By 1833, matters had stalled in a deadly stalemate. A government representative pointed out that two British battleships could have been built for the £15,000 that had already been loaned to Mr Babbage. The embittered inventor retorted that he had invested more than twice that amount himself, subsidising an invention which – unlike James Watt’s steam engine – had been developed without any prototype, as the production of a single brilliant mind: his own.
The plain fact was that by the beginning of 1834, Babbage’s glorious machine remained unbuilt. Only a tiny portion of his projected invention was on display for potential investors to inspect on the night (19 March 1834) when Ada paid a second visit to the inventor’s Dorset Street home.
Beauty, rank or intellect were declared by the attractive second wife of one scientist (Andrew Crosse) to be the sole criteria for joining Mr Babbage’s Saturday soirées. Wealth – enough to fund an unbuilt machine – was an asset that could buy anyone a ticket of entrance. Ada, bright, aristocratic and appealingly youthful, was the only child of a woman widely known to be immensely rich.
Eager to please, Babbage began by introducing one arresting young woman to another: the expressive-eyed and attitude-striking ‘Silver Lady’, who balanced an animated bird upon her outstretched fingers, was a gleaming automaton that he had rescued from destruction and painstakingly repaired for display as an amusing curiosity. Did Miss Byron wish to guess which turban the Lady would wear for the next soirée? (Babbage strove to amuse his favoured female guests by making small changes in the Lady’s attire.) But Ada – to the inventor’s astonishment – showed no interest in her host’s pretty automaton. All she cared about was the neatly clicking combination of wheels and cogs tucked away within Mr Babbage’s back-room sanctum.
Ada’s evident preference for a piece of machinery to a pretty automaton seemed remarkable to those who witnessed her March visit to Babbage’s home. Sophia Frend later described how, ‘young as she was’, Ada had immediately grasped the concept of its operation. More importantly, with an intuitive appreciation of what was to come, she instantly saw ‘the great beauty of the invention’.
March 1834 marked the birth of Ada’s deep interest in Charles Babbage and his work. In June, she attended a lecture in which Dr Dionysius Lardner stressed the urgent need for funds to complete Babbage’s remarkable machine. Nevertheless, credit is also due to Lady Byron who – during the very difficult summer that followed upon her daughter’s attempted elopement – had herself conducted Ada on a brief visit to Dorset Street. It may have been during this earlier visit, paid in June 1833, that an attentive Sophia Frend was struck by the young girl’s interest in engineering. Mary Somerville had been more interested in hearing Lady Byron’s views – and Annabella (expressing her opinion that June to both Mrs Somerville and Dr King) did not disappoint her.
We both went to see the thinking machine (for so it seems) last Monday. It raised several Nos. to the 2nd and 3rd Powers, and extracted the root of a quadratic equation – I had but faint glimpses of the principles by which it worked. [Babbage had explained its ability to count regularly to 10,000.] There was a sublimity in the views thus opened of the ultimate results of intellectual power.
Clearly, Annabella had grasped the machine’s capabilities. Nevertheless, the praises which Mrs Somerville lavished that summer upon the really exceptional elegance of dear Lady Byron’s own wonderful understanding of the Difference Engine were suspiciously obsequious. Mrs Somerville was a good friend to Babbage and she knew the financial quandary in which he was trapped. Quite possibly, she was flattering someone whom she thought might be persuaded to invest in the unfinished machine. Mary Somerville was not lacking in guile.
Ada had inherited two of her father’s most dangerous qualities: changeability and the ability to manufacture a persona. The Ada who wrote to Dr King and Mary Somerville that summer of 1834 was entirely under the spell of Charles Babbage’s machine. ‘I am afraid that when a machine, or a lecture, or anything of the kind, come[s] in my way, I have no regard for time, space or any other ordinary obstacles,’ Ada wrote to Mary Somerville on 8 July.
Lady Byron, knowing her daughter better, remained sceptical about the depth of Ada’s new passion. On 26 May, for the second year running, Annabella had asked Harriet Siddons’s brother-in-law, Andrew Combe, to provide her with a phrenological reading of Ada’s skull. For the second time, Combe’s reading confirmed Lady Byron’s fears: her daughter’s intelligence was considerable, but it was of an impetuous and wilful kind. Writing to her ‘dearest kitten’ (Harriet Siddons’s daughter, Lizzie) that summer, Annabella sighed that Ada’s mercurial mind had already darted off in a new direction. ‘Ada does not think anything the world offers worth trouble, except Music.’
Lady Byron was right. The harp – much admired at that time for its romantic ability to reveal the player’s soul through the rippled communion of fingertips and vibrating strings – was the latest object to have caught fickle Ada’s fancy. Who knew what might come next?
Music had never interested Lady Byron. Towards the end of July, she decided to revive
