The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. James Gleick

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      CHARLES BABBAGE (1860)

      In the Strand, at the north end of the Lowther shopping arcade, visitors thronged to the National Gallery of Practical Science, “Blending Instruction with Amusement,” a combination toy store and technology show set up by an American entrepreneur. For the admission price of a shilling, a visitor could touch the “electrical eel,” listen to lectures on the newest science, and watch a model steamboat cruising a seventy-foot trough and the Perkins steam gun emitting a spray of bullets. For a guinea, she could sit for a “daguerreotype” or “photographic” portrait, by which a faithful and pleasing likeness could be obtained in “less than One Second.” Or she could watch, as young Augusta Ada Byron did, a weaver demonstrating the automated Jacquard loom, in which the patterns to be woven in cloth were encoded as holes punched into pasteboard cards.

      Ada was “the child of love,” her father had written, “—though born in bitterness, and nurtured in convulsion.” Her father was a poet. When she was barely a month old, in 1816, the already notorious Lord Byron, twenty-seven, and the bright, wealthy, and mathematically knowledgeable Anne Isabella Milbanke (Annabella), twenty-three, separated after a year of marriage. Byron left England and never saw his daughter again. Her mother refused to tell her who her father was until she was eight and he died in Greece, an international celebrity. The poet had begged for any news of his daughter: “Is the Girl imaginative?—at her present age I have an idea that I had many feelings & notions which people would not believe if I stated them now.” Yes, she was imaginative.

      She was a prodigy, clever at mathematics, encouraged by tutors, talented in drawing and music, fantastically inventive and profoundly lonely. When she was twelve, she set about inventing a means of flying. “I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow,” she wrote to her mother. She hoped “to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book of Flyology illustrated with plates.” For a while she signed her letters “your very affectionate Carrier Pigeon.” She asked her mother to find a book illustrating bird anatomy, because she was reluctant “to dissect even a bird.” She analyzed her daily situation with a care for logic.

      Miss Stamp desires me to say that at present she is not particularly pleased with me on account of some very foolish conduct yesterday about a simple thing, and which she said was not only foolish but showed a spirit of inattention, and though today she has not had reason to be dissatisfied with me on the whole yet she says that she can not directly efface the recollection of the past.

      She was growing up in a well-kept cloister of her mother’s arranging. She had years of sickliness, a severe bout of measles, and episodes of what was called neurasthenia or hysteria. (“When I am weak,” she wrote, “I am always so exceedingly terrified, at nobody knows what, that I can hardly help having an agitated look & manner.”) Green drapery enclosed the portrait of her father that hung in one room. In her teens she developed a romantic interest in her tutor, which led to a certain amount of sneaking about the house and gardens and to lovemaking as intimate as possible without, she said, actual “connection.” The tutor was dismissed. Then, in the spring, wearing white satin and tulle, the seventeen-year-old made her ritual debut at court, where she met the king and queen, the most important dukes, and the French diplomat Talleyrand, whom she described as an “old monkey.”

      A month later she met Charles Babbage. With her mother, she went to see what Lady Byron called his “thinking machine,” the portion of the Difference Engine in his salon. Babbage saw a sparkling, self-possessed young woman with porcelain features and a notorious name, who managed to reveal that she knew more mathematics than most men graduating from university. She saw an imposing forty-one-year-old, authoritative eyebrows anchoring his strong-boned face, who possessed wit and charm and did not wear these qualities lightly. He seemed a kind of visionary— just what she was seeking. She admired the machine, too. An onlooker reported: “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, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.” Her feeling for the beauty and abstractions of mathematics, fed only in morsels from her succession of tutors, was overflowing. It had no outlet. A woman could not attend university in England, nor join a scientific society (with two exceptions: the botanical and horticultural).

      Ada became a tutor for the young daughters of one of her mother’s friends. When writing to them, she signed herself, “your affectionate & untenable Instructress.” On her own she studied Euclid. Forms burgeoned in her mind. “I do not consider that I know a proposition,” she wrote another tutor, “until I can imagine to myself a figure in the air, and go through the construction & demonstration without any book or assistance whatever.” She could not forget Babbage, either, or his “gem of all mechanism.” To another friend she reported her “great anxiety about the machine.” Her gaze turned inward, often. She liked to think about herself thinking.