Everything appeared to connect. On 2 August, Ada told her mother that she thought it better to involve Faraday than Brewster because their friend William Rutter’s experiments were closer to his field. William Rutter was one of the ten men of science who in 1850 had founded the British Meteorological Society at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. David Brewster and Adolphe Quetelet were among the earliest members; Lady Byron and her daughter were also swiftly nominated by John Drew, a 41-year-old astronomer and geologist from Southampton. (Drew knew Lady Byron through her educational work; he had become England’s youngest ever headmaster, aged seventeen, in 1826, at the Southampton school to which Annabella would send her grandson, Ralph King.)
The letters which Ada wrote to her mother during July 1851 constantly referred to the fact that she herself was working alongside William Rutter. On 5 August, she finalised plans with her mother for Rutter to conduct a privately held experiment during her own August visit to Brighton. It was agreed that a dinnertime discussion of the experiment would take place afterwards at Lady Byron’s home on Marine Parade.
And then comes Ada’s curveball. Firstly, she brought not Michael Faraday but David Brewster as her companion on this scientific mission. Secondly, while experiments were indeed carried out, they were not of the kind that Ada’s letters about light-filled drops might reasonably lead us to expect.
Brewster and his wife were paying an October visit to Hartwell House, the family home of astronomer John Lee, when he finally recorded what he had witnessed three months earlier at Brighton. On 6 August, Lady Byron and her daughter had taken him to observe the movements of a pear-shaped ball of wax when suspended from William Rutter’s fingers by a silk thread. Under Rutter’s grasp, the ball rotated from left to right; dangled from the hand of a woman, the movement was reversed. And what, the shrewd old Scotsman wondered, would occur if a blindfold were in place? But Brewster himself was far from sceptical. The experiment had greatly intrigued him, and he described it with scientific care, while drawing a parallel to the prevalent rage for spirit rapping and levitation.
William Rutter’s experiment was less fey than Brewster’s description suggests. Its purpose was not to indicate the presence of mysterious spirits, but to demonstrate the power of electromagnetic forces within the human body. It’s possible that Ada – whose interest in creating what she had grandly named ‘a calculus of the nervous system’ dated back to the mid-1840s – may have believed that she could draw upon this inner source of energy to overcome the physical challenges to her weakening frame.
While the link between magnetism and Ada’s research into light-filled drops remains unclear, it is evident that she considered Rutter’s demonstration a success. On 1 September, she reassured her mother that the ‘drops’ were still flowing well and that she would soon be able to offer ‘a certain solid reality, upon which to judge, rather than to hope’. Lady Byron had already hoped for far too long, as her daughter acknowledged with a wistful plea: ‘Have patience . . . yet a little longer.’
Two months passed. On 29 October 1851, a poignant letter from Ada followed a brief bedside discussion with her mother. Apparently, Lady Byron’s words had given ‘great encouragement’ and a promise was made that she might yet, ‘by and bye’, see ‘certain productions’. But Ada’s mind was clouded by pain-killing drugs. Her brave assurances shifted into a strange vision of herself presiding over regiments of numbers, ‘marching in irresistible power to the sound of Music. Is not this very mysterious?’
As Ada felt her grasp upon life slipping away, her attachment to her children grew stronger. Ralph, still living under his grandmother’s supervision at Brighton and Southampton, aroused grave concern in November 1851 when he caught scarlet fever, one of the major killers in Victorian times. Lady Byron’s attachment to her youngest grandchild was never more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that she herself arranged to watch over and nurse him, in her own bedroom, until the highly contagious fever had abated. Ada, helplessly fretting at a distance, urged his sister to write Ralph cheering letters, while wondering at the capricious fate that allowed the lives of both her sons to be threatened when she herself was so ill.
Byron Ockham’s letters from abroad sometimes took as long as three months to arrive. When they came, poor Ada shuddered at the dangers to which his parents had exposed their oldest boy. She was not to know that Viscount Ockham, who was still only fifteen, was relating his exploits with considerably more verve than accuracy. Promises to bring home a collection of scalps (‘What a very odd mind Byron’s is!’ Ada commented to her mother on 13 November 1851) were based on his having seen such trophies being brandished at officers by a group of marauding ‘natives’ during his stay at Vancouver Island. A dramatic account of his near shipwreck at Mazatlán failed to mention that the Daphne, when a hurricane ripped away her sails and snapped her masts in half, had been safely anchored in harbour.
Byron’s adventures were, nevertheless, remarkable. In September 1851, a month before the Mexican storm, the Daphne had sailed along North America’s western coastline from Vancouver to San Francisco. The California Gold Rush was then at its zenith. The wooden city of some 30,000 citizens was still being rebuilt after a summer fire had razed a quarter of its flimsy structures to the ground, but brothels and drinking saloons were still flourishing in the town for which the term gold-digger was coined, and where dashing, gun-toting
