* Declining on 29 March 1851, on account of ‘poor George’s health’ (although the invitation to Horsley was planned for the following winter), Lucy Byron asked Ada to tell her the truth about something. It’s unclear whether Lucy had heard rumours about buying Newstead, but it is noteworthy that the Wildmans also turned down the Lovelaces’ invitation. (Lovelace Byron Papers.)
* On 22 August 1851, Ada asked Charles Babbage to purchase Byron’s rifle and pistols from one of Augusta Leigh’s sons as ‘a favour to us’. Nine days later, following a day’s visit from Ralph to Horsley Towers, she told her mother that the boy needed her own care. (‘Set a Byron to rule a Byron! – For Ralph is a Byron – three-quarters at least.’) Commenting on Augusta Leigh’s death to Annabella six weeks later (15 October), Ada ominously alluded to her own dread of ‘that horrible struggle, which I fear is in the Byron blood’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
R
AINBOW
’
S
E
ND
(1851–2)
‘I am spellbound until my offspring is complete, however imperfect.’
ADA LOVELACE TO LADY BYRON,
10 AUGUST 1851
‘I have also an awful amount of writing to do at present.’
ADA LOVELACE TO LADY BYRON,
21 APRIL 1852
To have created, aged only twenty-seven, a boldly persuasive and articulate account of the possibilities that Charles Babbage’s unbuilt machine could offer was a splendid achievement, but it is important to remember that the celebrated Menabrea ‘Notes’ seem visionary only to us, enlightened retrospectively by Alan Turing’s generous appreciation of a brilliant predecessor. Within her own lifetime, Ada’s ascendant star was quick to fade. By 1851, confronting her own mortality at the age of thirty-five, the need to prove herself as a serious player in a world dominated by men had become overwhelming. Scientific recognition of Ada was what the Hen and her own loyal Crow had always desired. It was this mark of excellence that she herself most craved.
Again and again, in the stream of letters that Lady Lovelace wrote to Lady Byron during the last full year of her life, she referred to the excitement she felt about her continuing work on ‘light-filled drops’. It was in connection to this work that Ada, during the summer of 1851, pursued a new collegiate friendship with an eminent Scottish scientist. Sir David Brewster’s discovery of the kaleidoscope, back in 1816, was an offshoot from a lifetime dedicated to studying the properties of light.* Both Ada and her mother had known the elderly Scotsman for years (he was close both to Babbage and Mary Somerville), but it was only in 1851 that Ada began to take a particular interest in his work.
The idea may have come from her husband, always an eager supporter of his wife’s scientific work. On 17 May, Lord Lovelace, Dr Locock, Charles Wheatstone, Adolphe Quetelet (a highly regarded French astronomer) and David Brewster had all attended a dinner in the Royal Society’s splendid rooms at Burlington House.
Ten days later, the countess asked Charles Babbage to bring Brewster to see her at home, in order that she might converse with him and Adolphe Quetelet. Ada was therefore already in contact with Brewster when she suddenly decided to resume her old connection with Michael Faraday: ‘you see what I do – ever as you like with me,’ Faraday wrote affectionately on 10 June in a letter that also expressed concern about news of Lady Lovelace’s weakened health. On 21 June, Ada told Lady Byron that she was working hard on ‘the drops’ and hoping that the great scientist would visit ‘to give me his ideas on the subject’. The fact that she entreated 13-year-old Annabella on the following day to write and thank Mr Faraday for his kind gift to her of a book (it was a new primer on electricity) suggests that Lady Lovelace was unusually anxious to please him. A few weeks later, on 2 August, she told her mother that Faraday’s reliance upon experiments meant that he, more than Sir David Brewster, would be able to assist her researches on ‘the drops’.
So, what was it that Ada was working on in her race for time against the painful cancer that was insidiously spreading up through her cervix and into her womb? What were the ‘prismatic drops full of bright & various hues’ to which she was still referring on 29 October 1851, when she entreated her mother to believe that she might yet achieve something, that she ‘had not lived in vain’?
Surprisingly little attention has been given to this last phase of Ada’s involvement with the world of science. And yet, to judge by the letters that she and her mother exchanged, that research was intended to crown the summit of Ada’s brief career. The most likely explanation of her ‘drops’ is that Ada had turned back to the phenomenon that had captivated her as a light-obsessed child, when she wrote to William Frend to ask if he could explain how a rainbow’s arc was formed. Aged thirty-five, Ada knew that a rainbow is made by the angle from the viewer at which ‘white’ multicoloured sunlight is refracted into its separate components at the back of a drop of rain. She knew that rainbows brighten as they approach the ground because of the lengthening of the raindrops; she knew, too, that the visible arc is part of a circle.
All of this, by the year 1851, was current knowledge. Ada’s particular interest in the work of David Brewster (whose speciality was optics and the polarisation of light) and of Michael Faraday (who had demonstrated in 1845 that electromagnetism can twist a polarised ray of light shone through thick glass) suggests that her own study was related to the significance of the way raindrops refract the sun’s light. It’s impossible to be certain, but Ada Lovelace may well have been intuitively feeling
