* Ada’s suggestion was less insulting than it appears to have sounded to a furious Medora. In France, dentistry was regarded as an art that conferred upon its practitioners a high degree of social status. The dentist whom Ada named was French.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
M
Y
F
AIR
I
NTERPRETRESS
(1843–4)
Charles Babbage was a busy man and, despite his truculent manner, he was a popular one. In February 1843, he received, according to his own calculations, thirteen invitations for every day of the month. Among them, one of the most charmingly insistent came from Ada Lovelace. Hester King (‘so happy that I can scarcely hold my pen’, wrote Hester to Robert and Louisa Noel) was about to be married to Sir George Crauford. The wedding was to be held at Ockham, with a honeymoon to follow at Ashley Combe. Lady Byron was staying and nobody would complete the party more perfectly, Ada pleaded, than their own dear Charles Babbage himself. Would he come for a week?
or if you really cannot (tho I am sure you can, if you will) stay so long, then pray come for the night even . . . we all much desire your presence. For although our party for the occasion is very small & quiet, Miss King & ourselves feel that your long friendship with all of us, with myself most particularly, makes you especially to be remembered & wished for. So pray consider this & that weddings do not happen twice.
Yours ever,
AAL
Ada Lovelace – although her accuracy in dating correspondence can never be trusted even to be within the right year – appears to have written to Babbage on 6 February 1843. The following day, Babbage noted that he met with the young countess under what he succinctly described as ‘new circumstances’. Those changed conditions, it is fair to guess, related to Ada’s recent translation and to Babbage’s proposal as to what she should do next.
Babbage had always been his own worst enemy, and it was a trait he demonstrated with peculiar force in 1842. Visiting England at the beginning of the year to attend the christening of Queen Victoria’s first son, the King of Prussia was eager to inspect English technology. Urgently invited to the Royal Society on 30 January for an especially arranged morning meeting with this potential royal sponsor for his unbuilt machine, Babbage failed to show up. Later that year, when Ada was doing her best to bring Babbage together with journalists and editors who might drum up interest in the Analytical Engine – just as Dionysius Lardner, back in 1834, had done for the Difference Engine in the Edinburgh Review – the capricious inventor once again stayed away.
Babbage’s excuse to Ada for not joining her on this occasion was that he needed to keep himself free for ‘a possible discussion with Sir R. Peel’. Babbage’s behaviour during his meetings with the overworked Tory prime minister proved disastrous. Instead of allowing Sir Robert time to consider whether he could offer financial support from the government for Babbage to start building his second machine (its estimated size was equivalent to a small steam engine), Babbage began to hector him. Back in 1822, Peel had personally recommended a government subsidy for developing the Difference Engine. In November 1842, after two encounters with a furious Babbage, Peel folded his hands and walked out. There would be no further discussions.
Meanwhile, Count Luigi Menabrea, a brilliant young military engineer who had attended the 1840 Turin conference (where he may have heard Babbage lecture and certainly examined drawings of the unbuilt Analytical Engine), had published in a Swiss journal a lucid account of its projected appearance, workings and capability. (The choice of a French publication was reasonable at a time when French was still the common language of scientific reports; Menabrea himself spoke French well enough to serve later as an ambassador to Paris.)
Menabrea’s account, covering twenty-three pages, appeared in the respected Bibliothéque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Richard Taylor, editor of a London journal specialising in academic articles from abroad, approached not Babbage but his diminutive and fiercely ambitious friend Charles Wheatstone, when seeking a translator for the Italian’s work. Charles Wheatstone took the commission straight to Ada. To Babbage, the result of that meeting came in February 1843 as a complete – and seemingly delightful – surprise.
For Ada, Charles Wheatstone’s timing was excellent. Her health had been bad during 1842 (Hester King’s letters to Robert Noel’s wife in Dresden mentioned that Ada was suffering from a new digestive problem, following several months of undefined respiratory difficulties ‘which caused us all a good deal of uneasiness’). Ada’s health had not been improved by the news that Medora, out of funds and reduced to borrowing from the servants whom Ada had innocently recruited, had done a bunk from her rented chateau in Toulon and gone to seek legal redress in Paris. (The haste of her departure was underlined by the shocking information that Miss Leigh had undertaken the journey on public transport without wearing a hat.)
A distraction both from illness and her troublesome half-sister was always welcome to Ada. It’s hard to imagine any diversion that could have appealed to her more vividly than the proposal which Charles Wheatstone placed before her at St James’s Square.
Eight years earlier, back in the autumn of 1834, Ada had been an excited witness to Babbage’s discussions with Mary Somerville of a new and entirely different form of machine to the old and uncompleted Difference Engine. Since then, as Ada’s friendship with Babbage progressed, she had often declared her hopes of helping to bring this later project to completion. Talking with Wheatstone, she agreed upon the urgent need to present Menabrea’s description of what was by then known as the Analytical Engine to an English audience. Taylor had issued an end of July deadline. What mattered now was that an impartial and informed report should be
