Chapter 1Piccadilly Terrace

Foreword

The argument about Ada Lovelace has been going on for two hundred years and it has been fought over the wrong page.

The question everybody asks is whether she wrote the first computer program. The evidence everybody reaches for is Note G — the table of operations for computing Bernoulli numbers, printed in 1843 at the end of her translation of a memoir about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Note G is the weakest ground her defenders could have chosen.

Babbage had drafted something like two dozen sample programs for the Engine between 1837 and 1840, none of them published. He wrote in print in 1864 that he had worked the Bernoulli algebra himself, to save her the trouble. And the table as published carries an error at operation four, where two variables are transposed.

That is a poor place to plant a flag.

Note A is where the original mind is, and this book is about Note A.

There, in the opening pages of her commentary, she takes a machine whose inventor described it as a calculating engine and asserts something he never asserted. The Engine, she writes, does not operate on quantities. It operates on symbols. Anything whose mutual relations can be expressed in notation falls within its reach — and she names music specifically, and says that a machine of this kind could compose elaborate pieces of any degree of complexity.

That is general-purpose computation. It is written down in 1843, a hundred years before any machine existed that could do it, and Charles Babbage did not write it down.

Four chapters of this book cover nine months, because the argument only works if the reader is made to read the Notes rather than hear about them. Chapters 1 through 11 exist to establish what an Englishwoman could and could not learn before 1843, and what her mother's mathematical curriculum was actually for.

That curriculum is the second thing this book wants to correct.

Anne Isabella Milbanke decided that mathematics would be the antidote to her daughter's inherited Byron blood, and hired the tutors to administer it, and installed friends in the household to watch the girl and report on her — women Ada called the Furies and accused of inventing what they reported.

The standard reading makes Lady Byron a jailer. The harder reading, which this book takes, is that she gave her daughter the only serious scientific education available to an Englishwoman of her class, for entirely the wrong reason, and that both halves of that sentence are true and neither cancels the other.

The differentiator here is a body of evidence that no popular biography of her has used.

Between 1840 and 1841 she was taught by Augustus De Morgan of University College London, and the correspondence survives: functional equations, the calculus of finite differences, questions about convergence, her errors, his corrections, and the places where she was faster than he expected and the places where she stalled.

That material was digitized by the Clay Mathematics Institute with the Bodleian and reappraised technically by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice in 2017 and 2018. It is the only direct evidence anybody has of Ada Lovelace doing mathematics under supervision, and it settles the competence question in a way that satisfies neither of the two available myths.

She was not a mathematical genius being suppressed. She was not a society dilettante taking dictation. She was a serious, uneven, rapidly improving student of an unusually good teacher, working under conditions — illness, three young children, no institution, no colleagues — that would have stopped almost anybody.

Chapter 8 sets out the wall she was working against, and it is worth stating precisely rather than as a grievance.

Mary Somerville was the only professional model available to her. In 1835, with Caroline Herschel, Somerville became one of the first two women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society — as an honorary member. Ordinary Fellowship remained closed to women until 1916.

Admitted to the honors, excluded from the roll. That is the exact shape of the thing.

Two chapters in this book decline to fill a hole.

In 1833, at seventeen, there was an affair with a tutor and an attempted elopement and a recapture, and a family silence that has held for two centuries. The man is not reliably named in any source and this book does not name him.

And on 27 November 1852 she made a confession to her husband, whatever it was, and he left the bedside and did not come back. Every biography of her fills that hole differently. This one names it and leaves it open.

What is not in doubt about her last year is that she was dying of a tumor at thirty-six, that her physicians bled her, that she was on opiates, and that her mother moved into the house and took control of the sickroom, the visitors, and eventually the patient's soul.

She asked to be buried beside a father she had never met, at Hucknall. She was.

The last three chapters are about what happened to her afterwards: ninety years of family control of the papers, their eventual deposit at the Bodleian, a 1953 reprint that reintroduced the Notes to the twentieth century, a programming language named for her by the United States Department of Defense whose standard number is her birth year, and a commemorative day.

That is the mechanism by which a person becomes a mascot, and Chapter 21 is about what the mascot costs the person.

Chapter 22 states where the evidence actually stands, and it does not split the difference.

She did not design the Analytical Engine. She probably did not originate the Bernoulli method. And she wrote down what the machine was for before anybody else did, including the man who built it.

Chapter 1 · Piccadilly Terrace

The house stood on Piccadilly Terrace, in London. Lord Byron had married Anne Isabella Milbanke on 2 January 1815, and on 16 January 1816 she left that house for Kirkby Mallory and did not come back. One year and fourteen days, start to finish. Somewhere inside that span, on 10 December 1815, a daughter was born there — Augusta Ada Byron, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke.

This chapter is named for an address and not for a scene, and the distinction is deliberate. It would be easy to furnish that house: the winter light in the windows, the fires, the noise of Piccadilly outside the shutters, the state of the rooms in the weeks after a confinement. Nothing in the record this book works from describes them. A biography that opens by inventing a nursery has told its reader, on the first page, what kind of book it intends to be, and the reader would be right to adjust accordingly. Piccadilly Terrace is where the family was living. It is where the child was born, and it is the house her mother left. Beyond that it is an address, and it will be left as one.

The arithmetic is worth pausing over, because it is the first fact of her life and it is not a metaphor. She was born with five weeks of the marriage left to run. Her mother packed and went while she was five weeks old. Whatever the household was in the autumn of 1815 — and the accounts of it have been fought over ever since — the child arrived at the end of it, not in the middle. She was not present for the marriage. She was present for its collapse, in the way an infant is present, which is to say she was in the building.

What actually passed between the two of them in that house is not a thing this book can settle, and it is worth saying so at the outset rather than pretending otherwise. The separation itself is documented to the day; the days are firm and the sequence is firm. The interior is not. Both parties later had reasons to characterize that year, and both did, and the characterizations do not agree. The reader who wants a verdict on the marriage will have to look elsewhere, and should be warned that the places offering one are generally the least reliable. What matters here is narrower and better attested: what the collapse did to the person who could not yet speak.

She was christened Augusta Ada. Byron had a half-sister named Augusta Leigh. The relationship between them became, long afterward, the central allegation of the Byron scandal — a two-hundred-year-old charge of incest, published by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869 and then, extraordinarily, by Ada's own son Ralph, working from the family's own documents, in Astarte in 1905. It is contested. It has been contested continuously since Stowe printed it, and this book presents it as what it is: a serious allegation with named sources and no settlement, not a fact to be smuggled in as background. Attached to it is a further claim, concerning the paternity of Medora Leigh, which is contested on its own terms and is no better settled than the allegation it hangs from. Both are flagged here as unresolved, and both will be flagged again wherever they bear on the story, because the alternative — letting a contested claim harden into background through repetition — is precisely how a rumor becomes a fact inside a biography.

It matters here only because of the timing, which is easy to get backward. In December 1815 none of that was public. The scandal that would eventually organize every account of Ada's childhood, including her mother's, lay ahead. At the christening the name Augusta was a name. Why it was chosen — affection, obligation, provocation, or nothing at all — the record does not fix, and a biography that tells you which is telling you about its author rather than about the Byrons. The name was there first, and the meaning was attached to it afterward, by people with an interest in the attaching.

On 16 January 1816, Anne Isabella Byron — Annabella, in her own letters and in this book — left Piccadilly Terrace with the baby and traveled to Kirkby Mallory. The date is certain. The intention is not. The documents fix the day on which a woman and an infant left a London house; they do not fix what she believed she was doing when the carriage moved off, and the difference between a visit, a withdrawal, and a departure is not something a date can carry. It is one of the places where the record stops, and the honest thing is to stop with it.

Byron never saw his daughter again.

That sentence needs a small correction, because the precision matters and the sentimental version is wrong. He had seen her. He had lived in the same house as her for five weeks. What did not happen is the other direction: she never knowingly met him. She had no memory to lose. Whatever was in the room at Piccadilly Terrace during those weeks, it left no deposit in her that she could later consult. When she thought about her father, for the rest of her life, she was thinking about a body of published work, a set of stories, and a collection of documents held by her mother. She was not thinking about a man she remembered, because there was nothing to remember. This is a distinction most accounts blur, and blurring it makes the life sentimental in a way the life was not.

The legal separation followed in March 1816. By April he was out of England, and he did not return. The two events are usually reported as one movement — the disgraced poet driven abroad — and the compression flattens something that is worth keeping separate. A legal separation is an instrument. It is drafted by lawyers, negotiated in letters and in person, and it is a settlement of property, money, and status between two adults. Departure is a different act with different consequences. What the separation did was end the marriage. What the departure did was make the ending permanent and remove any possibility that the arrangement might be revisited by a father in the room.

It is worth noticing how unevenly matched the two parents were in one particular respect, because it shaped everything that was afterward knowable about their daughter. Both of them broadcast. Neither of them kept quiet, and neither of them was capable of it. But they broadcast through different machinery. Annabella's channel was correspondence: letters to relatives, to lawyers, to friends who could be trusted to repeat what they read, a circle wide enough to carry a version of events across the drawing rooms that mattered to her. Byron's channel was a printing house and a public readership. One of these reaches a circle, whose members know each other and can be counted. The other reaches a readership, which cannot. The daughter's name traveled by both routes, and she had no part in either.

From that spring onward the quarrel was conducted on paper, which is the detail that determines everything about how Ada Byron's childhood is knowable at all. Nobody in this story shouted at anybody across a table after January 1816. They wrote. They wrote to each other, and to lawyers, and to relatives, and to friends who could be relied upon to repeat what they had been told, and — in Byron's case — to a printing house and an audience. The war became a documentary war almost immediately, and it stayed one for the rest of both parents' lives and, through her mother's archive, well past the death of the child it was nominally about.

For a biographer this is a mixed inheritance, and it is worth being explicit about its shape now, because the same shape recurs at every later stage of this life. A documentary war produces paper, and almost none of it is disinterested. Every surviving statement about what happened in that marriage was written by somebody with a position in it. A neutral observer inside the house, if there was one, has not reached the record this book works from. What such an archive supports, and supports extremely well, is chronology — who was where, on which date, and what instrument was executed when. What it supports badly is motive. This is not a deficiency that further research repairs; it is a property of the material. The chapters that follow will keep the two apart, and where only the chronology survives, they will say so and decline to supply the rest.

In that war the daughter had a function. She was not a participant, because she was an infant, and she was not a bystander, because she was the subject of at least part of the dispute. She was an item of evidence. A wronged wife with a five-week-old daughter is a different figure in public and in law from a wronged wife without one; an absent father with a daughter he has not seen is a different figure again. Both parents understood this. Neither of them was cynical about it in any simple way — people rarely are about their own children — but both of them, in the years that followed, produced documents in which the child appears as proof of something about the other adult. She was converted into evidence before she could form a sentence, and she never entirely stopped being evidence, which is one of the reasons the quarrel over what she did in 1843 has been so difficult to conduct calmly.

The most public conversion came from her father, and it came in verse. The third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage addresses his daughter directly, and it uses her name. Ada. Printed, sold, and carried to an audience of thousands who would never meet her, and who now knew that she existed, what she was called, and that her father had something to say to her that he had chosen to say in public.

Consider the mechanics of this rather than the pathos of it. A poem is a one-way instrument. The address is intimate in its grammar and public in its distribution, and the person addressed is the only one in the transaction who cannot reply, partly because she is an infant and partly because the form does not admit replies. Byron did not write to his daughter. He wrote about writing to his daughter, in a medium she could not access, to readers who could. The gesture is not therefore insincere — there is no reason to doubt that he meant it, and every reason to think a man who wrote everything down would write this down too. But it is not correspondence. It is publication, and its effect on the child was the effect publication has: it made her a known name attached to an unknown person.

The consequences of that ran for the rest of her life and past it. It is reasonable to suppose that a good many of the people she later met had encountered her in print before they encountered her in a room, and had arrived with a fixed idea of what a daughter of Byron ought to be — brilliant, doomed, poetical, a little dangerous. She would spend her life being read against a stanza she had no part in. There is no way to measure this, and this book will not pretend to; nobody wrote down what a hostess expected when Byron's daughter was announced. But the structure of the situation is not in doubt. She was famous before she was interesting, for something she did not do.

And the fame was of a specific and unhelpful kind. It did not attach to anything she had made, because she had made nothing. It attached to a relationship, and to a name inside a poem. That is a condition with no exit. A person known for work can be reassessed by producing more work; a person known for being somebody's daughter cannot stop being it, and every later achievement gets read as either confirming the inheritance or defying it, which are the only two readings on offer and neither of which is about the achievement. The pattern established in her infancy held for the rest of her life, and it is holding still. A great deal of what is written about her now is written about whose daughter she was. A great deal of the rest is written about whether the work attributed to her could have been hers.

He died at Missolonghi in 1824. She was a child. She had never knowingly met him, and now she never would.

A dead parent one has never met is not an absence in the ordinary sense; it is a fixed object. Byron stopped changing in 1824. He could not revise his opinion of his wife, or take a belated interest in his daughter, or grow into an ordinary middle-aged man whom it would have been difficult to build a legend around. He became final, and therefore quotable, and therefore permanently available as an argument. Everything said about him afterward was said without the risk of contradiction from him. This was true for his admirers, and it was true, in a different and more consequential way, inside his daughter's own house, where his widow held the documents.

It should be said plainly that his death did not end the quarrel. It removed one of the two parties to it and left the other in possession of the field, with the papers, the surviving relatives, the reputation to be managed, and a daughter who was growing up. A dispute with one living participant is not a dispute that has been won; it is a dispute that has stopped being answered. Everything said in the Byron household after 1824 was said into that silence. And the child at the center of it was, by then, old enough to hear it, old enough to be told things, and not old enough to have any means of testing what she was told against anything except the printed poems, which were themselves a party to the argument.

What Ada herself made of any of this in childhood is the part the record does not carry. Small children do not keep diaries. The letters that survive from her early years were written to adults, by a girl who knew perfectly well that adults compared letters, and they are not a window into an interior. We know a good deal about how she was brought up, and we do not know what she thought about her father before she was old enough to write it down. Biographies that supply this have supplied it. The honest position is that the early interior life of Augusta Ada Byron is gone, and that the loss is not recoverable by inference from the later evidence, because the later evidence was produced by a person who had by then been thoroughly instructed in what to feel.

Which brings the matter to why any of this is worth a book. In 1843, a woman by then titled Countess of Lovelace published a translation from the French in Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, Volume III, over the initials A.A.L. Appended to it were seven notes of her own, running to roughly three times the length of the paper she had translated. The paper described a machine that had not been built and would not be built in her lifetime. Her notes did two things: they set out a method by which that machine could compute a particular sequence of numbers, and — earlier in the sequence, in a passage far less often fought over — they asserted that the machine was not a calculator at all, that it operated on symbols rather than quantities, and that anything whose relations could be expressed in notation, music included, fell inside its reach.

The quarrel over what she deserves for that has been running since 1970, and it has been unusually bad-tempered. On one side she is the first computer programmer, and the notes are the founding document of the discipline. On the other she is Babbage's translator, a competent amanuensis with a title and a famous surname, whose reputation is a modern invention serving modern purposes. The two positions have hardened into myths that face each other across a table, and the honest answer is neither of them. She was not the mascot and she was not the fraud. The argument of this book is that the quarrel has been fought over the wrong page, and that establishing why requires knowing, in detail, what an Englishwoman of her class could and could not learn in the years before 1843 — which is what the chapters that follow are for.

But the beginning is the house on Piccadilly Terrace and the five weeks by which the marriage outlasted the arrival of the child. She had done nothing. She had no capacities at all beyond the ordinary capacities of a newborn, no opinions, no part in anything. And already she was a fact that two intelligent, articulate, self-documenting people were entering into evidence against each other, and would go on entering for as long as they lived. Her mother left with her on 16 January 1816. Her father wrote about her, by name, for an audience of thousands. Neither of them consulted her, and neither of them could have.

She died in 1852, at thirty-six, having spent every one of those years being what other people could prove with her. The work she left is not exempt from that; it has been quarreled over on exactly the same terms, by people who never met her, using her as evidence for something else. The purpose of this book is to read the work instead.