Faraday had underestimated both Ada’s perseverance and her complete disregard for conventional behaviour. On 24 October (her second letter crossed Faraday’s response to her first), she wrote again, begging the esteemed scientist only to write when it felt comfortable, and to regard her ‘as a mere instrument’. Three days later, she hailed Faraday as ‘one of the few whom it is an honour & privilege to know on this earth’. On 8 November, Ada sought permission to visit ‘your philosopher’s cell, just to look about me there’. More boldly, Ada announced her plan to make Faraday’s own researches into ‘my hinge & centre for an Electrical Article’ that she planned to write in the coming year for the Quarterly Review. (References to other unidentified articles already in the pipeline also appear in this same letter.)
By now, Lady Lovelace had almost achieved her goal. A bewitched Faraday – in a letter that is missing from this intriguing correspondence – seemingly compared the endeavours of himself, a mere ‘tortoise’, to the dazzling ‘elasticity of intellect’ of her ladyship (a tribute that Ada swiftly shared with an impressed Lady Byron). Ada, whose physical diminishment of herself formed a regular part of her epistolary flirtations, now briskly shrank into ‘a little brown bird’ who would sit quietly at his side, but only if Mr Faraday would first promise to let the little bird pay a visit, and promise not to be cross at receiving such a giddy letter. ‘I mean it to make you laugh. At any rate you must, I am sure, perceive that you have a very good-natured creature to deal with in yours most sincerely AAL.’
Ada’s wish was granted. By 15 November, she was even apologising for having failed to make a return visit to his house in Albemarle Street. But she had not yet succeeded in luring him to her home. Faraday made one further feeble effort to escape (‘You drive me to desperation by your invitations. I dare not and must not come and yet . . .’) before he yielded to the siren’s call. ‘We must talk business & science next time,’ a gratified Ada announced on 1 December.
The subject of the meeting which took place on 28 November 1844 (one day before Ada’s lengthy discussion with Wheatstone) remains unknown. Religion is a possibility. Ada’s opening letter had engagingly presented herself as a regular hotch-potch of world faiths, although ‘in truth I cannot be said to be anything but myself’. Perhaps they discussed the extraordinary discrepancy between Ada’s physical fragility and the unfailing vigour of a mind which – as she had told him on 13 November, 1844 – ‘keeps me all compos and happy’. Certainly, the relationship had progressed. Three days after that encounter, Ada confided to Faraday her love of going about ‘incog.’ – that is to say, as ‘Mrs William King’ – and without the trappings of a rank that she professed to disdain. (‘I have in fact roughed it thoroughly, as they say . . .’)
Relations had grown friendly enough for Lady Lovelace to admit to Faraday – as Ada very rarely did – how much care she took to mask her physical sufferings from strangers. Plans were hatched for further meetings during February 1845, but – it was often the case with Ada’s grand projects – her plans for an article about electricity fizzled out. Her interest in Faraday’s work remained vivid. Later that year, she eagerly followed the news that Faraday had succeeded in manipulating the course of lights by magnets and thick sheets of glass. Ada’s own final ambition – seemingly to replicate the effect of sunlight on raindrops – would owe much to her knowledge of Michael Faraday’s work.
What was the project on which Ada hoped to collaborate with Faraday back in November 1844, at the time of her lengthy conversation with Charles Wheatstone? The answer emerges from her correspondence with another, less scientifically minded man: Woronzow Greig.
In that same November, Greig, who had been acting as Ada’s researcher for a year, decided to play a little joke. An extraordinary, anonymously authored book had just been published. It was called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and it proposed that the world had emerged from a fire-mist, that men had evolved from apes and that life might yet be generated in a laboratory. Written by Robert Chambers, a member of the Scottish publishing family, the book became a literary sensation. Nobody knew who had written it. Some pointed to William Carpenter and others to George Combe.
It says much for Ada’s standing in the scientific world, just one year after the publication of her ‘Notes’, that many believed Byron’s brilliant daughter to be the modest author of Vestiges. Babbage, perhaps a little jealously, twitted Ada about it. Old Joanna Baillie, convinced of her authorship, gasped to Annabella at the genius of ‘that wonderful creature’, her daughter. William Lovelace, rather gratified by all the attention his wife was receiving, told John Hobhouse that everybody seemed to think she’d written the book. Who was he to deny it?
Ada herself was enchanted by Greig’s notion of demurely presenting her with the very book that everybody was declaring she had written. Having signed herself with particular gratitude (‘With Many Many Thanks’), she rewarded her old friend by sharing with him the secret of her latest project: a calculus of the nervous system. What she intended, so Greig was now informed, was to create what Ada ambitiously defined as ‘a law or laws, for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain; (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world.)’. The problem that faced her, as she explained it in her lengthy letter, was purely practical. She needed to learn how to carry out practical trials on body parts: ‘viz:
