CHAPTER ONE
ADA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE
POETICAL SCIENCE
In May 1833, when she was seventeen, Ada Byron was among the
young women presented at the British royal court. Family members
had worried about how she would acquit herself, given her high-
strung and independent nature, but she ended up behaving, her
mother reported, “tolerably well.” Among those Ada met that evening
were the Duke of Wellington, whose straightforward manner she ad-
mired, and the seventy-nine-year-old French ambassador Talleyrand,
who struck her as “an old monkey.” 1
The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, Ada had inher-
ited her father’s romantic spirit, a trait that her mother tried to tem-
per by having her tutored in mathematics. The combination produced
in Ada a love for what she took to calling “poetical science,” which
linked her rebellious imagination to her enchantment with num-
bers. For many, including her father, the rarefied sensibilities of the
Romantic era clashed with the techno-excitement of the Industrial
Revolution. But Ada was comfortable at the intersection of both eras.
So it was not surprising that her debut at court, despite the glam-
our of the occasion, made less impression on her than her attendance
a few weeks later at another majestic eve of the London season at which she met Charles Babbage, a forty-one-year-old widowed
science and math eminence who had established himself as a lumi-
nary on London’s social circuit. “Ada was more pleased with a party
she was at on Wednesday than with any of the assemblages in the
grand monde,” her mother reported to a friend. “She met there a few
scientific people—amongst them Babbage, with whom she was de-
lighted.” 2
Babbage’s galvanizing weekly salons, which included up to three
hundred guests, brought together lords in swallow-tail coats and la-
dies in brocade gowns with writers, industrialists, poets, actors, states-
men, explorers, botanists, and other “scientists,” a word that Babbage’s
friends had recently coined.3
By bringing scientific scholars into this
exalted realm, said one noted geologist, Babbage “successfully asserted
the rank in society due to science.” 4
The evenings featured dancing, readings, games, and lectures ac-
companied by an assortment of seafood, meat, fowl, exotic drinks,
and iced desserts. The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they
dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings. Astronomers set up
telescopes, researchers displayed their electrical and magnetic contriv-
ances, and Babbage allowed guests to play with his mechanical dolls.
The centerpiece of the evenings—and one of Babbage’s many motives
for hosting them—was his demonstration of a model portion of his
Difference Engine, a mammoth mechanical calculating contraption
that he was building in a fireproof structure adjacent to his home.
Babbage would display the model with great drama, cranking its arm
as it calculated a sequence of numbers and, just as the audience began
to get bored, showed how the pattern could suddenly change based on
instructions that had been coded into the machine.5
Those who were
especially intrigued would be invited through the yard to the former
stables, where the complete machine was being constructed.
Babbage’s Difference Engine, which could solve polynomial equa-
tions, impressed people in different ways. The Duke of Wellington
commented that it could be useful in analyzing the variables a general
might face before going into battle.6
Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, mar-
veled that it was a “thinking machine.” As for Ada, who would later
famously note that machines could never truly think, a friend who
went with them to the demonstration reported, “Miss Byron, young
as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the
invention.” 7
Ada’s love of both poetry and math primed her to see beauty in
a computing machine. She was an exemplar of the era of Romantic
science, which was characterized by a lyrical enthusiasm for invention
and discovery. It was a period that brought “imaginative intensity and
excitement to scientific work,” Richard Holmes wrote in The Age of
Wonder. “It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless,
personal commitment to discovery.” 8
In short, it was a time not unlike our own. The advances of the
Industrial Revolution, including the steam engine, mechanical loom,
and telegraph, transformed the nineteenth century in much the same
way that the advances of the Digital Revolution—the computer, mi-
crochip, and Internet—have transformed our own. At the heart of
both eras were innovators who combined imagination and passion
with wondrous technology, a mix that produced Ada’s poetical science
and what the twentieth-century poet Richard Brautigan would call
“machines of loving grace.”
LORD BYRON
Ada inherited her poetic and insubordinate temperament from her
father, but he was not the source of her love for machinery. He was,
in fact, a Luddite. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, given
in February 1812 when he was twenty-four, Byron defended the fol-
lowers of Ned Ludd, who were rampaging against mechanical weav-
ing machines. With sarcastic scorn Byron mocked the mill owners
of Nottingham, who were pushing a bill that would make destroying
automated looms a crime punishable by death. “These machines were
to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of
employing a number of workmen, who were left in consequence to
starve,” Byron declared. “The rejected workmen, in the blindness of
their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so
beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to im-
provements in mechanism.”
Two weeks later, Byron published the first two cantos of his
epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his
wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later
remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful,
seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living
the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry.
He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties
each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady
Caroline Lamb.
Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristo-
crat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He
thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual am-
biguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They
had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively.
She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,”
which he was. So was she.
At Lady Caroline’s party, Lord Byron had also noticed a reserved
young woman who was, he recalled, “more simply dressed.” Annabella
Milbanke, nineteen, was from a wealthy and multi-titled family. The
night before the party, she had read Childe Harold and had mixed
feelings. “He is rather too much of a mannerist,” she wrote. “He ex-
cels most in the delineation of deep feeling.” Upon seeing him across
the room at the party, her feelings were conflicted, dangerously so. “I
did not seek an introduction to him, for all the women were absurdly
courting him, and trying to deserve the lash of his Satire,” she wrote
her mother. “I am not desirous of a place in his lays. I made no of-
fering at the shrine of Childe Harold, though I shall not refuse the
acquaintance if it comes my way.” 9
That acquaintance, as it turned out, did come her way. After he
was introduced to her formally, Byron decided that she might make
a suitable wife. It was, for him, a rare display of reason over romanti-
cism. Rather than arousing his passions, she seemed to be the sort
of woman who might tame those passions and protect him from his
excesses—as well as help pay off his burdensome debts. He proposed
to her halfheartedly by letter. She sensibly declined. He wandered
off to far less appropriate liaisons, including one with his half sister,
Augusta Leigh. But after a year, Annabella rekindled the courtship.
Byron, falling more deeply in debt while grasping for a way to curb
his enthusiasms, saw the rationale if not the romance in the possible
relationship. “Nothing but marriage and a speedy one can save me,” he
admitted to Annabella’s aunt. “If your niece is obtainable, I should
prefer her; if not, the very first woman who does not look as if she
would spit in my face.” 10 There were times when Lord Byron was not
a romantic. He and Annabella were married in January 1815.
Byron initiated the marriage in his Byronic fashion. “Had Lady
Byron on the sofa before dinner,” he wrote about his wedding day.11
Their relationship was still active when they visited his half sister two
months later, because around then Annabella got pregnant. However,
during the visit she began to suspect that her husband’s friendship
with Augusta went beyond the fraternal, especially after he lay on a
sofa and asked them both to take turns kissing him.12 The marriage
started to unravel.
Annabella had been tutored in mathematics, which amused Lord
Byron, and during their courtship he had joked about his own dis-
dain for the exactitude of numbers. “I know that two and two make
four—and should be glad to prove it too if I could,” he wrote, “though
I must say if by any sort of process I could convert two and two into
five it would give me much greater pleasure.” Early on, he affection-
ately dubbed her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” But when the mar-
riage began to sour, he refined that mathematical image: “We are two
parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet.”
Later, in the first canto of his epic poem Don Juan, he would mock
her: “Her favourite science was the mathematical. . . . She was a walk-
ing calculation.”
The marriage was not saved by the birth of their daughter on De-
cember 10, 1815. She was named Augusta Ada Byron, her first name
that of Byron’s too-beloved half sister. When Lady Byron became
convinced of her husband’s perfidy, she thereafter called her daughter
by her middle name. Five weeks later she packed her belongings into
a carriage and fled to her parents’ country home with the infant Ada.
Ada never saw her father again. Lord Byron left the country that sobriquet of “Mathematical Medea,” threatened to expose his alleged
incestuous and homosexual affairs as a way to secure a separation
agreement that gave her custody of their child.13
The opening of canto 3 of Childe Harold, written a few weeks later,
invokes Ada as his muse:
Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted.
Byron wrote these lines in a villa by Lake Geneva, where he was
staying with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife,
Mary. It rained relentlessly. Trapped inside for days, Byron suggested
they write horror stories. He produced a fragment of a tale about a
vampire, one of the first literary efforts on that subject, but Mary’s
story was the one that became a classic: Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus. Playing on the ancient Greek myth of the hero who
crafted a living man out of clay and snatched fire from the gods for
human use, Frankenstein was the story of a scientist who galvanized
a man-made assemblage into a thinking human. It was a cautionary
tale about technology and science. It also raised the question that
would become associated with Ada: Can man-made machines ever
truly think?
The third canto of Childe Harold ends with Byron’s prediction that
Annabella would try to keep Ada from knowing about her father, and
so it happened. There was a portrait of Lord Byron at their house, but
Lady Byron kept it securely veiled, and Ada never saw it until she was
twenty.14
Lord Byron, by contrast, kept a picture of Ada on his desk wher-
ever he wandered, and his letters often requested news or portraits
of her. When she was seven, he wrote to Augusta, “I wish you would
obtain from Lady B some accounts of Ada’s disposition. . . . Is the girl
imaginative? . . . Is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made
her anything save poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in thefamily.” Lady Byron reported that Ada had an imagination that was
“chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity.” 15
Around that time, Byron, who had been wandering through Italy,
writing and having an assortment of affairs, grew bored and decided
to enlist in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman
Empire. He sailed for Missolonghi, where he took command of
part of the rebel army and prepared to attack a Turkish fortress. But
before he could engage in battle, he caught a violent cold that was
made worse by his doctor’s decision to treat him by bloodletting. On
April 19, 1824, he died. According to his valet, among his final words
were “Oh, my poor dear child!—my dear Ada! My God, could I have
seen her! Give her my blessing.” 16
ADA
Lady Byron wanted to make sure that Ada did not turn out like her
father, and part of her strategy was to have the girl rigorously study
math, as if it were an antidote to poetic imagination. When Ada, at
age five, showed a preference for geography, Lady Byron ordered that
the subject be replaced by additional arithmetic lessons, and her gov-
erness soon proudly reported, “She adds up sums of five or six rows of
figures with accuracy.” Despite these efforts, Ada developed some of
her father’s propensities. She had an affair as a young teenager with
one of her tutors, and when they were caught and the tutor banished,
she tried to run away from home to be with him. In addition, she had
mood swings that took her from feelings of grandiosity to despair,
and she suffered various maladies both physical and psychological.
Ada accepted her mother’s conviction that an immersion in math
could help tame her Byronic tendencies. After her dangerous liaison
with her tutor, and inspired by Babbage’s Difference Engine, she
decided on her own, at eighteen, to begin a new series of lessons. “I
must cease to think of living for pleasure or self-gratification,” she
wrote her new tutor. “I find that nothing but very close and intense
application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems to keep my
imagination from running wild. . . . It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics.” He agreed with the
prescription: “You are right in supposing that your chief resource and
safeguard at the present is in a course of severe intellectual study. For
this purpose there is no subject to be compared to Mathematics.” 17
He prescribed Euclidean geometry, followed by a dose of trigonom-
etry and algebra. That should cure anyone, they both thought, from
having too many artistic or romantic passions.
Her interest in technology was stoked when her mother took
her on a trip through the British industrial midlands to see the new
factories and machinery. Ada was particularly impressed with an au-
tomated weaving loom that used punch cards to direct the creation of
the desired fabric patterns, and she drew a sketch of how it worked.
Her father’s famous speech in the House of Lords had defended the
Luddites who had smashed such looms because of their fear of what
technology might inflict on humanity. But Ada waxed poetical about
them and saw the connection with what would someday be called
computers. “This Machinery reminds me of Babbage and his gem of
all mechanism,” she wrote.18
Ada’s interest in applied science was further stimulated when she
met one of Britain’s few noted female mathematicians and scientists,
Mary Somerville. Somerville had just finished writing one of her
great works, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, in which she
tied together developments in astronomy, optics, electricity, chemistry,
physics, botany, and geology.* Emblematic of the time, it provided a
unified sense of the extraordinary endeavors of discovery that were
under way. She proclaimed in her opening sentence, “The progress
of modern science, especially within the last five years, has been re-
markable for a tendency to simplify the laws of nature and to unite
detached branches by general principles.”
Somerville became a friend, teacher, inspiration, and mentor to
Ada. She met with Ada regularly, sent her math books, devised prob-
lems for her to solve, and patiently explained the correct answers. She
was also a good friend of Babbage’s, and during the fall of 1834 she
*It was in a review of this book that one of Babbage’s friends, William Whewell,
coined the term scientist to suggest the connection among these disciplines.
and Ada would often visit his Saturday-evening salons. Somerville’s
son, Woronzow Greig, aided Ada’s efforts to settle down by suggest-
ing to one of his former classmates at Cambridge that she would
make a suitable—or at least interesting—wife.
William King was socially prominent, financially secure, quietly intel-
ligent, and as taciturn as Ada was excitable. Like her, he was a student
of science, but his focus was more practical and less poetic: his pri-
mary interests were crop rotation theories and advances in livestock
breeding techniques. He proposed marriage within a few weeks of
meeting Ada, and she accepted. Her mother, with motives that only
a psychiatrist could fathom, decided it was imperative to tell William
about Ada’s attempted elopement with her tutor. Despite this news,
William was willing to proceed with the wedding, which was held
in July 1835. “Gracious God, who has so mercifully given you an op-
portunity of turning aside from the dangerous paths, has given you a
friend and guardian,” Lady Byron wrote her daughter, adding that she
should use this opportunity to “bid adieu” to all of her “peculiarities,
caprices, and self-seeking.” 19
The marriage was a match made in rational calculus. For Ada, it
offered the chance to adopt a more steady and grounded life. More
important, it allowed her to escape dependence on her domineering
mother. For William, it meant having a fascinating, eccentric wife
from a wealthy and famous family.
Lady Byron’s first cousin Viscount Melbourne (who had the
misfortune of having been married to Lady Caroline Lamb, by then
deceased) was the prime minister, and he arranged that, in Queen
Victoria’s coronation list of honors, William would become the Earl
of Lovelace. His wife thus became Ada, Countess of Lovelace. She is
therefore properly referred to as Ada or Lady Lovelace, though she is
now commonly known as Ada Lovelace.
That Christmas of 1835, Ada received from her mother the fam-
ily’s life-size portrait of her father. Painted by Thomas Phillips,  it
showed Lord Byron in romantic profile, gazing at the horizon,
dressed in traditional Albanian costume featuring a red velvet jacket,
ceremonial sword, and headdress. For years it had hung over Ada’s grandparents’ mantelpiece, but it had been veiled by a green cloth
from the day her parents had separated. Now she was trusted not only
to see it but to possess it, along with his inkstand and pen.
Her mother did something even more surprising when the
Lovelaces’ first child, a son, was born a few months later. Despite her
disdain for her late husband’s memory, she agreed that Ada should
name the boy Byron, which she did. The following year Ada had a
daughter, whom she dutifully named Annabella, after her mother.
Ada then came down with yet another mysterious malady, which kept
her bedridden for months. She recovered well enough to have a third
child, a son named Ralph, but her health remained fragile. She had
digestive and respiratory problems that were compounded by being
treated with laudanum, morphine, and other forms of opium, which
led to mood swings and occasional delusions.
Ada was further unsettled by the eruption of a personal drama
that was bizarre even by the standards of the Byron family. It involved
Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron’s half sister and occasional lover.
According to widely accepted rumors, Medora was Byron’s daughter.
She seemed determined to show that darkness ran in the family. She
had an affair with a sister’s husband, then ran off with him to France
and had two illegitimate children. In a fit of self-righteousness, Lady
Byron went to France to rescue Medora, then revealed to Ada the
story of her father’s incest.
This “most strange and dreadful history” did not seem to surprise
Ada. “I am not in the least astonished,” she wrote her mother. “You
merely confirm what I have for years and years felt scarcely a doubt
about.” 20 Rather than being outraged, she seemed oddly energized by
the news. She declared that she could relate to her father’s defiance of
authority. Referring to his “misused genius,” she wrote to her mother,
“If he has transmitted to me any portion of that genius, I would use
it to bring out great truths and principles. I think he has bequeathed
this task to me. I have this feeling strongly, and there is a pleasure at-
tending it.” 21
Once again Ada took up the study of math in order to settle herself,
and she tried to convince Babbage to become her tutor. “I have a pecu-
liar way of learning, and I think it must be a peculiar man to teach me successfully,” she wrote him. Whether due to her opiates or her breed-
ing or both, she developed a somewhat outsize opinion of her own
talents and began to describe herself as a genius. In her letter to Bab-
bage, she wrote, “Do not reckon me conceited, . . . but I believe I have
the power of going just as far as I like in such pursuits, and where there
is so decided a taste, I should almost say a passion, as I have for them,
I question if there is not always some portion of natural genius even.” 22
Babbage deflected Ada’s request, which was probably wise. It
preserved their friendship for an even more important collaboration,
and she was able to secure a first-rate math tutor instead: Augustus
De Morgan, a patient gentleman who was a pioneer in the field of
symbolic logic. He had propounded a concept that Ada would one
day employ with great significance, which was that an algebraic equa-
tion could apply to things other than numbers. The relations among
symbols (for example, that a + b = b + a) could be part of a logic that
applied to things that were not numerical.
Ada was never the great mathematician that her canonizers claim,
but she was an eager pupil, able to grasp most of the basic concepts
of calculus, and with her artistic sensibility she liked to visualize the
changing curves and trajectories that the equations were describing.
De Morgan encouraged her to focus on the rules for working through
equations, but she was more eager to discuss the underlying concepts.
Likewise with geometry, she often asked for visual ways to picture
problems, such as how the intersections of circles in a sphere divide it
into various shapes.
Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift
that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as
intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that
describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.
Despite her mother’s efforts, she remained her father’s daughter,
with a poetic sensibility that allowed her to view an equation as a
brushstroke that painted an aspect of nature’s physical splendor, just
as she could visualize the “wine-dark sea” or a woman who “walks in
beauty, like the night.” But math’s appeal went even deeper; it was
spiritual. Math “constitutes the language through which alone we can
adequately express the great facts of the natural world,” she said, andit allows us to portray the “changes of mutual relationship” that unfold
in creation. It is “the instrument through which the weak mind of
man can most effectually read his Creator’s works.”
This ability to apply imagination to science characterized the In-
dustrial Revolution as well as the computer revolution, for which Ada
was to become a patron saint. She was able, as she told Babbage, to
understand the connection between poetry and analysis in ways that
transcended her father’s talents. “I do not believe that my father was
(or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; for with
me the two go together indissolubly,” she wrote.23
Her reengagement with math, she told her mother, spurred her
creativity and led to an “immense development of imagination, so
much so that I feel no doubt if I continue my studies I shall in due
time be a Poet.” 24 The whole concept of imagination, especially as it
was applied to technology, intrigued her. “What is imagination?” she
asked in an 1841 essay. “It is the Combining faculty. It brings together
things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying
combinations. . . . It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds
around us, the worlds of Science.” 25
By then Ada believed she possessed special, even supernatural
abilities, what she called “an intuitive perception of hidden things.”
Her exalted view of her talents led her to pursue aspirations that were
unusual for an aristocratic woman and mother in the early Victo-
rian age. “I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of
qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the
hidden realities of nature,” she explained in a letter to her mother in
1841. “I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one
vast focus.” 26
It was while in this frame of mind that she decided to engage
again with Charles Babbage, whose salons she had first attended eight
years earlier.
CHARLES BABBAGE AND HIS ENGINES
From an early age, Charles Babbage had been interested in machines
that could perform human tasks. When he was a child, his mothertook him to many of the exhibition halls and museums of wonder
that were springing up in London in the early 1800s. At one in Han-
over Square, a proprietor aptly named Merlin invited him up to the
attic workshop where there was a variety of mechanical dolls, known
as “automata.” One was a silver female dancer, about a foot tall, whose
arms moved with grace and who held in her hand a bird that could
wag its tail, flap its wings, and open its beak. The Silver Lady’s abil-
ity to display feelings and personality captured the boy’s fancy. “Her
eyes were full of imagination,” he recalled. Years later he discovered
the Silver Lady at a bankruptcy auction and bought it. It served as an
amusement at his evening salons where he celebrated the wonders of
technology.
At Cambridge Babbage became friends with a group, including
John Herschel and George Peacock, who were disappointed by the
way math was taught there. They formed a club, called the Analytical
Society, which campaigned to get the university to abandon the cal-
culus notation devised by its alumnus Newton, which relied on dots,
and replace it with the one devised by Leibniz, which used dx and dy
to represent infinitesimal increments and was thus known as “d” nota-
tion. Babbage titled their manifesto “The Principles of pure D-ism in
opposition to the Dot-age of the University.” 27 He was prickly, but he
had a good sense of humor.
One day Babbage was in the Analytical Society’s room working
on a table of logarithms that was littered with discrepancies. Herschel
asked him what he was thinking. “I wish to God these calculations
had been executed by steam,” Babbage answered. To this idea of a
mechanical method for tabulating logarithms Herschel replied, “It is
quite possible.” 28 In 1821 Babbage turned his attention to building
such a machine.
Over the years, many had fiddled with making calculating con-
traptions. In the 1640s, Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and
philosopher, created a mechanical calculator to reduce the drudgery
of his father’s work as a tax supervisor. It had spoked metal wheels
with the digits 0 through 9 on their circumference. To add or sub-
tract numbers, the operator used a stylus to dial a number, as if using
a rotary phone, then dialed in the next number; an armature carried or borrowed a 1 when necessary. It became the first calculator to be
patented and sold commercially.
Thirty years later, Gottfried Leibniz, the German mathematician
and philosopher, tried to improve upon Pascal’s contraption with a
“stepped reckoner” that had the capacity to multiply and divide. It had
a hand-cranked cylinder with a set of teeth that meshed with count-
ing wheels. But Leibniz ran into a problem that would be a recurring
theme of the digital age. Unlike Pascal, an adroit engineer who could
combine scientific theories with mechanical genius, Leibniz had little
engineering skill and did not surround himself with those who did.
So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he
was unable to produce reliably working versions of his device. Nev-
ertheless, his core concept, known as the Leibniz wheel, would influ-
ence calculator design through the time of Babbage.