To Annabella’s grieving friends, it seemed as if the delicate, waxen-faced little widow had reached the end of her journey. They should have known better. If we look for one quality shared by Lord Byron, his wife and his daughter, it is the ability to take us by surprise. Byron could shift from love to hate within the space of a sentence. Ada and Annabella could lie at death’s door on one day and be shaping destinies on the next. By mid-November, Lady Byron was well enough to visit Ockham and form a view of her grandchildren’s progress. Ada, while persuaded that the ‘many exciting expeditions, and irregular amusements’ devised by Dr Carpenter had proved the ‘very making’ of her firstborn, was less than impressed by the tutor’s influence over her daughter: (‘her spirits are too much for her; she speaks in a coarse vulgar voice, walks with a heavy masculine brusque step . . . is nothing short of perfectly odious’.)* Lady Byron, who was extremely fond of her little namesake, disagreed. ‘I think Dr Carpenter is on the right track,’ Annabella announced. By way of reward for his good work, she offered to pay the tutor a thousand-pound bonus in lieu of lost lecture work, and to fund necessary renovations to his house at Ockham. (Carpenter had complained that it was both poky and damp.) Always shrewd, Lady Byron made it clear that the money would be paid only when Dr Carpenter had satisfactorily completed his term of trial.
And Ada? Brilliant, impetuous, magnificently ambitious Ada? It’s hard to withhold admiration from a young woman who resolved to turn her personal battle against debilitating illness into a journey of discovery that would reap benefits for the world. While Charles Darwin would transform the garden of his country home into a vast outdoor laboratory, Ada – increasingly restricted to hobbling around the interior of a bedroom or study for her daily exercise – set out to make a clinical study of her own afflicted body. Writing to her mother in November 1844, Lady Lovelace bravely dwelt upon the value of possessing
a frame so susceptible that it is an experimental laboratory always about me, & inseparable from me. I walk about, not in a Snail-Shell, but in a Molecular Laboratory. This is a new view to take of one’s physical frame, & amply compensates me for all the sufferings, had they been even greater.
Ada had made her anonymous debut in the world of science in the late summer of 1843. By November 1844, Lord Byron’s daughter was known to be the clever young woman who had written the ‘Notes’ expanding upon Menabrea’s description of Babbage’s unbuilt Engine. Mary Somerville had sent compliments upon the clearness with which she had illustrated a very difficult subject (a real homage from the translator of the fiendishly difficult writings of Laplace). Augustus De Morgan had not only written to praise Ada to herself. Answering a question from Lady Byron about his opinion of her daughter’s intellect, De Morgan had boldly stated that Ada was, if the risk to her delicate health could be taken, capable of going beyond them all, of looking into realms of knowledge that were not yet apparent. It was as if De Morgan had intuited the then unimaginable fact that his former pupil would be perceived, over a century later, as the predictor of modern computer technology.
Buoyed by such an encouraging reception, but held back by recurrent ill health, Ada resolved to make a laboratory of her own frail body. But how was it to be done? To whom could she look for help?
By 1844, interest in Babbage’s projected machine was already being overtaken by the growing impact of Michael Faraday’s discovery, back in 1831, of electromagnetic induction, establishing the principles upon which the first electrical generator and transformer could be built. Professor Charles Wheatstone, Faraday’s close friend, had meanwhile developed the first telegraphic system to be put into use in England. By November 1844, the Wheatstone telegraph was already being described as the ‘nervous system’ of the nation. It was an image that chimed precisely with Ada’s bold new plan to use electricity and magnetism to create ‘a calculus of the nervous system’. This was the intriguing proposal that she had submitted to Woronzow Greig on 15 November. Two weeks later, she invited Charles Wheatstone to her home for a discussion that lasted for five hours. It was the possibilities opened up by Wheatstone’s electrical transmission systems – rather than the railway tracks in which her canny mother had started to invest – that had captured Ada Lovelace’s enterprising imagination.
It may have been because Charles Wheatstone did not have to answer for the consequences to Lady Byron (whom he had never met) that he felt less anxiety than Augustus De Morgan about encouraging his protégée – Ada was thirteen years younger than himself – to push her enquiring intelligence to its limits. Ada looked upon her well-received ‘Notes’ as the foundation for a future and much larger career. It was Wheatstone – the instigator and first reader of Ada’s Menabrea translation, the kindly advisor on how best to deal with Babbage’s ill-conceived anonymous preface – who now appeared most eager to assist that career into life.
The connection that Wheatstone wanted Ada to explore was with German science. He had already encouraged her to translate certain papers by Georg Ohm, the German analyser of Wheatstone’s ingenious device for measuring electrical usage. (It is still referred to as ‘the Wheatstone
