Ada -- Ada Byron as she initially was; Ada Lovelace as she became. What was so
special about her in terms of her education, her genealogy if you like,
her genetics? What was so special about her that enabled her to do what she did?
Well, this is not strictly computer science but it's a good story and
it does have some marginal relevance to all of this.
Ada's parents were George Gordon Byron - he was born in 1788. I'll put the first
name of his wife in quotes. Actually she was christened, I think as
Anne Isabella, but she actually liked to run the two together and elide them
into "Annabella". So that's why I put quotes around "Annabella Milbanke". They got
married in 1815 and you can work it out: I mean ... that would mean that Byron was 27;
she was actually 23. And very shortly after getting married they had a
daughter and Byron chose the name Ada for her. You know, short; to the point;
poetical. Ada Byron born 10th December 1815. She was the only
legitimate daughter of these two. Now, I can only apologize again and say I have
to say something about, particularly, her father because it explains so much about Ada and how
she was educated the way she was. Lord Byron was unbelievable. He was the
[pre-] Victorian bad boy, par excellence. George Gordon Byron was like an amalgam of
Hunter S. Thompson, y' know, Sean Penn, Charlie Sheen, Keith Richards maybe,
all of the bad boys. And had there been a gang, of them, a ratpack, he would have been the
leader, most definitely. Indeed, one of his many, many
girlfriends, for George Byron, was a lady called Lady Caroline Lamb. Some of the
oldies of my audience will have seen the movie, starring Sarah Miles.
And famously Lady Caroline Lamb characterized him as being: Mad, Bad and
Dangerous to Know. [movie clip] >> William Lamb - later Lord Melbourne: He [Byron] writes like a housemaid on the verge of the vapours !
>> Lady Caroline: He does not mean to write like Alexander Pope .... >> DFB: Lord Byron was famous at Cambridge for keeping a pet
bear in his rooms and when he'd later declared himself to be a poet, and he was
a very good one, he went off to Italy to see his
poetical friends - and have them visit him.
People like Shelley and Keats and stuff like that. Shelley recounts that when he found
Byron by the sea, in lodgings, the staircase was occupied by six pet
peacocks. It was this kind of excess - it was sex drugs and rock'n'roll. Except
no rock'n'roll in those days - so it was sex drugs and poetry >> Sean: If he'd had a Rolls-Royce
it would have been in the swimming pool? >> DFB: Oh! yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
Because he was like that. And because he left his wife immediately - five weeks after Ada
was born - and they'd only been married earlier that year, that Annabella Milbanke
thought he was the devil incarnate - had no time for him - and was worried stiff
that daughter Ada might grow up in the image of her father. So, to try and head
off trouble at the pass, it was decreed that Ada's education could cover things
like non-fiction English literature, geography, botany, mathematics, physics
chemistry - nothing that involved the emotions. The thing that was absolutely
banned in her education was poetry. That inflamed the passions! She might start
taking after her father and then heaven knows what would happen. So Ada,
unusually for a woman of [good] breeding in early Victorian era, had a very rational
scientific upbringing. She had mathematics tutors and, later on, actually
in wanting to become an even better mathematician she did ask ... well she
not only took up with Babbage as we will find out, but she also asked for
recommendations for other tutors. And one of them is a person I think I have
mentioned on Computerphile already: Augustus De Morgan, who came up with the
rules of the logical algebra, later known as Boolean algebra. So, she had De Morgan
of De Morgan's Rules fame, as one of her Maths tutors. And she was serious about
becoming ever more devoted to mathematics. Think about it: 1815 she was
a society lady; she lived with her mother and a large proportion of living with her
Mum, during the year, would be in London in rented lodgings. Her mother was
reasonably well-off. She was a minor-league sort of heiress in her own right. They
could afford that OK. But young ladies of [good] breeding - really
up until about 1970, in the society circuit, had a ceremony
almost of what was called 'coming out'. What it meant was you were a 'debutante', you
were a young lady in society who hadn't been formally introduced to the people who
mattered in Society. So you had 'coming out balls', in fashionable London, and
these were attended by the Queen
or the King. When you add 17 onto 1815 [when Ada was born] - 1832 was Ada's Coming-Out Ball, where
she met the predecessor to Queen Victoria who was King William IV, I think, at that time.
But anyway, as part of this 'coming out' she met, at one of the events, a certain
Charles Babbage and Charles Babbage invited Ada and her mother,
Annabella, to come and visit him at his house, meet his wife, and to be shown this
miracle of mechanical engineering and mathematics. "Only part-constructed but
we're just awaiting more funds". Difference Engine Mk II. And Ada was completely
captivated by this. She thought it was wonderful and she and Babbage became, shall
we say, "firm friends", corresponding very very regularly. They kept in touch. But in
order to explain how it all came down, in the end, to this Analytical Engine it goes
roughly as follows. In the early 1830s, aged still only 19, she corresponded
a lot with Babbage about his Difference Engine MK II,
asks for recommendations for Maths tutors and so on. [The] late 1830s were occupied by the
fact that. in about 1835 I think, Ada met another gentleman from high
society called William King. Married him. They fell for each other; whirlwind romance;
mid-1830s. So the late 1830s as you can imagine was
spent on William King's Somerset estates in the process of being domestic and
having three children. And fortunately for Ada - very unusual in the Victorian
era - they did all survive and she herself did not die in childbirth - a minor miracle
in those days. But by early 1840s she'd had her three children - of
course they were well enough off that they'd be looked after by governesses, nursemaids
and so on - she decided that she would like to get back into mathematics. And it
was at this late stage that Babbage, without actually formally publishing it
anywhere, had come up with the idea of the Analytical Engine. [video clip] ... keep it in the CPU, or if ...
>> DFB: Babbage, of course, would have been the first programmer, in a
sense, of his Analytical Engine. He'd have come up with the design and he'd have done
pencil and paper exercises about " ... with that design will this actually work?". But don't
forget the Analytical Engine was not built, has not been built and will cause
huge problems in being built. However, the spec. could be obtained and
it was very, very impressive indeed. So, why didn't Babbage publicize this
more? Why did Ada and others have to find
out almost by knowing him personally? The answer is that Babbage was thin-skinned
- think back to my story in early videos about Newton and Gauss. They were thin-skinned,
couldn't stand criticism, couldn't stand the unwashed criticising their
great thoughts. [video clip: Undecidability tangent] >> DFB: But like Newton-- he hated publishing. If you published then
the great unwashed would start telling .... [end of clip] >> DFB: The Boeotians I think it was called by
Gauss. Same thing with Babbage he was so thin-skinned he could not take
criticism and worst of all he stopped giving lectures, because people
misunderstood them and, worse still, he got heckled! So, it was no use asking Babbage
to give a lecture to the Royal Institution, or something, in London about
his Analytical Engine - he was not going to do that! However, he was invited to go to
Italy and I think he was probably a member of the Italian equivalent of the
Royal Society. So we went over, by invitation, in the late 1830s [correction: 1841]
to give a talk on his Analytical Engine. A person there called Luigi Menabrea, an
engineer with a good maths background, who later became Italian Prime Minister
actually, took copious notes and wrote up a paper, published in a French journal - not
an Italian one, amazingly. Well, Ada got to hear about this, got hold of a copy of
it and decided that she could rework it as translator, add a lot to it, do it
better and explain it to an English audience. So, this is where the whole
issue comes of Ada as computer programmer.
Yes she really, really DID understand every nuance of Babbage's design; she had
to in explaining how this program worked. In, no doubt, writing programs of her
own. And I think what always impresses me about Ada, when you read her copious notes at
the end of this paper ... beware it's in Victorian English. It is heavy going! She
and Babbage and the rest of the Victorians would never use 6 words where 36 would do.
All sorts of subjunctive clauses - oh! it's hard work.
Be warned! So anyway, in part of her end-notes in this she lets her
imagination run free and she says to people: "Have you thought? Could
this wonderful Engine of Babbage's compose music?" Now that really is good lateral
thinking, because Sean and I have stood there at Bletchley Park or sat there in
front of my computer, here at Nottingham, when we were doing the Ackermann
function, and jokingly said to ourselves "Ooh! it's thinking!" when the result didn't
come out. And, somehow, that's not too difficult a thought to have when the
thing is electronic and humming away. But to have the thought of this crashing great
Analytical Engine being driven by steam, going bang! crash! bang! bang!. To think of
that as a thinking machine does require a bigger leap of imagination. So yes,
she had glimpses of the future, there's no question about it.
she really did. >> Sean: Even more so if you think that it's actually just on paper at this stage ...
>> DFB: Oh yes! >> Sean: ... she's seen some cogs from other things he's done but ...
>> DFB: Yes, later on, after her sort of tragic death, Babbage when he wrote his own
autobiography referred back constantly to what he called his 'Enchantress of Number'
i.e. Ada herself. And this wonderful paper.
Oh!! and another lovely Babbage story - I love this one! She consulted with him while she was
writing this paper and he thought it was wonderful but came up with the great idea,
which you can guess! "Wouldn't it be a good idea, my dear, if as
well as this paper I were to write an anonymous preface to it and flame the
establishment and the grant-givers for not giving me enough money to actually build it ?!"
And she knew him well enough by this time; she adroitly avoided doing that. I mean
Babbage's idea that so long as it was anonymous nobody would guess who wrote
it, is just unbelievable. Anyway that's how it all ended because
the trouble was - and the really tragic thing for Ada was, as the 1840s wore on -
her health got worse and worse and worse. It's now believed that she actually died
of cervical cancer. I think she didn't actually die until 1852.
By that time her mother had moved in with her and her husband, William King
Earl of Lovelace, on their Somerset estate. But a week or two before Ada died
ructions began all over again because she called William King her husband,
apparently, according to Stephen Wolfram's blog - and i believe this, he's
researched it well - and told William King something that made him " ...very, very upset".
It has not been recorded what it is. She insisted that when she died - and she knew
death was inevitable - that she did not want to be buried on the William King,
Earl of Lovelace, estate in Somerset. She wanted to be buried next to her father.
And this, if you like, is where the local bit comes in, for us here in
Nottingham. Her father George Gordon, Lord Byron, when he wasn't being Mad, Bad and
Dangerous to Know, had also actually inherited from a very distant Byron
cousin [correction: great-uncle] the whole of the Newstead Abbey estate. Now Newstead Abbey is a stately home just
north of us here [in Nottingham] . Byron loved inheriting this! Lord of the Manor; striding around; sword in
hand, y' know, order the workers what to do next ...
Be a man with a country estate and with all my learning and my [good] breeding as well.
Only trouble was - the fact is he was
virtually bankrupt. He couldn't remotely afford to run the Newstead estate. What little
money Byron had was spent on sex, drugs peacocks and poetry. So it
never really got off the ground. And I think fairly shortly thereafter maybe
even before Byron died in 1828 [correction: 1824] the estate was sold and left the Byron
family completely. But Newstead Abbey was there and it brought with it, of course, the
rights of the family grave. Byron himself was buried in Hucknall
Parish Church and Ada said - and upset her husband and her Mum mightily - "I want to be buried
next to my father in Hucknall Parish Church". Fortunately due to our friends and
colleagues in Physics and "Sixty Symbols", we're able to refer across because they
paid a visit [in 2015] to Ada and her father's tomb in Hucknall Parish Church and have done a
video on it. [video clip] >> Prof. Merrifield: ... and up there on the wall is the plaque, commemorating Ada Lovelace,
vertical, she's not buried up there. She's down here, in the family vault, or
actually this is just the entrance to the family vault .... >> DFB: At the funeral -
again it was a small affair - but really telling was her mother did not attend, I
think probably furious at her daughter's wish to be buried next to the hated
husband, Lord Byron. Babbage was appointed executor of Ada's will, but he didn't
attend either. Read into that what you will but I think one can certainly say
that in the past - in Ada's past - she was a troubled soul in many ways - there were
probably "goings-on" of various sorts, that we can only speculate about. And yet -
there's no doubt about it - I don't want to under-play or over-play
Ada but she was important. She really was. She "got it", in a sense,
about software - and what software could do. And I think she sort of could
transcend the unbelievable limitations of the hardware, that would have been
limited, even had it ever been built. And could see beyond that - she could see
beyond that to a future of "computing for its own sake" if you like. That local link
has been very important to us as part of the bicentenary celebrations of Ada,
December 2015. Everybody labelled everything "The Ada Lovelace Laboratory" or
"The Ada Lovelace Thing". Our excuse for doing this - we've labelled our first-year lab
as: "The Ada Lovelace Computing Laboratory" is that there is this local connection.
I don't know that she ever visited Newstead Abbey [in fact she did visit Newstead - in 1850]. She probably lived in London
most of her life with her Mum. And I bet you her mother, if there had been any talk
of a trip to Newstead, would have vetoed it, because it might have, y' know, taken
you too near to "That Man" or something like
that - but, yes, that is our local connection.