Wheatstone knew what he was talking about. His father, a maker of musical instruments, had taught music to Princess Charlotte. (Wheatstone himself invented a primitive form of the concertina and later presented one to Ada.) Acting in his role as the first professor of experimental philosophy (or applied science), at King’s College London, the ingenious Wheatstone had contrived an electrically triggered cannon salute across the Thames to greet Prince Albert on his first visit to the college in 1843. The crushing failure of that dramatic salvo from the new riverside Shot Tower (the galvanic battery that should have triggered it was damp) bore unexpected fruit: it caused the sympathetic prince to ask the inventor about his technique. A friendship formed. By the time of his November discussion with Ada, Wheatstone understood how intensely frustrated Albert felt about his exclusion from the world of English science. The prince longed to contribute. ‘Wheatstone says none but some woman can put him in the right way, & open the door to him towards all he desires,’ Ada reported to her husband, before explaining the plan that their friend had unfolded to her.
. . . if I can take a certain standing in the course of the next few years, the Prince would on some occasion speak to me about science, and that in that case, if I happily seize the moment, I may do for science an inestimable benefit; for all the Prince wants is a sensible advisor & suggester, to indicate to him the channels for his exercising a scientific influence.
The idea of acting as a royal advisor was intriguing. Closer to Ada’s own line of interest was the fact that Charles Wheatstone’s closest friend in the world of science was the very man she was currently urging to become her collaborator. Electricity was what quickened Ada’s interest now. Nobody in England knew more about electricity in 1844 than Michael Faraday.
Faraday had first seen Ada Lovelace back in 1839, the year in which Alfred Chalon’s prettified portrait of the young countess was being displayed in the windows of London’s most fashionable print shops. Faraday liked the look of her so much that the superstar of electrical science persuaded Charles Babbage to secure an image for him from the sitter herself.
It was Babbage who gave the relationship its first friendly nudge. Observing Faraday and Ada deep in conversation at one of his soirées on 9 September 1843, he sat down that same night to send Faraday the recently published Menabrea ‘Notes’, while adding a glowing tribute to ‘that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it’.
Silence followed.
In October 1844, Ada took the initiative into her own hands. Presenting herself to Faraday as ‘the bride of science’, she asked permission, not only to work alongside him, but to become his soulmate. ‘For many years,’ she informed the startled scientist, ‘I have desired to be admitted to intercourse & friendship with you; & to become in some respects your disciple.’
Ada was not exaggerating. She had been hearing about Michael Faraday, a man old enough to be her father, since childhood. Ada was eleven when Faraday began giving his famous Christmas lectures for the young at the Royal Institution. At the time when little Ada was first pondering the span of a rainbow’s arc, Faraday was already experimenting with electromagnetism. Self-taught and with no formal knowledge of mathematics, Faraday was the principal advisor on electricity and magnetism for Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Faraday’s name appeared at least fifteen times over in Somerville’s index. (Babbage, by contrast, appeared just once.)
‘I have a spell of some sort about me . . .’ Ada had boasted to Woronzow Greig in 1841. Returning to the idea in a letter sent to her mother shortly before her first appeal to Faraday, Lady Lovelace remarked again upon ‘the power I know I have over others’. It was to this most Byronic aspect of Ada’s seductive personality that a dazed Michael Faraday was about to be subjected.
The silence which had ensued after their first meeting at Babbage’s home was partly due to a crisis in Faraday’s personal life. A nervous breakdown had been followed by the enigmatic dismissal of himself and members of his family from the strict Sandemanian sect in which Faraday himself had long served as a respected elder. (The rupture was serious; Faraday was not reappointed for sixteen years.) The feyness apparent in Ada’s first overture may have appealed to a man who, while reading the Bible, marked out the passage in Daniel that states: ‘And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people . . .’ More likely, Michael Faraday, a keen admirer of Lord Byron’s poetry, was genuinely impressed by Wheatstone’s praise for a young woman who combined imaginative intelligence with what seemed to him (but not John Herschel) to be a first-rate mathematical mind.*
Faraday may have been intrigued by Ada’s background and her blandishments, but he was not to be so easily conquered as William Carpenter. Faraday had recently turned down a request from the elderly and eminent Maria Edgeworth to visit his home. Ada was firmly informed that he was not well enough for collaborative endeavours. Neither did Faraday share her declared belief in the bond between religion and science: ‘there is no philosophy [science] in my religion’. However, where many would have laughed at Ada’s proclaimed desire to become ‘High-Priestess of God’s works as manifested on this earth’, Faraday received the news of her ambition with pleasing gravity. Really, there could be no doubt that ‘with your deep devotion to your subject you will attain it,’ he wrote back in
