most of their experiments in private, far from the masculine precincts of lecture theatres and college laboratories. An added bonus in the case of Crosse was the fact that Fyne Court lay less than twenty-five miles from the Lovelaces’ home-grown Somerset Alhambra.
To Andrew Crosse, as to Michael Faraday, Ada Lovelace indicated the seriousness of her own commitment by identifying herself as a ‘bride of science’. A reference to her wish to practise galvanising frogs’ legs may have suggested that Ada was in some ways a little behind the times; such experiments had been carried out forty years earlier. Ada’s interest was nevertheless patently sincere, while the Menabrea ‘Notes’ – these were sent to Crosse twice over, once by Ada and again by her proud husband – offered evidence of a luminously intelligent and adventurous mind.
It was for quite another reason that Lord Lovelace encouraged both Ada’s correspondence with Andrew Crosse and the plan that she hatched in November 1844 to pay a personal visit to Fyne Court. Devoted though the couple were at that time (Ada told the Hen that her dear Crow’s nature grew more beautiful every year, while Lovelace wrote to Lady Byron of his longing that everybody should recognise the nobility and even the ‘grandeur’ of the Bird’s glorious mind), the earl was an orderly man. His wife’s undisciplined habits drove him almost to distraction. Respecting Ada immensely for her courage and independence, her husband nonetheless thought it admirable that, after sacking an unsatisfactory maid, his wife briefly chose to fend for herself. He thought it splendid that Ada now packed her own travelling cases, mended and even made her own clothes, dressed and laced herself and even – when ill – prepared her own modest supper in a saucepan hung over
