One could never guess just what Babbage would say next. If the evolution of technology had been a little speedier and given television to the early nineteenth century, Babbage might easily have become a ‘mad scientist’ TV personality, popular on talk shows and hired to host documentaries about technological innovations.
Eminent men of science and other high-calibre professionals generally respected Babbage and found him amusing. In January 1832, the geologist Charles Lyell had travelled to Hendon, at that time a village north of London, and visited his friends and fellow geologists Dr William Fitton and William Conybeare.
We have had great fun in laughing at Babbage, who unconsciously jokes and reasons in high mathematics, talks of the ‘algebraic equation’ of such a one’s character in regard to the truth of his stories etc. I remarked that the paint of Fitton’s house would not stand, on which Babbage said, ‘no: painting a house outside is calculating by the index minus one,’ or some such phrase, which made us stare; so that he said gravely by way of explanation, ‘That is to say, I am assuming revenue to be a function.’ All this without pedantry, and he bears well being well quizzed by it. He says that when the reform is carried he hopes to be secularised Bishop of Winchester. They were speculating on what we should do if we were suddenly put down on Saturn. Babbage said: ‘You Mr Leudon (the clergyman there, and schoolmaster, and a scholar), would set about persuading them that some language disused in Saturn for 2,000 years was the only thing worth learning; and you, Conybeare, would try to bamboozle them into a belief that it was to their interest to feed you for doing nothing.’
Obviously relishing the memory, Lyell added:
Fitton’s carriage brought us from Highwood House to within a mile of Hampstead, and then Babbage and I got out and preferred walking. Although enjoyable, yet staying up till half-past one with three such men, and the continual pelting of new ideas, was anything but a day of rest.
Like Lyell, Ada, for her part, found in Babbage a man whose mind she could engage with and who was as excited about ideas as she was. For her the demonstration piece of the Difference Engine she saw in action that Monday evening at Babbage’s house was wonderfully exciting. Seeing it, she felt filled with a completely new sense of purpose and direction.
From Ada’s childhood onwards, she had been torn between two opposite poles. She was conscious of being the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Britain’s most celebrated Romantic poet, a man whose memory in death loomed larger than it had in life, and of being the daughter of Lady Byron, whom her father had – according to her mother – so thoroughly wronged.
Ada’s mind was circumscribed by her mother’s wishes, which had often threatened to overwhelm her own personality. But now Ada sensed the possibility that her friendship with Babbage might at some point lead to a new life of her own, a life of the mind that was hers and not that her family’s.
* The date of Babbage’s wife Georgiana’s death was discovered by Annelisa Christensen who assisted me with the research for this book. The date is mentioned in an issue of the London Times for September 1827, which records the death as having happened ‘on the 1st inst at Boughton-house, in the county of Worcester, aged 35, Georgiana, the wife of Charles Babbage Esq., of Devonshire-street, Portland-place.’
10
Kinship
The friendship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace was to grow one of the great friendships of the history of science. It is possible to trace the friendship in considerable detail by means of following chronologically the extant correspondence between Babbage and Ada. This correspondence spans the years from June 10, 1835, to August 12, 1852, which was when Ada wrote her last (known) letter to Babbage.
The surviving correspondence between them consists of eighty-five letters from Ada to Babbage and twenty-five letters from him to her. There are often references in the correspondence to other letters that have apparently not survived. Moreover, in 1853 Babbage wrote a letter to Lady Byron’s solicitor (Woronzow Greig) in which Babbage referred to an ‘extensive correspondence’ he had carried on with Ada ‘for years.’ He is surely referring to a correspondence much more extensive than what survives. Indeed, in the year 2000, a small cache of letters from Ada to Babbage turned up in the store-room of the Northumberland County Archive in the north of England. It is possible that more letters between them may yet materialise. Most of the letters that do survive date from the year 1843, the year Ada was at her most productive as a scientist.
It may well be why so many letters survive from 1843 is that, while Lady Byron destroyed most of Babbage’s letters to Ada after Ada’s death (or delegated the job of destruction to someone else), she felt morally obliged as a dedicated amateur mathematician to keep the letters relating to her daughter’s great intellectual effort of that year.
At first, the friendship advanced relatively slowly. When Babbage and Ada met, she was still only seventeen and he a widower of forty-two. He was not a shy man but nor was he the kind of man who would have been excessively forward in developing the friendship. Had he been, there was always Lady Byron to contend with.
Ada was greatly impressed by Babbage. She regarded him with what she was to describe in a letter to her mother in late 1839 as a ‘fondness … by no means inconsiderable.’ Ada and her mother kept in contact with Babbage and it seems certain Ada saw him on several other occasions as her mother’s search for a suitable husband continued.
Ada was dealing with the avuncular Dr William King, whom Lady Byron had recruited to be her moral guide. They went on ‘pleasant walks’ where he would instruct on how to control one’s imagination and thoughts. She sweetly wrote him on Sunday, March 9, 1834, that she was ‘really & permanently awaking to a sense of religious duty.’
Repeating to him his ideas in her words and using them slightly against him – the style of writing that dominates the letters to her mother – she tells him what will help her with ‘self-government’ of her imagination.
I must cease to think of living for pleasure or self gratification; and there is but one sort of excitement, if indeed it can be called by that name, which I think allowable for me at present, viz: that of study & intellectual improvement. I find that nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.
She asks him to improve his teaching of mathematics, the other area in which Lady Byron expected Dr King to tutor Ada, by laying out a syllabus for him to put together:
I am most thankful that this strong source of interest does seem to be supplied to me now almost providentially, & think it is a duty vigorously to use the resources thus as it were pointed out to me. If you will do me so great a favour as to give me the benefit of your advice and suggestions as to the plan of study most advisable for me to follow, I shall be most grateful. – I may say that I have time at my command, & that I am willing to take any trouble.
It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics – that is to say – Euclid, and Arithmetic & Algebra; and as I am not entirely a beginner in these subjects, I do not anticipate any serious difficulties, particularly if I may be allowed to apply to you in any extreme case. My wish is to make myself well acquainted with Astronomy, Optics & c; but I find that I cannot study these satisfactorily for want of a thorough acquaintance with the elementary parts of Mathematics … In short, here I am ready to be directed! I really want some hard work for a certain number of hours every day …
Yours most gratefully & affectionately
A A Byron
Like Mary Somerville, Ada’s sharp mind had found a subject to focus on – and a burning passion for mathematics had awoken within her.
11
Mad Scientist
As for Babbage, he was born some three years after Lord Byron, on December 26, 1791, in Walworth, Surrey. Nowadays, this district, which is just south of the River Thames, i
s known as Elephant and Castle after a coaching inn which once had that name.
Charles Babbage’s father, Benjamin Babbage, born in 1753, was a wealthy goldsmith and banker. The two professions were then closely linked; it was a small practical and logical step for customers who were buying gold and jewellery from their goldsmith to use the safes in goldsmiths’ offices to store all their valuables and for the goldsmith to advance money on his clients’ valuables.
The Babbages had been well established since the late seventeenth century in Totnes, a small town in the county of Devon in the south-west of England, about 220 miles from London.
Today, Totnes is a busy little market town, especially popular with people living New Age and alternative lifestyles. Its population, about 8,000 now, has not greatly increased since the end of the eighteenth century, when it was extremely wealthy by the standards of the day.
The historical prosperity of Totnes originated from wool sheared from the backs of the sheep that spent much of their lives in the meadows on the hills that ripple around the town. This wool was turned into an inexpensive, coarse, long-lasting woollen cloth called kersey. There was a huge demand for this cloth throughout Britain and abroad for workmen’s breeches and trousers.
Benjamin Babbage slowly founded a successful business in Totnes and the villages and towns in the area. He traded informally, lending out sums, transacting business under his own name and acting an agent for some London banks. Benjamin was an astute businessman, and business was good.
The trouble was, though, that by the start of the 1790s, the cloth trade was waning. Steam-powered machines were having a major impact on the weaving business. Steam provided what promised at the time to be close to unlimited energy. The steam engine also meant it wasn’t necessary any more for mills and factories to be built near running water for operating waterwheels. Coal was the fuel of the future, and in this new industrial world Totnes was at a big disadvantage. Why? Simply because Devon had, as far as was known, no large natural endowment of coal. The Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum and Totnes was being left behind.
A canny fellow, Benjamin was quick to spot the significance of the new developments. He decided to transfer his business activities to London, a radical move indeed in those days, when the vast majority of the population lived out their lives in the village or town where they were born.
Benjamin moved to London in 1791, taking with him his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married the year before. He had first-class business contacts in the capital and eventually became a partner of Praeds Bank in London, probably one of the banks for which he had acted on an agency basis.
Benjamin Babbage had always made his own luck, so there was really nothing accidental about his success in London. He chose to move to the great capital – then the largest city in the world – at a time when there was a huge increase in the demand for credit, mainly caused by the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. The banking business was literally a golden opportunity for lenders who could keep their heads and had the skill to distinguish good credit risks from bad. Benjamin possessed that skill. He prospered.
The only surviving portrait of Benjamin shows a man with a rather jovial expression (money may have been on his mind), and the look of having a precise understanding of his importance in the world and his success. Little else, however, is known about his personality except what can be inferred from the letters about him written by his son Charles and Charles’s wife Georgiana.
Judging from the letters, Benjamin was frequently prone to moods that were anything but jovial, at least in how he treated his eldest son. Benjamin was often impatient with Charles and frequently even abusive to him, accusing him of failing to make serious career plans for the future, even initially refusing to approve his wish to marry Georgiana until he had made safe headway in some suitable recognised profession.
Georgiana came from a family of quality, had a fortune of her own and was by all accounts a thoroughly charming and good person. But Benjamin, a self-made man, believed that young men should make money a higher priority than matrimony, like he had.
On Benjamin’s death in 1827, Charles inherited almost his entire fortune, including Benjamin’s cash in the bank and his silver and gold plate, which was – as we’ve seen – worth about £100,000. To set this amount in perspective, when Charles Dickens died in 1870 after a lifetime of working harder than almost any writer has ever worked – overwork undoubtedly contributed to his early death – he left £98,000 in his will.
Babbage’s £100,000 would be worth about £10 million today. Benjamin’s legacy freed his son from any serious financial care for the rest of his life and made possible the liberation of Charles Babbage’s scientific imagination and his ability to follow any pursuit that interested him.
What is known about Babbage’s childhood comes from his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, published in 1864 when he was seventy-two. Babbage liked to think of himself a philosopher rather than a mathematician or man of science. (The term ‘scientist’ did not become current until the 1890s.)
The son of a business man, Babbage was destined for a good education. When a boy of eight or nine, he was sent by his father to a small school in Alphington, a village then a mile and a half from the city of Exeter on the south side. Apart from his time at this school, and some time he spent at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, young Charles was mostly educated by tutors, though he also attended an academy in Enfield. There, under the inspirational tutelage of the Reverend Stephen Freeman, he ‘imbibed’ Freeman’s great love of mathematics.
As Babbage writes in his autobiography, among the books at the Enfield school
was a treatise on Algebra, called ‘Ward’s Young Mathematician’s Guide.’ I was always partial to my arithmetical lessons, but this book attracted my particular attention. After I had been at this school for about a twelvemonth, I proposed to one of my school-fellows, who was of a studious habit, that we should get up every morning at three o’clock, light a fire in the schoolroom, and work until five or half-past five. We accomplished this pretty regularly for several months.
Quite unlike Byron, he was always a well-behaved child and recalls how he lost his nurse at the age of five, while walking across London Bridge looking at ships.
My mother had always impressed upon me the necessity of great caution in passing any street-crossing: I went on, therefore, quietly until I reached Tooley Street, where I remained watching the passing vehicles in order to find a safe opportunity of crossing that very busy street.
In the meantime the nurse, having lost one of her charges, had gone to the crier, who proceeded immediately to call, by the ringing of his bell, the attention of the public to the fact that a young philosopher was lost, and to the still more important fact that five shillings would be the reward of his fortunate discoverer. I well remember sitting on the steps of the door of the linen-draper’s shop on the opposite corner of Tooley Street, when the gold-laced crier was making proclamation of my loss; but I was too much occupied with eating some pears to attend to what he was saying.
The fact was that one of the men in the linen-draper’s shop, observing a little child by itself, went over to it, and asked what it wanted. Finding that it had lost its nurse, he brought it across the street, gave it some pears, and placed it on the steps at the door: having asked my name, the shopkeeper found it to be that of one of his own customers …
Even as a boy, Babbage recalls, he loved to know how things worked. What fascinated him, from his childhood, was the ‘desire to enquire into the causes of all those little things and events which astonish the childish mind.’
My invariable question on receiving any new toy was ‘Mamma, what is inside of it?’ Until this information was obtained those around me had no repose, and the toy itself … was generally broken open if the answer did not satisfy my own little ideas …
When the forty-two-year-old met seventeen-year-old Ada and Lady Byron for the first
time, little had changed. In a passage in his book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) Babbage goes into great detail about how the remains of a horse are used economically by selling the hair from the mane to upholsterers, the skin to tanners, the flesh to the animal-meat trade, the fat to soap-makers and the bones to glue-makers and cutlers, and how even the maggots produced in the decomposing flesh are put to use as bait for fishing, though mainly as food for fowls, and (as Babbage notes) ‘especially for pheasants.’
The young Babbage’s enthusiasm was carefully fanned by his parents. When he was living in London with his parents, his mother took him to several exhibitions of machinery, including one in Hanover Square, organised by a man who called himself ‘Merlin.’ As Babbage recalls in his autobiography:
I was so greatly interested in it that the exhibitor [Merlin] remarked the circumstance, and after explaining some of the objects to which the public had access, proposed to my mother to take me up to his workshop, where I should see still more wonderful automata. We accordingly ascended to the attic. There were two uncovered female figures of silver, about twelve inches high.
One of these walked or rather glided along a space of about four feet, when she turned round and went back to her original place. She used an eye-glass occasionally, and bowed frequently, as if recognising her acquaintances. The motions of her limbs were singularly graceful.
The other silver figure was an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the forefinger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings, and opened its beak. This lady attitudinised in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible.
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