Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers:Poetical Science Read online

  Politically, she was a Whig as Lord Byron had been; however, she did not decry industrialization but attempted to help farmers make the transition to an industrial society. Lady Byron was involved in many educational endeavors. She sponsored industrial and agricultural schools at a time when only one out of eleven children received a formal education. The first school she established was based on the school begun in Scotland by Mrs. Henry Siddons, a member of a prominent acting family.

  Lady Byron was interested in the philosophy of cooperation, particularly the work of another educator, Emanuel DeFellenberg, who had established a school in Switzerland where aristocratic young men learned practical as well as intellectual skills. Cooperative groups were the rage and were set up throughout England and America to foster moral, social, industrial and agricultural development.

  In June 1826, two years after Lord Byron’s death, Lady Byron went to London to make final preparations for taking Ada on a trip to the Continent. Ada was left in the care of Louisa Chaloner and Miss Briggs, Ada’s attendant. Louisa Chaloner told Ada she was not pretty. Although Ada was quite upset, she used the comment to explore her feelings and concluded that vanity was “the cause of all people’s foibles, and unhappiness. . .” Seventeen years later Ada continued the discussion and wrote to Charles Babbage about her opinion of vanity. On a practical level Ada spent her time developing mathematical skills with Hugh Montgomery, the nephew of Mary Montgomery.

  Ada embarked with her mother and her new governess, Miss Stamp, to the Continent in late June 1826. They traveled with an entourage of friends and one of Lady Byron’s cousins, Robert Noel, who remained Ada’s friend and correspondent for the rest of her life. Robert was one of four sons of the Reverend Thomas Noel, Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son. If Lady Byron’s mother had not prevented the marriage of her brother, Lord Wentworth, the Noels would have inherited the Wentworth fortune, estimated as varying from about £3000 to £6000 a year (approximately ten to twenty times the annual teacher’s salary of £300 at the time). Lady Byron felt herself under a financial obligation to her cousins and paid for their education.

  The trip was a thrilling change for Ada since it was very different from the quiet life she led in the countryside. She set off with her family and her new governess and toured on the continent for fifteen months. She wrote to Mrs. Joanna Baillie and many of her mother’s friends describing the beautiful views of the Alps. Ada drew chalk sketches of the exquisite scenery in Switzerland. The steamboats on Lake Lucerne impressed her. The organ music she heard in the churches made her think that her destiny would be in the realm of music. The entourage moved on to Turin, later a very important city for Charles Babbage, where she enjoyed watching the punch and tumblers parading through the streets.

  When Ada and her mother returned to England, Lady Byron rented a home, Bifrons, near Canterbury. In early 1828 Lady Byron went away for a health cure for many months. Even though Ada continued to observe every antic of her cat Puff, she was very lonely and her imagination began to soar. She played with the idea of flying, an ancient myth since the Greek Daedalus attempted to escape a Cretan prison by fashioning wax and feather wings. Ada’s imaginative approach was scientifically sound. Many of her ideas about flying in 1828 predate Henson’s design for an aerial steam carriage in 1842.

  Henson’s Aerial Carriage 1842

  When Ada was twelve years old, this future “Lady Fairy,” as Charles Babbage affectionately called her, decided that she wanted to fly. Ada went about the project methodically, thoughtfully, with imagination and passion. Her first step in February, 1828, was to construct wings. She investigated different material and sizes. She considered various materials for the wings; paper, oilsilk, wires, and feathers. She examined the anatomy of birds to determine the right proportion between the wings and the body. She decided to write a book Flyology illustrating, with plates, some of her findings. She assessed what equipment she would need, for example, a compass, to “cut across the country by the most direct road,” so that she could surmount mountains, rivers and valleys. Her final step was to integrate steam with the “art of flying.”

  Steam proved to be Ada’s most difficult problem to overcome. She developed a design and thought that if she were successful, her flying machine would be even more “wonderful than steam packets or steam carriages.” Her design was to make a “thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so....as to move an immense pair of wings” and in such a manner “as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.” Ada asked everyone from her family physician to her governess at the time, Miss Stamp, to help her in this endeavor.

  Lady Byron humored Ada’s project, but when she learned that Ada was not attending to her studies she reprimanded her. Ada informed her mother she had dropped the “flying project” by removing the ropes and pulleys in her flying room. Instead, she put a wooden horse in the room, got up on the horse, and pretended she was riding a “real” horse.

  Ada thanked her mother for her “kind advice” and dropped the flying project, but the idea of the potentiality of technology did not escape her imagination. Ada started on her unique path to understanding science and technology, a combination of imagination and experimentation.

  Poetical Science

  The first step in integrating imagination, what’s in you mind, with numbers, is you have to know your basic skills.. The best way to test your skills is to play a game. This game is based on the game Krypto, and if you can’t find Krypto you can make your own version with a deck of cards.

  1. Take a card deck and remove the picture cards and the aces. You have 40 cards left.

  2. Shuffle them, and deal out four cards to each player. Turn over the next card.

  3. The object is to use the four cards in your hand, which you can add, multiply, subtract and divide. You must use all four cards to get the number you turned over.

  4. It is not as easy as you think, but it will get you used to using numbers in you head.

  5. It is also the path to estimating, which in this era is critical.

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  Conversational Litigation, I Am an Altered Person, Ada Meets Babbage,

  The Rainbow

  [1829-1834]

  Ada’s life changed dramatically at the end of 1828. Not only did she have to cope with being thirteen and the onset of puberty, but Miss Stamp left to get married. Rather than hire another governess, Lady Byron enlisted the help of various friends, Sophia Frend (Dr William Frend’s daughter), Dr King, and Miss Arabella Lawrence, to guide Ada’s studies. Sophia Frend was not iconoclastic like her father but very prim, proper, and critical. Dr King was head of the Brighton Cooperative Society, and his wife Mary was an Evangelical Christian. Miss Arabella Lawrence, a Liverpool educator, was also involved in the Cooperative movement.

  Just as Lady Byron was making plans for Ada’s education, Ada contracted the measles in early 1829. Instead of designing flying machines and riding horses, she was bedridden until mid-1832. Lady Byron believed Ada’s illness was an opportunity for her to concentrate on her studies. She hired Miss Lawrence to supervise those studies, primarily by correspondence. Miss Lawrence made visits every few weeks to the bedridden girl.

  Lady Byron read Ada’s letters to Miss Lawrence and added postscripts. She warned Miss Lawrence that Ada had a propensity to “conversational litigation” and asked Miss Lawrence to help curb this trait since it was “very necessary for this habit to be checked, both as disagreeable and inconsistent with the feeling of respect.” Ada’s snide comments might have been not only a reflection of a thirteen-year-old’s adolescent rebellion but also the mirroring of her mother’s behavior. Just at this time Lady Byron was involved in her own “conversational litigation,” enlisting a wide range of people to join in her fight to prevent Thomas Moore (a close friend of Lord Byron’s) from publishing his biography explaining Lord Byron’s perception of the separation.

  Ada walked a precarious line. She tried to set the boundaries of
her own identity and at the same time please her mother. She wrote Arabella Lawrence that her illness, and being confined to bed made her anxious and nervous. She confessed that she became so passionate about even the smallest issues that it would disturb her as much “as Charles the 10th losing a kingdom.”

  In 1832 Ada and her mother moved to Fordhook, a mansion that had been the home of the writer Henry Fielding. By the end of 1832 Ada’s health had improved, but she was overweight from being bedridden. She voiced her passion for horses and music. Miss Lawrence had been replaced by a series of tutors for chemistry, Latin, shorthand (William Turner), and music. Ada continued to be watched carefully, not only by her mother, but by her mother’s spinster friends, whom Ada dubbed “the three Furies.” Sometimes they were not watching too closely.

  According to Ada’s confidences to Woronzow Greig, her attorney, more than fifteen years later, despite being constantly watched, she had an affair with her tutor, most likely in late February or early March 1833. Although the date of her fall from grace is uncertain, Greig’s account of the event, whenever it occurred, was vivid. He always saw Ada in the context of being Lord Byron’s daughter, and in turn Ada loved shocking Greig. In recollecting the event, Ada told him that she and her lover went about as far as they could go without “connection.”

  Inevitably, Ada was caught. When Selina Doyle observed her being a little too familiar with the tutor, she alerted Lady Byron. The tutor was fired. Furious and distraught, Ada ran off to his home but was promptly returned to Fordhook. After the escapade, Ada received sermons from Miss Briggs, Dr King, Mrs King, and others. Turner was paid a partial salary for the year on 6 April and although Ada’s other tutors are listed as having been paid after that date, Mr Turner’s name never appeared in the bank books again.

  After some soul searching, Ada saw the error of her ways, according to her letters, and began to ride her horses, Dubby and Sylph, with a wild passion. She also began to lose her baby fat.

  Ada had many other things on her mind in addition to sex. She was presented at Court on 10 May 1833. Lady Byron described this event on 13 May in a letter to Mrs King: “Ada wore White Satin & Tulle. She was amused by seeing for the first time—the Duke of Wellington–Talleyrand–and the Duke of Orleans.—She liked the straightforwardness of the first–the second gave her the idea of an ‘old monkey’—the third she thought very pleasing.”

  Guitarpa

  Ada wrote to her friend Fanny Smith about her new passion, the guitar. She had a new teacher, a Spaniard of high rank, Count Urraea, and described him as an excellent player who could “produce the effect of a full band or orchestra at a little distance, of the harp, the castagnettes; in fact he does anything with the instrument.”

  It was just at this time that Ada met Charles Babbage, a man whom she was linked to in history.

  Sir Alphabet Function, a knight much renowned,

  Who had gained little credit on classical ground,

  Set out through the world his fortune to try,

  With nought in his pate but his x, v, and y.

  Charles Babbage

  On 5 June 1833, Ada attended a party where she met Charles Babbage. Babbage, who later dubbed himself Sir Alphabet Function, was a 42–year–old mathematician and widower, who, like Ada’s father, had gone to Cambridge University. He was regarded as one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century. His interests ranged from mechanical dolls to mechanical machines, from the probability of games of chance to the moves in a chess game. Compared to most of the adults Ada knew who were so very proper, Babbage was an iconoclast. He viewed politics, science, technology, and mathematics in an unusual way.

  When Babbage was a student at Cambridge, he founded the Analytical Society with his friends John Herschel and George Peacock. They wanted the university to adopt Leibnitz’s notation of calculus rather than Newton’s method. The three men were determined to do their best to leave the world wiser than they found it.

  Herschel became a noted astronomer. George Peacock, later to become the Dean of Ely, was responsible for major educational reform at Cambridge. Babbage left us with the conceptual building blocks for the birth of the computer revolution. It all began, according to Babbage’s autobiography, Passages in the Life of a Philosopher, when Herschel encouraged Babbage’s idea to build an engine that could calculate numbers by steam. Babbage thus became part of the history of brilliant mathematicians who turned their attention to the mechanical and technological manipulation of numbers.

  Poetical Science

  A most important poetical science skill today is the ability to estimate. Your basic mathematical skills must become “part of your mind” as Ada wrote. In this era of calculators and computers your ability to estimate is critical. Just last week, in May 2010, it is believed that a trader in the stock market, by putting in an order for billions when he meant millions, caused the stock market to fall by 10% in just a few seconds. It took what felt like hours before that mistake was fixed. Many people suffered financially.

  You can practice how to estimate effortlessly in your everyday life.

  1. Before you get to the cash register in the market estimate what the bill will be.

  2. Estimate what portion of your budget should be allocated to different needs.

  3. Estimate what your credit card bill will be at the end of the month.

  4. Have a good idea of large numbers, whether the answer should be, 3, 30, or 300 or even 3 billion.

  4

  From Calculating Machines to the Difference Engine

  [1833]

  The history of calculating devices goes back to the beginning of time. The most familiar device was the abacus. Pebbles (calculi) were put on wires and used to help count numbers. In 1642 the French mathematician Blasé Pascal, who was nineteen years old, invented one of the first calculating machines. Bored with working on his father’s accounts he invented a machine that was capable of addition. In 1671 the German mathematician Leibnitz designed a machine capable of multiplication by means of repeated additions using a stepped reckoner. Babbage adapted the stepped reckoner in the design of his first calculating machine, the Difference Engine.

  Ada, in a series of letters, made only remote references to Charles Babbage, but it is evident even from these remarks that someone very special had come into her life. The bulk of her correspondence with him, which Babbage preserved, took place during the summer of 1843, when Ada was writing the Notes describing his Analytical Engine. For the years 1833-1835 we must rely on other sources to gain an idea of Ada’s relationship with Babbage and the Difference Engine. The following information comes primarily from Lady Byron’s diaries and letters found in the Lovelace-Byron Collection; Babbage’s marvelous autobiography, Passages; Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer; and other sources listed in Appendix I.

  In 1843 when Ada wrote the Notes describing Babbage’s Analytical Engine, one of her greatest strengths was her ability to distinguish between Babbage’s calculating engines. Also, Ada’s passionate support and belief that Babbage’s engines were not only of practical advantage, but would lead to a deeper understanding of mathematics and science, most likely stemmed from her first encounter with the Difference Engine. It is important, therefore, to understand the history of the Difference Engine and highlight it as Ada first saw it and as Babbage described it in June 1833. Babbage was famous for Saturday night soirées at his home that attracted hundreds of the most prominent people of the time: the Duke of Wellington, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Andrew Crosse (an experimenter in electricity), and Harriet Martineau (a popular science writer). The conversation must have been remarkable but the star attraction of these soirées was the Difference Engine.

  Difference Engine

  In 1823 Babbage received what can be considered the first government grant to support technological development to build his first calculating engine, the Difference Engine. The government supplied part of the cost, but by the time Babb
age met Ada in June 1833, funding of the engine was in jeopardy. A part of the engine was built. It had a feedback mechanism and when completed would be able to print out logarithm tables that could be used for navigation. It worked on the theory of calculating differences.

  Babbage had supervised construction of the engine in a fireproof building with a glass roof behind his house in Dorset Street. The machine was 29 inches tall, 27 inches wide and 36 inches deep, which is about the size of a small modern business computer. In order to visit the Difference Engine you had to go out through what was a cow yard to the building, but the trip was worth it to many visitors and there were many visitors.

  The highlight of the evening was to show the Difference Engine to his guests. When he showed it to the Duke of Wellington for the first time, he left pieces of music lying near it. He knew the Duke loved country dance music, and Babbage wanted him to associate the engine with music. Instead, the Duke remarked how the engine might be a help in handling all the variables a general might need in conducting a military campaign.

  The Duke of Wellington

  When one woman saw the Difference Engine, as Babbage recollected in Passages, she asked him: “If you put in the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” Today, we refer to such statements as GIGO, or Garbage In Garbage Out. Harriet Martineau described Babbage’s response to such questions: “. . . I always thought he appeared to great advantage as a host. His patience in explaining the machine in those days was really exemplary. I felt it so, the first time I saw the miracle, as it appeared to me.”