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  Even as Byron made his case, Jacquard looms were producing a quality and volume of textiles unlike anything the world had ever seen. The mathematician Charles Babbage owned a portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard woven from thousands of silk threads using twenty-four thousand punched cards, a weaving so intricate that it was regularly mistaken for an engraving by his guests. And although the portrait was a fine possession, it was the loom itself, and its punch card programs, that really ignited Babbage’s imagination. “It is a known fact,” Babbage proclaimed, “that the Jacquard loom is capable of weaving any design which the imagination of man may conceive.” As long as that imagination could be translated into a pattern, it could be infinitely reproduced, in any volume, in any material, at any level of detail, in any combination of colors, without degradation. Babbage understood the profundity of the punched-paper program because mathematical formulae work the same way: run them again and again, and they never change.

  He was so taken with the Jacquard loom, in fact, that he spent the better part of his life designing computing machines fed by punch cards. To describe how these worked, he even adopted the language of the textile factory, writing of a “store” to hold the numbers and a “mill” where they could be processed, analogous to a modern computer’s memory and central processing unit. Numbers would move through Babbage’s machines, coming together as thread becomes whole cloth.

  Babbage’s machines—the Difference Engine, a hand-cranked mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions, and the more complex Analytical Engine—were so far ahead of their time that they’re generally considered historical anachronisms. His mechanical designs required a level of technical precision never before attempted, although the British government, for whom mathematical tables were a point of national interest, was willing to try. It funded construction of the Difference Engine in 1823, with an initial grant of seventeen hundred pounds; by the time it wrote off the project, nearly twenty years later, having spent ten times as much, there was still nothing to show for what the prime minister had by then determined to be a “very costly toy,” and “worthless as far as science is concerned,” save some partial models and four hundred square feet of confounding schematic drawings.

  The machines made Babbage famous—and perhaps infamous—but very few people alive in his time were mentally equipped to understand what they were supposed to do, let alone how. One of those people was Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada. In her short life, she would make one thing certain: that the spider work her father had so disdained would proliferate, unstoppable, into the following century and beyond.

  RAYS FROM EVERY CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE

  Ada’s alchemy was peculiar. She was the child of a passionate yearlong marriage between Byron and a bright, mathematically inclined aristocrat named Anne Isabella Milbanke, or Annabella. Byron was, in a former lover’s estimation, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” his passions Romantic in every sense; Annabella, on the other hand, was so sensible and well-bred that Byron teasingly called her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” The couple separated amid rumors that the louche Byron had a more-than-fraternal relationship with his half sister Augusta.

  Amid the scandal of that separation, the last thing Annabella wanted was for Ada to inherit any of her father’s wildness or to suffer as a consequence of his notoriety. To keep her daughter on the straight and narrow, Annabella began a rigorous course of mathematical instruction from the time Ada was four years old. Math—the opposite of poetry. Or so she thought.

  Byron absconded to Italy shortly after Ada’s birth. He never made her acquaintance, although he inquired after her often. “Is the Girl imaginative?” he wrote to Augusta, knowing full well that Annabella, who kept their daughter purposefully secluded, would divulge nothing directly. Byron died unromantically of the flu in Greece in 1824, when Ada was only nine. As he died, he called to his valet, “Oh, my poor dear child! My dear Ada! My God, could I have seen her! Give her my blessing!”

  His body was returned to England by ship, and huge crowds gathered in the streets of London to see his funeral procession of forty-seven carriages. When Ada finally learned her father’s name, she wept for him, although it doesn’t appear that she or her mother held his legacy in high esteem—Byron’s portrait, in their home, was concealed under heavy drapery until Ada was twenty. But his mercurial spirit was alive in her. “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician),” she wrote to Charles Babbage later in life, “for with me the two go together indissolubly.”

  Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

  Ada’s sharp analytical mind was inflected by a wild imagination. Prevented from a formal university education by her gender, she thrived under private tutelage. A precocious and very lonely child, she designed flying machines and marched around the billiard table playing violin. She was also frequently ill, prone to episodes of what was then called hysteria, and barely survived a serious three-year bout of measles, during which Annabella took advantage of her daughter’s bedridden condition to double down on schoolwork. But Ada was indomitable, agitated, and charismatic, and when she outpaced—and in one case, seduced—her tutors, she educated herself with books and through correspondence with some of nineteenth-century England’s most illustrious minds.

  She was only a teenager when she struck up a close friendship with the well-known scientist Mary Somerville, who would answer her questions and encourage her studies. The logician Augustus De Morgan sent her problems by post, only to be astounded by the power of thinking represented in her responses. Had she been a man, he marveled, her “aptitude for grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles” would have made her “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first rate eminence.” She did not shrink away from difficulty, and she had a peculiar way of learning: she questioned the basic principles of mathematics to drill down to their fundamental meaning and understand them completely.

  Ada first met Charles Babbage when she and her mother went to see his Difference Engine, the first of his very expensive, very unfinished mathematical machines, in London. She was seventeen; Babbage was forty-two. He displayed the machine—a piece of it, anyway—in a salon where he hosted Saturday-night soirées that attracted the most prominent names in society: Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, the Duke of Wellington. It wasn’t long after Ada’s ritual debut in court, where she had worn satin and tulle and made whispered pronouncements to her mother about the various dukes to whom she was presented: Wellington, she liked, and the Duke of Orleans, too, but the Duke of Talleyrand? He was an “old monkey.”

  Ada diligently made the rounds, but she held her social obligations in low esteem. She was, however, immediately mesmerized by Babbage’s machine, a hulking block of interlinked brass gears and cogs. “While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression, and I dare say the sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun,” wrote an onlooker, “Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”

  Not long afterward, Ada became Ada Augusta King, after her marriage to a sensible aristocrat a decade her senior, and then, three years later, her husband’s peerage elevated, the Countess of Lovelace. By the age of twenty-four, she’d borne three children—one, a son, named after her father—and was managing her family’s homes in Surrey and London, but she continued to study mathematics every day, and she remained fascinated by the Difference Engine.

  She pleaded with Babbage to let her be of service to his machines. “I hope you are bearing me in mind,” she wrote to him in 1840, “I mean my mathematical interests. You know this is the greatest favour any one can do me.” Being a countess came with social obligations Ada found immensely distracting from her true passions; she wanted a professional path, a vocation,
to practice mathematics in some useful way that might cement her legacy as her father’s poems had cemented his. Her letters—to Babbage, to her mother, to her many friends—reveal a woman consumed by the crippling fear that she might not have the opportunity to make her mark on mathematics. She was certain of her own unique talents: both her immense reasoning faculties, drilled into her by her mother’s homeschooling, and her “intuitive perception of hidden things,” the legacy of her absent father. “I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus,” she wrote to her mother, who worried she might be mad.

  Ada had affection for her husband—she called him “my chosen pet”—but she devoted her mental life to Babbage and his machines. She became his acolyte, and then his mouthpiece. His iconoclastic way of thinking appealed to her; she admired the imagination of his inventions. Having been raised in isolation, under the rigorous tutelage of a mother hell-bent on curbing any trace of Lord Byron’s poetical fancies, Ada felt validated by Babbage. Like her, he understood that the manipulation of numbers—the highest levels of mathematical thought—had profound metaphysical implications. That math was a form of poetry in itself.

  But by the time Ada was married, Babbage had all but given up on the Difference Engine. Impressive as it might have been to the British society passing through his Saturday soirées, it was only a very complicated adding machine, churning out rows and rows of numbers using the method of finite differences. The Difference Engine could have been used to tabulate error-free mathematical tables, to precisely “calculate by steam” the sorts of things human computers had by then been doing with only occasional errors for more than a century, but Babbage was no longer interested in anything so practical. He had a bigger idea.

  The Difference Engine’s precisely milled cogs and wheels stored thousands of numbers, but Babbage longed that they store variables instead—abstract symbols standing in for numbers. Such a machine could do much more than arithmetic. It would be capable of solving every kind of problem. He began to make plans for a second, far more ambitious engine, one that would make the conceptual leap from mechanized arithmetic to full-fledged general-purpose computation. He called it the Analytical Engine.

  If the Difference Engine was ingenious, the Analytical Engine was brilliant. Had it ever been fully built, the Analytical Engine would have been able to multiply two twenty-digit numbers in three minutes. The Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical computer built in the 1940s using some of Babbage’s basic computing principles, was capable of the same task in about six seconds, albeit nearly one hundred years later; today, my laptop does it in under a millionth of a second. But the Analytical Engine was not an electronic machine: it was a cumbersome mechanical thing, its cranks, rods, and spinning gearwheels designed to be powered by steam. The word “engine” is right: to an untrained eye, the partial model of the Analytical Engine currently on display at the Science Museum in London looks like something pulled from the belly of a train. It has the formidable and hulking physical presence of a bank vault.

  It was a tough sell. After all the money it had wasted on Babbage’s Difference Engine, the British government certainly wasn’t going to spring for a new model with even fewer immediate applications, and Babbage had nobody to lean on: in his obstinacy, he’d made his share of enemies in the British scientific community. In the hopes of stoking interest in his machine, Babbage accepted an invitation in the fall of 1840 to go to Turin and share his plans for the Analytical Engine with a group of Italian scientists and philosophers. He hoped that “the country of Archimedes and Galileo” might prove more enlightened than his homeland, but things didn’t go as planned.

  A small portion of the Analytical Engine’s “mill”

  Seated in Babbage’s Turin audience was a certain L. F. Menabrea, a young military engineer who would later become a diplomat, and then the Italian prime minister. Soon after the presentation, Menabrea wrote a detailed paper, “Notions sur la machine analytique,” for a Swiss journal. When the intellectually curious Ada came across the paper, she immediately began to translate it, correcting Menabrea’s mistakes as she went. She presented the unsolicited translation to Babbage; impressed, he asked her why she hadn’t just written an original paper, seeing as she was so familiar with the machine and its architect. The thought had not occurred to her. Babbage suggested that she should, at least, add some of her own notes to the translation. This compromise between modesty and intellectual ambition was amenable, and she undertook the project straightaway. But by the time they made it to the printer’s office, Ada’s notes—which she signed only with her initials, AAL—had taken on a life of their own. They were nearly three times longer than Menabrea’s original text, and an order of magnitude more sophisticated.

  In her notes, Ada synthesized the vast scope of Babbage’s vision. It was no easy task: by the time he died, he’d dedicated thirty volumes of plans to the Analytical Engine. Enlivening her technical analysis with flights of metaphysical fancy, she aimed to make the machine comprehensible—and exciting—for an educated Victorian audience, particularly those among the scientific community and the British government, whom Ada and Babbage both hoped would come to their senses regarding the machine. Babbage was obstinate and not a particularly good political player, and Ada knew his brilliance could easily be overlooked by those who found his temperament intolerable. “My dear and much admired Interpretress,” he admitted.

  But Ada didn’t only explain the technical workings of the Analytical Engine. She imagined the impact it could have on the world, teasing out the implications of general-purpose computing to anticipate the transformative power of software. She understood that if the Analytical Engine manipulated symbols, then anything that could be represented symbolically—numbers, logic, even music—could pass through the machine and do wondrous things. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns,” she wrote, using a textile metaphor, “just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” The possibilities were limitless, and hers was just the mind to articulate them: mathematically brilliant and poetically incisive in equal measure.

  The work was taxing on her, mentally as well as physically. Like many patients at the time, she was prescribed laudanum for her maladies. Through an opiate haze, she labored in bursts of feverish energy between social appointments and periods of illness. Her mother disapproved of the work, and she tried to contrive family dramas to distract her, but Ada was tenacious. Correspondence between Ada and Babbage during this time was brisk and highly intimate. They sent letters back and forth across London, often several times a day. She chided him for his sloppy work, bristled when he edited her writing, and caught his errors, all the while referring to herself as his “Fairy,” an apt description for the mathematical sprite she was. “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal,” she boasted as she sorted out all the ways the machine could deduce Bernoulli numbers. “Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.”

  The Analytical Engine would never be completed, but it represents the conceptual dawn of the computer age. The four components of its design—input, storage, processing, and output—remain core components of all computers today, and the strikingly original notes that Ada prepared to explain this new kind of machine would presage the literature of computer science by nearly a century. To demonstrate how the engine could calculate Bernoulli Numbers without any assistance from a “human hand or head,” she wrote mathematical proofs that many scholars characterize as the first computer programs ever written, and all for a machine that never even existed. Although Ada had three children, she referred to her notes on Menabrea’s essay as her firstborn. “He is an uncommonly fine baby,” she wrote to Babbage, upon completing her draft, and “he will grow to be a man of the first magnitude & power.”

  It’s telling of Ada’s time that she c
haracterized her work as male and signed her notes with only her initials. Although she was encouraged in her lifetime by high-profile supporters—Babbage chief among a circle that included her tutors, husband, and scientific friends—her path was decidedly unorthodox. Even her mother barely tolerated it. “Not even countesses,” writes Sadie Plant, “were supposed to count.” Beyond her friend Mary Somerville, she had few female peers, and her accomplishments required a dogged and persistent self-education, a near-manic dedication to mathematics that defied convention and damaged her health.

  Ada had been prone to illness her entire life, suffering from bouts of dizziness, pain, fainting, and nervous malcontent. Her symptoms were written off as hysteria and managed with her regular doses of laudanum, which she anticipated eagerly, her eyes burning. At thirty-six, the same age as her father, Ada died of what really ailed her: uterine cancer.

  She had all but given up on mathematics. In her final years, she bet compulsively on horse races, using her mathematical acuity to calculate odds for an ad hoc syndicate of male friends. One biographer has suggested that she hoped to win the fortune required to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine, but she lost so often and so spectacularly that she was forced to borrow money from friends and pawn family jewels. By the time she succumbed to protracted bed rest in London, she had become more like her father—mad, bad, and dangerous—than any Princess of Parallelograms. Floating in and out of reality with doses of laudanum, wine, and chloroform, she echoed the family chord of recklessness and tragedy. “I do dread that horrible struggle, which I fear is in the Byron blood,” she wrote to her mother. “I don’t think we die easy.”