by Rebel Girls
The Analytical Engine cannot create anything new, she had written. It, however, can do whatever we program it to do.
The machine could not generate any new ideas, it was true. But after this project, Ada knew for certain that she could.
Early one morning a few weeks later, Ada heard a thump outside and ran downstairs, flinging open the door.
There on the step was a parcel wrapped in brown paper. With shaking hands, she tore it open and read the first page.
Her name was absent, just as she had insisted. She knew that men would never take a scientific article seriously with a woman’s name on the cover but she didn’t care. Even if no one ever knew all she had done to bring this work into the world, she would know. She squeezed the package tight to her chest.
CHAPTER TEN
Once the paper was published, Ada thought offers of support for Charles’s machine would flow in from scientists, politicians, and businessmen. Hopefully everyone would now understand the wonderful possibilities of the Analytical Engine and would be eager to fund it.
But the letters never came. Babbage’s reputation as a difficult person to work with had traveled far and wide. Important people had come to know the inventor as a man who didn’t finish the projects he started.
“The world needs this machine, William!” cried Ada pacing the floor of her office seething. “I refuse to let him sabotage himself. If he would just let me speak for him, I could convince people to help him build it.”
“If anyone can convince Babbage to do this, darling, it’s you. You know how stubborn you both . . . I mean, how stubborn he is,” William said, ignoring a sharp look from his wife. “He might be too proud to agree, but it can’t hurt to try.”
~
Ada always wrote to Charles before she paid him a visit, but this time she marched right up to his door.
“Mr. Babbage!” called Ada, breezing past the dismayed housekeeper who had been in the middle of tidying up a mess of papers in the entryway. “I have something urgent to discuss with you.”
Charles gave her a startled look.
“I have it all worked out,” Ada began. “We’re going to get this machine built.”
“Lady Lovelace—”
“No, listen! William and I will find support for your project. All you need to do is work out the mechanical issues.”
“Lady Lovelace.”
“We both know that dealing with people isn’t your strong suit, Mr. Babbage. That’s why we will make such a magnificent team! Your machine is incredible. It could change history. It could—”
“Lady Lovelace!” Charles almost shouted. There was a harsh note in his voice that Ada heard him use with others, but never before with her. He softened a little, as if catching himself, before he spoke again. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Lady Lovelace, but I refuse your offer. And I must ask you never to speak of it again.”
Disappointed, Ada stared at her friend. She noticed the creases in his forehead from countless hours squinting by candlelight over diagrams and brass cogs. Ada loved leaping to the next challenge. But her friend, she realized, was different. Perhaps Charles didn’t want to build the machine. Perhaps he was afraid of being laughed at or criticized. Perhaps he wanted to stay daydreaming forever, in private, in his own home, with trusted friends.
Ada had spent a lifetime ignoring people’s whispers and curiosity. It rarely bothered her when people made fun of her or stared as she walked into a room, but Babbage was not like her. And a good friend would not push him where he did not want to go.
“I will not speak of it again,” Ada said gently.
~
Ada impatiently checked the clock at the train station. Charles was always late, and she was eager to enter the fair.
Eight years after their collaboration on the Analytical Engine paper, the mathematician and the inventor were even closer friends, which meant Charles had found even more ways to irritate her. Ada smiled as she spotted a familiar face and a rumpled coat making its way toward her through the station.
Poor Charles, Ada thought. She knew he was angry about not having been invited to display his work at the fair. (The organizers apparently found him too difficult.)
“These infernal crowds,” he grumbled, as he reached her. “How great is this exhibition anyway?”
“The greatest. Now come on,” she said, tucking her hand through his arm. “We’re late!”
Ada had been looking forward to the exhibition for months. In the years since the article she’d translated was published, the world seemed to be changing faster than ever. New machines and technologies were being thought up for factories, fields, and hospitals. To showcase all these advancements, English royalty had organized a massive fair where inventors and scientists from all over the world could show off their work. It was called The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, though everyone just referred to it as The Great Exhibition.
Ada gazed upon the magnificent glass exhibition hall with wonder. It was beautiful, decorated with statues and huge trees, planted to look as if they’d grown inside the building. Even better were rows upon rows of inventions that made Ada’s mind spin. There were machines that made everything from envelopes to steel beams. A gigantic telescope brought previously unexplored parts of the sky into view. The latest version of the Jacquard loom stood in full view, and Ada circled it with fond memories swirling in her mind. But a new mechanical marvel quickly caught her attention.
“Look here, Charles, a steam-powered plow! It can replace the work of ten horses.”
“What good is that?” Charles grumbled.
Ada thought about her diagrams for a steam-powered flying horse all those years ago and smiled. Then she stopped in her tracks, feeling a pain so sharp it took her breath away. She was only thirty-six years old but the pains seemed to be coming more and more often lately.
“Ada, are you all right?”
Catching her breath, Ada saw the look of concern on her friend’s face and pushed aside her fears.
“It’s nothing, Charles,” she said. “Nothing at all. Now, come. Let’s see what the future looks like.”
AFTERWORD
Ada could not have predicted exactly what the digital age would look like when she penciled out what we now realize was the first published computer program. But her notes make clear that she understood, before almost anyone else, just how many possibilities the computing era could hold, even if she never got to see that future herself.
Ada Lovelace died of uterine cancer at her home in London on November 27, 1852. She was thirty-six years old, the same age as her father, Lord Byron, when he died. At Ada’s request, she was buried next to him at the church near his childhood home.
Charles Babbage died in 1871. He never finished building the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine. In the late 1990s, using Babbage’s original plans, a team of computer scientists built a working model of the Difference Engine. You can see it today in London’s Science Museum. One hundred years after Ada’s death, Ada’s fellow mathematicians rediscovered her work. They marveled at how a woman who had lived long before the age of computers had been able to imagine them and the immense potential they held to shape our world.
In the 1970s a group of computer scientists created a programming language for the U.S. Department of Defense. It’s used around the world to power rockets, banks, trains, and airplanes. They named it after one of computing’s earliest pioneers: Ada.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We couldn’t have created this series without the incredible women who inspire us. Ada Lovelace conceived of a future that many of us would not have predicted a few decades ago. We love her pioneering spirit!
Thank you Corinne Purtill for crafting such a beautiful tribute to a remarkable woman with humor and sensitivity. Thank you, Marina Muun, for creating beautiful illustrations. Monique Aimee, the cover lettering is gorgeous! And thank you to our brilliant copyeditors and proofreaders Susan Nicholson and Taylor Morri
s.
To Wogrammer, you rock! We are so grateful that Hillary Fleenor was able to bring these coding activities to life. Kathleen Ortiz, thank you for going to bat for this speedy collaboration.
And to the Rebel Girls of the world, we are nothing without YOU. Your support is what keeps us aiming higher and fighting harder. Keep resisting, keep pushing, keep creating!
ABOUT REBEL GIRLS
Rebel Girls is a cultural media engine on a mission to balance power and build a more inclusive world.It is best known for the wildly successful book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, a collection of one hundred tales of extraordinary women throughout history.
Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, published in 2016, was an overnight sensation, becoming the most successful book in crowdfunding history. The title has since been released in over eighty-five territories around the world. Following the book’s triumph, Rebel Girls released Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls Volume 2 and I Am a Rebel Girl: A Journal to Start Revolutions. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is also a podcast, highlighting the lives of prominent women with beautiful sound design.