Ada was clearly apprehensive about the inventor’s reaction. A final sentence wondered whether he would now dismiss ‘the lady-fairy’ from his service. The following day, Ada wrote again, to backtrack. Perhaps it would be better after all if Babbage ignored the whole idea and behaved ‘as if nothing had passed’.
And so he did. A note in his personal records stated, without offering an explanation, that Lady Lovelace’s proposals had been rejected. Babbage did, however, back down about his preface. The memoir and ‘Notes’ were published (prefaceless) on 25 August 1843 in an edition of 250 copies, of which Ada received 100 and Babbage fifty. By 9 September, the inventor was almost ready to resume his old, teasing relationship with the young woman he now addressed as ‘the Enchantress of Number’. Almost, but not quite. Of course, he would love to visit her down at Ashley Combe, Babbage wrote, and perhaps he ought to bring along Arbogast’s Du calcul des dérivations so that the two of them could discuss ‘that horrible problem – the three bodies’.
The allusion to the French mathematician was deliberately malicious. Ada had referred to Arbogast in her ‘Notes’. By offering to bring along the book, Babbage was hinting that she hadn’t read it. But her tussle with Babbage had taught Ada to give as good as she got. While informing the inventor that she (naturally) already possessed Arbogast’s book and would be happy to discuss it with him, Ada passed along a glowing personal tribute to her ‘Notes’ from Augustus De Morgan. ‘I never expected that he would review my crude young composition so favourably,’ Ada remarked with just a hint of menace. De Morgan had powerful friends and Babbage took the point. ‘You should have written an original paper,’ Babbage grovelled on 12 September. ‘The postponement of that will however only render it more perfect . . . Ever my fair interpretress, your faithful slave . . .’
By the following year, all bitterness had evaporated and Babbage and Ada had safely resumed their easy, quasi-familial role. But it was Charles Wheatstone, not Babbage, who was willing to spend five hours in November 1844 advising Ada on how best to proceed in her scientific endeavours.
Writing to William later that same day, Ada sounded both flattered and excited. ‘Wheatstone has given me some very striking counsels,’ she told her husband on 25 November 1844. Ada had apparently been planning to expand her observations on the Analytical Engine, but Wheatstone dissuaded her. ‘Don’t be vexed at this,’ Ada reassured William, ‘a subject is fixed on instead, so it will make no difference, & I can as easily do one as the other . . .’
Here, in her immediate readiness to apply her mind to a new project, is evidence of the degree to which Ada had – as she proudly claimed to Woronzow Greig – become a truly professional person. The boost to her confidence of seeing her own clear work in print, with herself identified as the author, had been immense. All that she now lacked was the means to transform herself into a scientist. It seemed, following her conversation with Wheatstone, that help might be at hand.
* Menabrea had written in his concluding paragraph that – in literal translation – ‘all of the parts, and all of the wheelwork, of which the immense apparatus is composed, have been studied as has their action, but they have not yet been combined’. Ada restated him thus: ‘The plans have been arranged for all the various parts, and for all the wheelwork, which compose this immense apparatus, and their action studied; but these have not yet been fully combined together in the drawings and mechanical notation.’ Progress was being stressed. Ada’s other and far more significant footnotes were added at a later stage (Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, 1843, p. 670).
* Ada’s quotes within this chapter are referenced in the text from the original article page numbers.
* In 2008, Stephen Wolfram’s ‘Mathematica’ program was used to compute the ten millionth Bernoulli number (one that would have taken Babbage’s Engine several thousand years to achieve). It took ‘Mathematica’ a little less than six days. Ada was, of course, using Bernoulli numbers only as a way of showing off the powers of the engine.
† No precise figure for what that cost would have been is currently available.
* Recently returned from living in Europe, 31-year-old Frederick Knight was enchanted by Ada. It was probably Knight that Ada was thinking of on 27 June 1850, when she told Woronzow Greig that she ‘had not a leg to stand on’ some seven or eight years earlier. Advice to behave with more discretion had been ignored, for ‘I was then young & plucky & had no mind to be put down about anything at all.’ (Betty Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (Strawberry Press, 1992), pp. 359–60).
* A granite headstone, engraved with her maiden name and a quotation from Byron, has only since 1960 marked Medora’s previously obscure grave at Lapeyre, a rural hamlet in south-west France. Married to a soldier’s servant, Georges Taillefer, in 1847, the year after giving birth to a son, Medora died in 1849 of smallpox, aged thirty-five. Her daughter, Marie, ejected from the convent where she had been placed, was subsequently spotted (in 1872) gambling at Baden-Baden by George Eliot. (The novelist made memorable use of this scene in the opening of Daniel Deronda.) Medora’s son, Elie Taillefer, entered the church and worked in an area local to Lapeyre,
