William Nightingale, like Babbage and Ada, was fascinated by mathematical games and puzzles. It is fair to guess that it was this member of the Nightingale clan to whom Ada frequently referred within the private correspondence that she now embarked upon with Charles Babbage.
Writing his memoirs after the deaths of both Ada and her mother, Babbage recalled a project he had developed during the 1840s for an automaton that might be able to play intellectual games of skill. (Tic-tac-toe, along with chess and draughts, were offered as examples.) If he could produce such an ingenious and entertaining machine, might it be sold to the public at large, thus raising money for the Analytical Engine to be built without all the burden entailed by outside investment? ‘A friend, to whom I had early communicated the idea, entertained great hopes of its pecuniary success.’ Just who could this hopeful friend of Babbage’s have been, if not the entrepreneurial Ada Lovelace?
On 30 September 1848, Ada made her first known reference to ongoing discussions with Babbage about ‘Games, and notations for them’. The inventor had just been staying at Ashley Combe and Ada sweetly told him in this same letter that even the rain-filled skies ‘are weeping unceasingly over yr. departure’. At the end of an especially affectionate letter, almost as an afterthought, she urged Babbage to get in touch with the Nightingales, who had apparently begged him to write to them. Three weeks later, Ada wrote again, this time with reference to a favourable article that had just appeared in the Athenaeum about Babbage’s engines. (‘Let the Government answer it, if they can!’) This time, Lady Lovelace alluded not only to letters from ‘the Birds’, who threatened to be ‘angry’ and fail to ‘sing’ if he did not respond, but to the potentially lucrative system upon which Babbage and she were now at work.
You say nothing of Tic-tac-toe – in yr last. I am alarmed lest it should never be accomplished. I want you to complete something; especially if the something is likely to produce silver & golden somethings . . .
The hope of financial gain could hardly have been more clear.
It was towards the end of 1848, on 19 December, that Ada first mentioned sending Babbage ‘a book which I think will interest you’. On 11 February 1849, she promised to send him ‘the book’ (always underlined) to keep during the three days that she would be spending with her mother. On 27 February, Ada wrote again, hoping that Babbage had understood something she had written out very clearly, for his particular interest. On 20 September, while urging him to come and spend an entire month on their beautiful Somersetshire estate, Ada reminded her friend of the need for ‘the new cover’ (underlined) for the book. If she came straight up to London from Surrey, would he like to travel to Somerset with her, by the new express train?
There is a great deal I want to explain to you, which can’t be by letter. I can’t decipher satisfactorily some indications in the work in question.
Seven days later, Ada expressed relief that Babbage had turned up, however unexpectedly, while the Lovelaces were entertaining at their London home. He was just back from Paris, which she considered ‘a most excellent step’. She had been ‘particularly glad’ to see him, whatever the circumstances; it was ‘a very good thing as regarded the book’.
Many theories have been produced about that mysterious book, as well as about the role that was being played as a messenger by Mary Wilson, Babbage’s former servant. But the fact that this very same book was shown at a later date to Sir David Brewster, an eminently respectable Scottish scientist who took a keen interest in the Analytical Engine, suggests that there was nothing especially sinister afoot. That said, it seems reasonable to assume that a plan for making money was being discussed, and that it involved the use of a mathematical system – to which both Ada and Babbage were contributing ideas – in a book that they shunted back and forth (with Mary Wilson as its carrier). Probably, Lovelace knew what was afoot. Lady Byron, known for her aversion to any form of gambling or speculation, was kept in the dark.
Back in 1846, Lovelace’s sister Hester Crauford had written to Lady Byron from her marital home near Pisa, to hope that Ada had recovered well enough ‘to let her quicksilver loose again’. The Craufords’ own worries about health had always been focused upon Sir George (it was for this reason that the couple had gone abroad), but the news that reached the Lovelaces in the spring of 1848 was of Hester. Already the mother of a little boy called Charles, Hester had died while giving birth to her second son. Characteristically, Lady Hester King wasted no time in informing the heartbroken widower that she herself had never recovered from the shock of her daughter’s heartless defection. Replying with as civil a letter as he could muster, Sir George explained how greatly he had adored his wife. ‘A heart like Hester’s, I never did find, and never shall find again upon earth,’ he wrote on 12 April, while asking his mother-in-law to believe that Hester had never hated her, as the bitter old woman now claimed. ‘It was from the house that she was estranged,’ Crauford vainly pleaded. He received no response.
Ada was desolate. She had loved Hester Crauford like a sister. Anguish of a similar
