(1843–4)
‘Science is no longer a lifeless abstraction floating above the heads of the multitude. It has descended to earth. It mingles with men. It penetrates our mines. It enters our workshops. It speeds along with the iron courser of the rail.’
MICHAEL GARVEY,
The Silent Revolution (1852)
Towards the end of 1843, having worn herself down the previous summer in her heroic endeavour to promote Charles Babbage’s unbuilt machine, Ada Lovelace suffered an unusually grave lapse in her health. Writing to Sophia De Morgan – and entreating her not to tell Lady Byron – Ada confided that learning she was not pregnant had, nevertheless, offered great solace. ‘I don’t the least mind all I have suffered,’ she wrote. ‘I think anything better than that.’
Of all her family roles, motherhood was the one that Ada least relished. She had been admirably supportive of William’s sisters, while vainly striving to improve relations between her husband and the unremittingly hostile Lady Hester King. As a daughter, she had proved affectionate and loyal throughout Lady Byron’s painful tussles with Medora Leigh and her quasi-keepers, the Beaurepaires.
As a mother, however, Ada was both negligent and capricious. True, she had written in an uncertainly dated letter to her mother about how tears had ‘rushed’ to her eyes as she watched little Lord Ockham stepping carefully through a dance with his sister. Eager to believe that she had detected signs of genius in her small daughter, Ada had also predicted that the gifted Annabella, aged seven, would become a great artist.
Such moments of tenderness were rare. From the time of embarking upon her translation of Menabrea, Ada’s mind was focussed upon her own scientific career. Writing to Charles Noel in Dresden in August 1843 about finding a teacher for the Lovelace family, Ada was far more interested in obtaining the latest scientific information from Germany (the admired heartland of scientific study) ‘as to the microscopical structure and changes in the brain, nervous matter, & also in the blood’, than in the academic credentials of Herr Kraemer, Charles’s candidate for her children’s tutor.
Nevertheless, there was no denying that a competent instructor was required to take care of three small children whose parents’ Unitarian beliefs prohibited young Viscount Ockham and his siblings from attending conventional (Anglican) schools. The thing to impress upon Herr Kraemer, as Ada explained to her cousin Robert at careful length, was that he would be working for ‘a completely professional person’. As such, she herself was unable ‘(were I even fitted by nature, which I am not), to associate much personally with my children, or to exercise a favourable influence over them by attempting to do so’. While there would be no regular or frequent association with the Lovelaces themselves, Kraemer would receive instructions on what principles to deliver his lessons, with special attention to the inculcation of religion based upon solid Unitarian foundations (‘subject of course to our more special direction than perhaps in any other matter’) and well-balanced habits of empirical observation.
It is not perhaps surprising that Dr Kraemer would prove unable to meet such a demanding standard. Hired in the autumn of 1843, his peremptory dismissal was hastened by the fact that Lady Byron had found a more suitable candidate. Summoned to join her mother in October at the genteelly unfashionable resort of Clifton (Brunel’s great suspension bridge had not yet linked Clifton to the thriving port of Bristol), Ada heard Annabella’s proposal. Presented in Lady Byron’s quiet but always decisive tones, Dr William Carpenter sounded ideal.
It was Annabella’s philanthropic work that had brought her into contact with the Carpenters. Dr Lant Carpenter, a leading Unitarian educationalist who suffered from depression, had drowned in 1840, while travelling around Europe on a prescribed health tour. At the time Annabella arrived at Clifton, his widow and eldest daughter Mary were both working at the celebrated Bristol school inaugurated by the late Dr Carpenter. Mary, then aged thirty-six, would later become one of Annabella’s closest allies and a co-trustee of her papers, while her first cousin, Harriet Martineau, would become one of Lady Byron’s greatest champions. In the early autumn of 1843, however, Lady Byron’s interest was focussed more sharply upon Mary’s younger brother.
Handsome, clever and highly ambitious, the Edinburgh-educated William Carpenter had already made his name as the author of Principles of Human Physiology, an account of developmental theories of life which paid prudent tribute to ‘our continued dependence on the Creator’. Recently married, young Dr Carpenter was a rising academic in need of a steady income and secure accommodation. That was where the Lovelaces came in.
Anxious to see her unruly grandchildren given a sterling education while Ada concentrated on her burgeoning scientific career, Lady Byron intended Carpenter to act both as tutor and watchdog, one who would ensure that her daughter was not pushing herself beyond her strength. What Lady Byron did not factor into her plans was the effect that Ada’s celebrated parentage and charismatic personality was likely to have upon a socially insecure academic who – as William Lovelace would later remark – was excessively susceptible to the charms of a pretty woman.
‘I like to please people’s eyes and indeed ears and all their faculties as much as I can,’ Ada jauntily informed her mother in an undated letter that was probably written a year or two before meeting Dr William Carpenter. The effect of this flirtatious streak in Ada’s nature was predictable. Dr Carpenter, arriving with his wife for a first interview at Ashley Combe in late November 1843, was flattered by the rapidity with which the young Lady Lovelace (‘more delightful than ever,’ her doting husband wrote to the Hen after Ada’s return from Clifton on 1 November) took him into her confidence, both about her children and about herself. Within the first week of meeting Carpenter, Ada had told him about her teenage escapade with a tutor at Ealing. She had also spoken mysteriously of ‘present troubles’ from which the smitten academic impulsively decided it was his mission to release her. In early December, after agreeing to a provisional engagement as tutor for one year, Carpenter was invited to visit Ada after dinner, at her London home.
For a married woman to ask her children’s married tutor to call on her alone and late at night was a clear signal of more than professional interest. Summoned to the bedroom-cum-office that Ada spoke of as her ‘sanctum’, Carpenter was made privy to further confidences about his young employer’s private life. By mid-December, the relationship was intimate enough for Ada to entreat him to cheer her with ‘a few kind lines – I need them’. Quoting these words back to her on 15 December, Carpenter asked permission to sign himself as ‘Your affectionate friend’.
It was here that the trouble began. Already promised £400 a year, Carpenter now felt sufficiently emboldened to lay out his requests to ‘the really kind friend which I believe you wish me to regard you’. He wanted a free house in which to entertain his friends, a horse of his own – presumably from the Ockham stud funded by Annabella – and the freedom to go to London to give lectures as and when he wished. Furthermore, he would only consider work that kept him within easy reach of the City. Remote Ashley Combe, where the King children were used to spending a blissful part of every year, was out of the question.
It may seem that Carpenter was asking for quite a lot. In his defence, he was no ordinary tutor. A published academic with the genuine promise of an appointment as the Fuller Professor of Physiology (1844–8) was justified in seeking some concessions for educating a trio of undisciplined children. (A governess, Miss Cooper, was independently recruited to act as nursery supervisor.)
Carpenter’s mistake lay, not in his demands, but in misreading Ada’s volatile personality. In January 1844, following one of the young countess’s sudden breakdowns in health, Carpenter did something – it seems he had already kissed her – at which she took offence. Icily, Ada indicated that he had stepped beyond his role. She had wished only to be friendly. Perhaps the question of his employment should be reconsidered.
Carpenter was both furious and alarmed. Without telling Ada (on whom he inflicted a lengthy defence of the absolute purity of his intentions), he elected to write separately and at considerable length (concision was not Dr Carpenter’s forte) both to her husband and her mother. Annabella was sufficiently displeased by his revelations to seek advice from Joanne Baillie about alternative teachers for her grandchildren. William Lovelace, offered Carpenter’s commiseration for having to deal with such a feckless wife, grew incandescent with rage. ‘I was completely stunned,’ an injured Carpenter told Ada on 19 January after reading her husband’s response. ‘Though I saw that I had made a great mistake, I could not see in what . . .’
Carpenter, thanks to Ada’s good-natured intervention on his behalf, was still offered the tutor’s post. The request for a free house at Ockham was confirmed, together with his generous salary. Gratitude, grudgingly, was expressed. ‘That you are a peculiar – very peculiar – specimen of the feminine race, you are yourself aware,’ Carpenter informed his future employer on 24 January. Resentment seeping from his pen, he assured Lady Lovelace that ‘the barriers’ of social position would never again be transgressed. Nevertheless, he owed her a debt of thanks.
Would not a word from you as to liberties I had even offered, damn me with Lord L. Lady B. and the world? I feel that you must have done your best for me and for yourself to have extricated me as you have done; and to lead to the continuance of the wish that the educational engagement should continue.
William Carpenter’s appointment as the Lovelace children’s tutor – a role in which he would in fact acquit himself quite well during his trial year – proved timely. His employment coincided with the time at which Ada’s brave words about her readiness to endure – and even to make a research subject of her physical suffering – were put to the test.
Ada’s health suddenly deteriorated during the midwinter of 1843–4. Dr Locock was shaken when he saw for the first time what he described as a ‘mad’ look in his patient’s eyes. ‘He told me that it was really peculiar, & horrible to a spectator,’ Ada confessed to her mother in an undated note. Put on a light diet and in a state of strict isolation, Ada acknowledged the need for such prudent measures when she found that she could not even cope with the stress of a short visit from a cherished family friend, the Yorkshire vicar Samuel Gamlen. ‘I could not bear it for more than 10 minutes,’ a wistful Ada admitted to her mother in a second undated note.
My brain then began to turn & twist, & my eyes to burn. I referred him [Gamlen] to you for everything about me . . . & merely said a few little facts as to the present . . . I cannot but weep over my inability to see so many who I would wish to see. It is sad, sad, sad to me.
Six weeks after Christmas 1843, Ada was still living in enforced solitude at St James’s Square. On 10 February 1844, while eager to visit Woronzow and Agnes Greig, she felt obliged to warn these dear friends not to be startled by the strangeness of her swollen features. William was piteously thanked for the worry that he expressed (‘What a kind kind mate ou is. Your sweetest letter (just received) has almost made me cry. It is so wise, yet so tender.’) But William himself was contributing to Ada’s fragility. ‘I do not feel I am fairly dealt with in this,’ Ada wrote from her London sickroom after her absent husband complained that the children were not always made immediately available to visit him either at Ashley Combe or East Horsley. ‘Either thro’ negligence or intention on your part, you give me no notice of anything scarcely . . . I am expected to make no objection, & manifest no surprise, however impromptu the thing may be, & however unpleasant for what I had planned.’ After scolding her husband for behaving in a way ‘very pernicious to our mutual happiness’, Ada smoothed her Crow’s ruffled feathers. ‘Pray write to me, if only 6 words. I am quite miserable about you because I know you are unhappy, & fancy you have an unkind bird.’
Reading the tender letters that the Lovelaces exchanged during this time, it becomes clear that, despite their many spats and disagreements, Ada and her husband remained powerfully attached to each other. Lovelace had been infuriated by Dr Carpenter’s suggestion that Ada was an unfeeling wife. But it was always easier for a diffident and reclusive man to demonstrate emotion through his fanciful buildings than in words. In the Great Hall of the newly transformed Horsley Towers, Crede Byron was proudly chiselled into one of the mighty beams that William himself had engineered (Brunel was pleasingly complimentary). Fretting about the absent Ada’s health – he was alone down at Ashley Combe in the summer of 1844 – Lovelace set out to create a new sea pool and elaborate grotto for a wife who now placed her faith in swimming to cure her ailments. Visiting Brighton that summer, while the children went to Somerset and Carpenter took time off for his own career, Ada lodged herself at 38 Bedford Square, adjoining the seafront. Taking dutiful daily immersions from a bathing machine in a daring black one-piece, rounded off with a pair of stout leather boots, the novice sea nymph was soon envisaging herself as ‘an independent & skilful swimmer . . . Perseverance will do the business, I feel no doubt.’
Exercise was the solution, or so a hopeful Ada now persuaded herself. In between despatching instructions about the proper strength and length of gymnastic ropes to be installed in their various homes, she diverted William with accounts of her visit to a travelling circus (where the appearance of an elephant was an exciting novelty) and Brighton’s zoo, where an adventurous monkey ripped through her sleeve and drew blood. ‘This is my year of accidents,’ poor Ada sighed, having already managed to break her nose and undergo ‘some hours’ of dental surgery.
Exercise did not mean that Ada had weaned herself off the combination of claret and drugs prescribed by her favourite doctor. Ada’s mother – Annabella had a horror of opiates – argued for the safer route of mental control. Harriet Martineau, a woman for whose industry and intelligence Lady Byron had considerable respect, attributed her recovery from uterine cancer entirely to the power of mesmerism. The letters about her unconventional cure were published the following year, but in 1844, they were already being shared and widely discussed among Martineau’s friends. Here, surely, was the answer to Ada’s predicament, one that would protect her uncommon and precious mind from being needlessly addled by stimulants?
Used to having her way, Lady Byron found herself on this occasion in the minority. Neither Dr Locock, nor his medical colleagues, nor even the opinionated William Carpenter believed that mesmerism could cure physical illness. Moreover, as Ada sharply informed her mother on 10 October 1844, the doctors believed that the experiments with mesmerism that she had voluntarily undergone back in the summer of 1841 might even have caused her current ills. It wouldn’t do. In fact, Miss Martineau might herself benefit from the advice of a young lady who now wrote with brimming confidence of ‘my advancing studies on the nervous system’ and of ways that the world might yet benefit from her suffering.
And with that, Ada was off, overpowering her mother with a verbal extravaganza of all the thoughts and schemes that coursed unchecked through her shifting, skimming mind. She wrote of the authority with which she had learned to discipline Annabella’s small namesake. (‘Gentle as I am in general, yet when she is naughty, I am well aware that I give no quarter . . . I am a changed being at once.’) Ada went on to predict her personal destiny. She would become either a sun or a vagrant star. (‘Solemn decree’.) The Sun, perhaps. And what planets should she permit to orbit her solar self?
Oh! I must arrange some Comets too, by & bye. No complete planetary system without. Heavens! How shall I get any comets? I think I must myself be the chief Comet & not merely one of the Planets. Yes – that will do.
At least I am an amusing Bird, if not a very wise one, with my repentances, my Suns, Planets, Comets, &c, &c, &c.
I really believe that you hatched me simply for the entertainment of your old age, that you might not be ennuyée.
In part, Ada was simply playing with ideas and seeking to entertain a mother who she knew was going through sad times. To whom else, she sweetly asked, could she rattle on in such a lunatic vein, and yet be understood? ‘I grow so fond of my old Hen, who understands all I can say & think so much better than any one.’
Annabella was in need of consolation. The summer of 1844 had been blighted by a bitter quarrel with Edward and Fanny, her favourites among all the Noels, when they jointly attacked Lady Byron for undervaluing Edward’s skills as an educationalist.* (Ada had acted as the peacemaking go-between, but without success.) And then, within a single month, death robbed Annabella of Harriet Siddons, of a beloved godson, Hugo de Fellenberg Montgomery, and of the Swiss school reformer for whom the late Mr Montgomery had been named. Advising Hugo’s young widow, while comforting Mrs Siddons’s bereaved daughter, Annabella wore herself out. Gossipy Mrs Jameson, visiting the woman she now regarded as her closest friend, was dismayed. Lady Byron had been ‘more white and tremulously weak than I had ever seen her,’ she confided to the American author, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, the following year. ‘I was shocked . . . Of all human beings she is the one most necessary to my heart & to my mental and moral well-being . . . uniting in her extraordinary character and peculiar destiny all I most love with all I most reverence.’
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 bridge’.) Wheatstone next proceeded to the unexpected proposal that Lady Lovelace should use her social position to become the secret scientific advisor and mediator for the queen’s German husband.
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 this same long letter, while adding kind hopes – clearly, he had been briefed about Ada’s poor health – that her life would be sufficiently prolonged to do so. But he did not want a collaborator.
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: the brain, blood, & nerves, of animals’.
To us, it may sound either as though Ada had gone mad or as though she had been burying her nose in the imaginative pages of that contemporary masterpiece, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.* But William Lovelace, as ambitious as the Hen for Ada’s success, had heard and approved his wife’s project; Greig, the legally trained, rational and sober-hearted son of Mary Somerville, neither questioned Ada’s sanity nor withdrew his services as her devoted researcher.
On 5 December 1844, Ada wrote again to Greig. His friendly invitation to a play was brushed away with a reminder that she had not set foot in a theatre for over two years. All Ada wanted from him at present was a means of access to that most un-woman-friendly treasurehouse of researchers: the Royal Society. Had she not earned the right? ‘I really have become as much tied to a profession as you are,’ Ada pleaded to the lawyer. ‘And so much the better for me, I always required this.’
A rare view for a woman to take of herself in the mid-nineteenth century, it was one in which Ada Lovelace was assisted by the quiet support, not only of Woronzow Greig, Charles Wheatstone, Lord Lovelace and her own mother, Lady Byron, but by the reassurance in 1844 that Michael Faraday, then regarded as the greatest scientist of the day, had confidence in her declared belief that she – Lord Byron’s daughter – had been singled out to act as ‘the High-Priestess of God’s earthly manifestations.’
Great things were evidently in store.
* Local insurrections had forced Edward and Fanny back to England from Euboea. Angry altercations began when Lovelace suggested that Edward could become a land agent like his brother, with no loss of social status. Things worsened when Fanny defended her husband’s right to be made a principal at his own school, rather than running one of the village schools set up by Annabella. The provision of a Warwickshire house at Leamington Spa (where Lady Byron owned property) did not lessen the touchy Edward’s sense that he had been insulted. The quarrel with Annabella was never patched up, but Edward, as a widower, became her younger grandson’s most respected advisor on family history.
* To Carpenter himself, Ada wrote of her daughter’s need of ‘a profession’ and suggested, presciently, that it might be that of an artist. (AAL to W. B. Carpenter, n.d. 1844, Dep. Lovelace Byron 44, fol. 16.)
* ‘I find myself in reading her notes at a loss in the same kind of way as I feel when trying to understand any other thing which the explainer himself has not clear ideas of.’ John Herschel to Charles Lyell, 15 November 1844, Royal Society, Herschel Letters, vol. 22. ff. 210–11. Herschel nevertheless had a very friendly correspondence with Ada (Dep. Lovelace Byron 172, fols. 1–29.)
* A book which Ada seems never to have read. It is not known whether she ever met Frankenstein’s creator, but these two remarkable women lived alongside each other in London’s small scientific world from 1822 to 1851. Mary Shelley died in London, just one year before Ada. (See www.mirandaseymour.com for a blog about possible connections.)