Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
A quick, not a turing test, but when one's talking
to art people, you look up and you say, hm.
All power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
>> [LAUGH] >> It works.
Fine, we're in the right area.
That's very good.
And you will immediately notice two things.
Charles Babbage is smoking cigar, except of course it's not.
It's kingdom Brunell.
And tomorrow Sydney Pageo will tell us why he's smoking a cigar.
And more to the purpose she'll tell us why Ada is smoking a pipe.
>> [LAUGH] >> And you'll see about that.
Now, there's a reason for that image,
because I've attended the workshops yesterday, which are wonderful,
and a wonderful range of speeches, and talks, and subjects.
And somebody said to me, Ada is a hostess interdisciplinary.
She brings all the disciplines together around her and
it seems to be true and I've noticed that very much today.
But I've also noticed another thing which is that there's
been a tremendously tight concentration on Ada and Babbage and
I want to open that up as a biographer just in the little time we've had.
I hope many of you know this.
Of course it's at number 10 Saint James's Square.
It's where she was working for a lot of time when she
was working with Babbage, although also in the country.
I'm interested in the form of that.
First of all, it's just pioneer of computing, of course it's nothing else.
That's the tag line.
It doesn't actually say the first programmer, but
it does say computing, but it leaves a lot else.
And I'm also interested by lived here.
Where did she live?
I don't mean the fact that they were a very wealthy family, and
of course they had the kings publicists.
They had houses in Siri and of course in Somerset.
Ashley Kum, which will take us to courage in a minute.
But what I mean more historically.
She lives in that revolutionary,
industrial revolutionary period.
Men with the big boots, all right.
And there's some very interesting both combination and
conflict indicated in that image.
But so she lives in that industrial world of the 1830s and
40s, which I want to talk about.
She also lives in something which I feel hasn't sufficiently been
looked at for a moment.
In the great tradition of women in science and women mathematicians,
for example, Madame du Chatelet, a great friend of Voltaire,
a fine mathematician who wrote a whole thesis on the nature of fire.
In France, Sophie Germain, another fine mathematician.
Mary Somerville, who I will talk about a bit more.
And then Ada.
And you could go on to for example, Maria Mitchell.
The American astronomer, the first woman professor at Vassar
who Ada mentions in her letters and we might come back to her.
She also belongs, she lives in that tradition as well and
that's very important to us.
And finally, it's quite evident now,
she lives now in a very important edition of setting up a model for women,
and maybe particularly young women in science, int he STEM disciplines.
And I wrote some time ago about Mary Wollstonecraft, and
there's a wonderful essay by Virginia Woolf.
Which concludes that her life was an experiment, and we see it still.
She is living among us now, and
there's a sense in which Ada Lovelace is exactly what is happening now.
She's living and important to us now because of what she represents,
and this is partly what I want to explore by widening the focus
a little bit away from Babbage.
There's a wonderful remark that Lord Byron,
who never knew his daughter, of course.
Tragic, never knew her.
He wrote in an early letter, there's these two lines,
I just love them, says, is the girl imaginative?
Is she passionate?
I hope the gods have made her anything save poetical.
[LAUGH] It is enough to have one such fool in the family, a very byronic joke.
But that's interesting and we'll come back to that.
And then a letter that Ada wrote from this address, from
Thames and James's Square when she was 25, March in 41, to her mother who's in Paris.
Instant a connection which hasn't been made by Ada's frequently going over
to France.
And she knows What work in Science is being done in France and
also in fact in Germany but we'll come back to that.
Here's this wonderful letter, just again two lines.
Dearest Mama, pray to find out all you can for
me about everything curious mysterious, marvelous,
electrical, etc., etc., etc.
Be my wonder and mystery hunter.
And that seems to me something wonderful about Ada.
And that quality of exuberance, which if you read her letters.
People saying mania, my God, I've worked on Coager's private journals and
letters, and Ada, very calm person.
>> [LAUGH] >> And I also have to tell you the young
Shelley, the young atheist Shelley, his letters wild, wild.
So there's a very interesting gender issue here.
Maybe a young woman is not allowed to write letters certainly.
But she is now.
She is among us in the living.
So that sense of her exuberance, it's tremendously strong to me and
one of the reasons I've been drawn to her as a subject.
Now, we've seen these images and
I want to set up something a little bit provocative here.
Just that's the 1835, the one on the right,
which is really when she was being presented at court.
And in fact, we know from her letters she didn't like this image.
It had partly been organized by her mother to give the profile, the Byron profile.
But we know what she said is, my jaw in that picture is long enough to have
the word mathematics written right the way down it.
[LAUGH] It's very interesting that, but there you are.
You could say that's the cool mathematical image.
And then on the right, little bit later, this is a costume that she put on because
at the time that Lord Lovelace was made a count, and so it was her countess costume.
It's always struck me as sort of wild and eccentric, and we finally find out that
she looked at this picture, and she thoroughly disapproved of it.
She says, it's stiff and in a most extravagant fashion,
which is putting it mildly, I think.
But those two images, why I've put them up is because
they operate a sense of something opposed in her nature.
As it were the cooler mathematician.
And the wild poetical.
And I think when you study her,
the whole point of Ada is that she combines these in a way.
So that's a force opposition.
And you could do an elegant dissertation saying that represents a divide between
the two cultures.
You could do a dissertation on that.
I want to look at this in a different way.
Now as a biographer, we have the real biographer.
Julia Marcus is going to talk to us tomorrow.
And we have Miranda Seymour here, who is writing a biography.
And I can tell you as a biography.
When you look over Ada's life, it is fantastically ranging.
Talk about exuberance.
I made a list of what are the things, starting at home, I would,
her childhood, I'm going to come back to this, quite extraordinary.
Her mother, remember, was an expert in childhood care and education,
a very dangerous thing to be.
Then Ada, on the subject of riding, waltzing,
skating, harp playing three hours a day, and then the piano.
Also, there's some hint about billiards.
And there's even a story of her going round and
round a table playing a fiddle as she goes round and round the billiard table.
Sea bathing, Ada on sea bathing.
One of the places she goes to is Brighton, partly to get better,
partly because it's very fashionable.
And there's a wonderful Ada note on swimming and swimming costumes, all right?
Now Ada describes most of the women there are wearing outfits with big and
bustles round here.
Very protective, and very proper.
And she says there's a liquid hydraulics problem here.
>> [LAUGH] >> That if you have that it fills with
air, and it tilts you over, and you turn upside down.
Most improper, instead let's have a one piece bathing suit.
Which is what she will wear, and then she will move smoothly through the water.
She slightly spoils it at the end, saying that shingle is very bad at Brighton, so
I would include heavy boots.
>> [LAUGH] >> So again, a wonderful Ada-ism,
I'm just giving you some ideas.
The whole question of Ada bringing up those three children
in a way it's quite a tragic thing.
And though the relationship, very interesting, with all three children.
And that would be something as a biographer,
we want to look at that relationship.
The complicated flirtations, put it no further than that, but
there's a Mr. Knight, not Mr. Knightly, Mr. Knight.
Mr. Kaye, Mr. Compton, Mr. Cross, and the exact nature of those relationships.
And I assume nothing as a biographer.
What I do notice is that Ada had an extraordinary gift of attracting people,
she refers to her colony of people.
People really, the famous enchantress.
They really were magnetized.
It was perfectly evident that that's the case,
which doesn't necessarily imply anything sexual at all.
But there was a kind of magnetism which is important anyway.
Very evident that would be to a biographer.
How questions of music, I mentioned she was an opera fan.
She adored so when we had the music just now, and
indeed that modern Ada opera I thought perfect, perfect.
And she gives very good accounts of going to opera.
Her writing we know a lot about.
We know about the gambling, but also she loved horses, and I'll come back to that,
that's very important.
The opium letters, I've mentioned, when we're drawn to write about that.
And then her interest in literature, we know she had
a good relationship with Charles Dickens, and I'll come back to that.
And there may be other people which I will just look at towards the end,
notably Tennyson, I want to send a hare running there.
And then widening out this focus, her astonishing awareness of what was
going on in the sciences and technology generally.
We've just been talking about the computer, but if you go through her
letters, for example, she is fascinated by railway construction, railway times.
The bridges.
She's travelled on a lot of them.
She writes about airplanes, we'll come back to that.
And air balloons, about early calculating machines, about the atmospheric railway.
A wonderful letter of this atmospheric railway which was designed in
South London.
Which literally, it used a vacuum system.
About 20 miles that were built, and
she describes traveling in it at 25 miles an hour.
But being Ada,
she also gives the exact gradient of the ascent that it was going up at 25.
And she said, that's what's impressive, it's the gradient.
That's absolutely how Ada's mind worked.
The whole question of electrical telegraphy.
The name Wheatstone hascome up cuz he was the one of
the great early inventors of the electrical telegraph,
in fact his invention was overtaken by Morse eventually.
The Americans managed to exploit it more efficiently typically than us but
Wheatstone is a very important figure.
I mentioned Maria Mitchell who that first professor discovered an early comet.
And in came over to London bringing with her the first photograph of a star.
Very interesting,
very to show it to the royal society who were very sniffy about it actually.
>> [LAUGH] >> But which we'll come back to
Maria Mitchell She's interested in photography and.
I'll expand on that.
She's interested in early evolution theory.
Lamarck, she reads Lamarck, she's interested in that and
again ,there's a further extension of that.
She's interested in animal intelligence.
She's interested in mesmerism, I noticed one of the musical sketches
called Mesmerism, and how scientifically it can be assessed.
She's interested in steamboats.
Wonderful accounts of travelling over to the harbor, what the timetable is.
How long does it take, do the tides and things affect it and not?
She's interested in electrical induction and early field theory,
Faraday's early field theory, and we know certain exchanges of letters about.
She's also interested in the history of science and scientific discovery.
This is something I'll try and expand on because I don't think people realize just
quite how her theoretical interest was.
And, of course,
one of the last great things she does is the great exhibition 1851.
And then she goes, she writes about it.
And of course Babbage writes about it, Dickens writes about it.
She's absolutely fascinated by it, even when she's very ill.
So there's that astonishing range of interests.
So the image, Bette's image of the kaleidoscope is doubly effective for
that reason.
And anybody writing about her would need to be able to cover that huge expanse.
Now what I would like to do is look at around her a number
of people who she knew or whose books she read and
I think affected the way she thought.
And this, I'll try and talk about, Mary Summerville is going to be very important.
We'll go straight to her.
But also William Hewell, also Faraday,
also Harriet Martiner, also Mr. Anonymous, I shall come back to him.
And possibly Alexander von Humboldt.
So we'll just see what we can fit in, in that time.
But before doing that, before expanding that picture, I want to do the reverse.
Biographer's love doing this, they can say I'm gonna give you the huge panorama, and
now look at this tiny little spot.
And that's what I want to look at, three tiny little spots.
The cat We have to mention the cat.
This is Madame Puff.
This is Ada's cat with whom she had long conversations,
with whom she had letters in French possibly written by Ada's cat.
Or certainly written about Ada's cat.
All the trouble in the household, usually Ada was responsible, not Ada.
Ada's mom said she was responsible for it, but actually it was the lovely Puff,
who was responsible for making her late, for making her being mischievous.
And this drawing, I know it's rather weak but here's something very touching.
It's drawn by her mother, Lady Byron.
The lovely Puff in a sweet slumber.
Third of June, 1825.
And that says also something about the mother, daughter relationship.
And that's the signature at the bottom,
Anna Isabella Noel Byron Pinkset painted it third of June, 1825.
And that is from a commonplace book.
And Puff has an extraordinary later life.
One thing I want to suggest to you is this,
that I think Ada, throughout her life had very acute and
perceptive knowledge of, understanding of animals.
And it begins with a cat and later in life, it's the horse.
She has many horses, dogs in the country.
And they follow her around.
She names everybody, every horse.
Every animal in the household has a name, probably a personality,
probably writes letters as well.
Not necessarily in French.
But this is an important thing.
Ada, who we've been focusing on Ada and the machine, clink clank.
But Ada also has this understanding of the very thing which is not a machine,
an animal and an empathetic one.
And it runs right through her letters, and again,
the sense of the kaleidoscope, her extraordinary range in that way.
And there's just a little footnote to pin this down that as it were,
I'm not making it up.
In 1844, March, after her translation notes had been published,
the Scottish playwright Joanna Bailey writes to Mary Summerville.
And I'm going to talk about that in one moment, who was then in Italy and
she writes this wonderful sentence to Mary.
She says the lady, I can't do the Scottish accent, I'll try.
The lady who we know so well as little Ada,
whose chief conversation used to be about a Persian cat,
Puff by name, is beginning to be known a little in the literary world.
And that, the moment that she's published that translation.
So I just introduced that one to make you think slightly differently about
Ada's mind and her imagination as she was.
Second one.
Now there was a big talk in the workshop yesterday about this.
This is Ada aged probably 11 or 12.
Neither of those are originals, the bird, in fact,
is drawn by Otto who's a flight expert, but later on in the century.
But why I've given that is to explain the way Ada was thinking.
This 11 or 12 year old girl, we know, somewhere around this time,
she had measles and she was in bed for 18 months.
And she was moving around on crutches.
So the idea of flight.
>> Sorry.
>> Aha!
I see, Ada's infant.
Very good, thank you very much.
Cuz that bird wasn't flapping enough, perhaps.
The fact that she, there she is in bed or at least not able to move.
The idea of flight becomes very important to her.
I would also have to say something gendered, that i wouldn't be so
surprised if it was a little boy of 11 or 12, thinking about flying.
Much more unusual that it was Ada thinking about flying, I think.
Now more than that,
I've written a whole book about balloons in the Victorian period.
And the thing that astonishes me is Ada wasn't interested in balloons, why?
Because they were too uncontrolled.
There was no way of getting decent equations out of them.
Whereas the bird and flight was something and here's from,
just little notes from letters, this is to her mother.
I'm going to begin my paper wings, my paper wings tomorrow and
the more I think of writing a book flyology.
To be illustrated with plates, [INAUDIBLE] that's what would happen,
if I ever really invent a method of flying.
Signature yours, dearest carrier pigeon, and she's becoming that thing.
And we find out that Ada has a flying room, which has ropes above it so
she can imagine herself flying with wings.
And then, very interesting, she says, I'm going to take the exact pattern
of a bird's wings in proportion to the size of its body.
So at 11 years old,
she's understood that if something's going to fly, the body weight and
length must have some proportionate relationship with the wing size.
Now I suggest that is pretty unusual at 11 years old, then, all right?
And so she thinks in that way.
And then she thinks, and this is why the second illustration is there.
To make the thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine inside it so
contrived as to move an immense pair of wings fixed on the outside.
And of course, A, she realized it needs a power source.
This is a great problem for the 19th century to solve.
But also she's come back to Pegasus, cuz she adores horses, and
the very poetic idea of the flying horse.
And in fact, we then find this.
This is from a recently discovered notebook which is probably of
William Sinclair, which is a commonplace book which was in the Noel family.
And this looks like it's a picture of Ada.
It's got a Byron quote about Ada written on the side.
Handwritten picture of Ada who says that she decided to move from flying to horses.
All right, it might be easier to do, all right?
But, she does say this and again, this says so much to me.
I have now decided upon making much smaller wings.
Not nearly large enough to actually fly with but
enough to explain perfectly to anyone my project for
flying and it will serve as a model for my future real wings.
And again, that's the science way of thinking with, I'm going to make a model.
Which will have all the conception of this machine in it.
I won't be able to build the actual machine but
I'll have the model of it where we're going to hear that, all right?
And this is still Ada at 11 or 12 years old.
And then one more link, we're now forward to the 1840s.
And when she's talking about the way that she thinks mathematics and science can
take us outwards, and we'll talk a little bit more about the idea of discovery.
She uses this phrase,
those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds,
by means of what are commonly termed par excellence, the exact sciences.
May then with the fair white wings of imagination,
hope to soar further into the unexplored.
Which we live.
So there's her flying machine, now as a mental symbol of imagination.
Finally, as our little glimpses, this.
This comes from a later date.
There were still no photographs of the moon.
This amazingly is [INAUDIBLE] a painting.
Based on some of the observations of both William Herschel and John Herschel.
And Ada was fascinated by this, but she received
a letter from her mother in Paris, who teased her and said, we've got
various new French information about the moon but this this
would only interest you from a scientific point of view, not from a poetical one.
Moon being one part of a subject, and this is what Ada replies.
Tell the hen, that's how much she called her mum in a not friendly way.
Tell the hen, I'm feck vexed at her thinking
I can only take her mathematical astronomical view of the heavens.
And that if I were to write verses on the moon
the subject would be the living things of our satellite.
And then she goes in effect to write a prose play about the moon,
I would wonder whether its surface, so fair and so bright, would open as
perplexing a perspective of mixed wheel and as our own orb, the Earth, does.
So she imagines being on the moon and then looking back.
I should wonder whether the shadows
which are dimly visible in our glittering countenance are truly emblematic of
the spiritual state suited to her physical conditions.
And then in short, I could compose a very sublime poem,
but not a word therein of mathematics and the laws of motion.
So the hen has not quite such a kooky daughter as she supposes.
I'd love to suggest that's the first time the word kooky,
which possibly is the answer of geeky.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
there it is in one of Ada's absolutely wonderful letters.
And then, that in fact that planetary imagery continues throughout her writing,
here's just one example.
1844 the year that she had completed the translation of notes.
I seemed to myself as if condemned to liberty,
condemned to liberty as if I were ordered by providence to be a wandering and
erratic star among the boundless heavens.
In vain seeking for entrance into some planetary system.
In vain praying to obey some sun.
That idea might be developed into a fine poem.
The disobedient and wondering star.
Yes, there's Ada, an image of herself for a moment, that sense condemned to liberty.
The disobedient and wandering star.
Just focus.
Just to try and make you think a little bit differently about Ada,
the kaleidoscopic Ada.
And now, I would like to just now expand out a little bit.
Mary Somerville, there was a lovely question from over there on that word
connection, which picks up.
And of course it relates to was great book on the connection of physical sciences.
I put in each of these images just to show you that these texts are now current
and available.
I suggest to say something about Mary Summerville who
I think was tremendously important in Ada's life.
Then when they met of course, it was one of the reasons that she couldn't
[INAUDIBLE] because Marry Summerville got on very well with her mother
and therefore was create a fandom of and therefore socially this was allowable.
Mary Summerville was 54 at the age they met, Ada, 18, so again, very interesting
that kind of divergence or dynamic between them.
We know very early on that
Ada mentions this on the connection of the physical scientist book.
1834, the very year it's published.
And she's obviously fascinated by it and
I'm just going to look a little bit closer why.
For a start, Mary Somerville completely different background.
Scottish born on a burnt island which is sort just north of Edinburgh.
Naval connections of her father who died quite young.
A very unhappy first marriage and
then a very successful second marriage to William Somerville.
Fellow of the royal society who'd been a traveler, also in the navy,
and come back and was immensely kind and
supportive to Mary Somerville throughout their two lives together.
And they made one of those households that attract people.
And the moment Ada got to know them, they almost adopted her and she went over,
they had a house at Chelsea Hospital, in South London.
And the pattern of visiting Babbage, to begin with, was she, Ada,
would go over on a social visit to the Chelsea Hospital, to the Somerville's.
They would put her in a coach and
take her up to First Dorset Street, Number One Dorset Street.
Which is where Babbage held his great parties,
his great Saturday champagne, science, champagne parties.
Oh, I wish we'd been there, all right.
>> [LAUGH] >> And he held those for
about 30 years, and everybody came to that.
Everybody came to those parties.
I mean just pluck what Charles Love, for example,
that's where Ada would have met him.
So, she is a fantastic enabler and even down to the wonderful descriptions
that they sit down and there's a whole evening that they just spend,
Mary Somerville and Ada discussing what does the word discover mean, right?
And we'll follow that up.
Also overnight, she is allowed to stay with the summer girls.
So she gets away from, I wouldn't say specifically her mother,
but in a way she gets away from that barren background for a moment.
So Mary Somerville is immensely enabling, and
her own career, which had started held up by this very unhappy first marriage.
She starts late.
She begins to publish papers on solar light polarization, solar light,
in the Royal Institution's Philosophical Transactions.
Then she's challenged to do, guess what, a translation.
And it's a translation of Laplace.
His [FOREIGN] very technical and difficult book but
she translated it, that's wonderful descriptions, like Jane Austin she hides
the papers when anybody comes into the room so they don't know she's translating.
It's a brilliantly successful translation, a mechanism of the heavens and
it in fact is used In Cambridge by the undergraduates.
And the first woman's textbook, alright, in translation.
I just note that's how she begins by translating, not her own work,
by translating.
And then, having done this so successfully and written a very interesting
introduction to it John suggests why doesn't she write her own book.
Remember this dialogue?
Wrote their own book so.
And Mary Summerville does write it and
it's on the connection of the physical which is published in 1834.
Just let me say a word about that.
That it's quite a story published by John Murray,
The same publisher of Byron, Jane Austen and so on.
It becomes his best selling text up to The Origin of Species, okay?
It's got it's a 500 page book, you can read there,
presented in 37 short chapters.
And they reduced the traditional they panorama of natural philosophy
into something much tighter,
modern feeling that we would recognize into the high sciences.
Astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, geography, meteorology, and
electromagnetism, and
a lot of that stuff, most of today's stuff is in that last section.
And she has a particular style, of very clear logical explanation but
which she can let go at some moments, all right.
And then remember partial science that we could give you a couple of
examples of this.
Universal gravity, a force equally present,
a force equally present in the dissent of a rain drop as in the falls of Niagara.
In the weight of the air, as in the periods of the Moon, so
it's suddenly just to make you think,
get you away from that falling apple, all right?
She then says it also is responsible for
certain disturbances in nature which is her reading of LePlass.
Every tremor that excites in any one planet is immediately transmitted
to the furthest limits of the system in oscillations like sympathetic
notes in music or vibrations from the deep tones of an organ.
Now that's the way that Mary Somerville writes about science constantly
while doing this simple,
straightforward explanation, she then opens it up for a moment.
And this is what absolutely fascinated Ada,
give you a couple more examples of that.
The propagation of sound may be illustrated by field of corn,
agitated in the wind [INAUDIBLE] that's how sound [INAUDIBLE].
Anyone who observed the reflection of the waves on the wall,
on the side of a river after the passage of a steam boat will have
a perfect idea of the reflections of both sound and of light, again wonderful image.
As the steam boat moves we've all seen that the ripples that a way just to
explain that to lead you into the subject.
And shes also very very interested In
a material that's at the very edge of scientific perception.
So she writes about of course infrared rays and ultraviolet web discovered and
she calls them undulations beyond the human optic nerve.
And she speculates particularly on what function that it might have, infrared and
ultraviolet which we now know of course it does in the animal kingdom.
We are altogether ignorant of the perceptions which direct
the carry of pigeon to his home or those in the antennae of
an insect which warns them of the approach of danger.
And again, that wonderful way of suggesting that scientific knowledge has
got so far that I think we don't know and that's what we should be interested in and
this clearly connects with the way Ada's mind is working.
So that she writes a little after reading the connection
that famous description of mathematical science shows us what is.
It is the language of the unseen relations between things, but
to use and apply that language we must be able to fully appreciate
to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.
And that is an idea that's come out of Mary Summerville's writing and then has
been fully adopted by Ada, that notion of science and the scientific imagination.
Now there's more to be said about that, but I'll try and
come back to it in a different way.
And it says that that relationship, which i think was mentally supportive
to Ada, it was broken because simply that the family, of course,
not owning her were down in financial terms.
They couldn't go on living in London so then like so many of the generation and
rights, they went to Italy and they lived alternately in Naples and in Florence.
And in fact Mary Summerville's tomb is still there,
it needs repair, it's cracked, maybe that will happen, we will see.
And she is visited not by Aida but Maria Mitchell the American astronomer
comes out as shes a great focus and always looking back at Ada and
long after Ada's death in her own personal reminiscences
Mary Summerville describes that relationship.
And with great fondness and
in fact quite interestingly she actually says it was me who led Adrian
to mathematics when we know the story is much for complicated than that.
And just one thing which would amused Adrian I think,
when Maria Mitchell goes out they they want to do some astronomical observing.
And Mary Summerville who is very famous now with his European reputation, and
publishing other books.
She says, yes we can i would love to take you to the Vatican observatory.
There's one problem Maria, which is the authorities at the Vatican
observatory will only allow women in daylight.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
beautifully told, it's a wonderful Maria Mitchell joke, right?
Now I'm gonna slightly speed up, I'm very well aware this is the last your hanging
on in there and focus is difficult to have so let me just speed you now through.
Remember my overall thing,
I'm trying to give you a frame in a way that we haven't quite looked at it before.
Now here is Babbage, but Babbage as he is also one of the bridge war to treaties.
And his great friend and in the end great rival, William Praed,
North countryman who becomes very powerful, writes a number of papers,
notably a history of the inductive sciences,
and then finally a followup, a philosophy of the inductive sciences.
A great theoretician of early and mid-Victorian science
and he wrote that one of the first Bridgewater Treatises were
launched in 1829, quite early, inspired by William Paley.
And the idea basically, was to show that science justified
the creation by God that was the basic challenge, all right.
And William Hue took on the one which is called
the astronomy in general physical in 1833 and
Babbage his old friend was shocked and dismayed by this and so
he wrote in 1837 the 9th [INAUDIBLE] which had not been commissioned, all right?
This is Babbage causing mischief, all right?
I'll give you a couple examples of it, cuz I know Ada and [INAUDIBLE] wrote,
read the [INAUDIBLE] and wrote her mother about it, and
of course read the Babbage Treaties which first which he has been complaining
he'd written it too fast.
But it contains some very interesting ideas,
i ll just see if i can just sketch a couple of them.
In answer to Hughes ideas that The Biblical Creation.
We could still accept this and that species were individually created.
And also, extinction of species where individually God was intervening.
Babbage was uneasy about this, so he wanted to suggest some other
mechanism without directly claiming that he was an Atheist.
He just wanted to suggest another mechanism.
So basicall,y what he does is he suggests that God
really has enormous calculating, or analytical engine, right.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
what he's set in >> Right at the beginning,
he sets up the what we've now think of evolution is entirely setup
as it's immensely complicated computer program.
All right, and it would include for instance the extinction of species.
I think commander but [INAUDIBLE] will be conditional branching.
That something, it's suddenly to a surprise to theatre.
But it's already, it's all built in there.
And God has invented this miraculous machinei
andi it is works on this law I'm quoting, so complicated the analysis itself,
in its present state, can scarcely be grasped as a question, all right.
But he launches that idea in answer to.
And of course, when you reflect on it, and I would love to be able to do this,
I don't think I'm actually competent to do it.
But it seems to me that Babbage has got a Darwinian notion of evolution,
but he's expressed it in terms of God as the first computer programmer.
And one other thing theretThat Babbage also is
complex in a way that there hasn't quite come out I don't think at the moment.
Here's a passage from that ninth and
he's singing of question, soothing as a computer man in a sense but
what happens to human voice when it speaks,
if you look at it technically, scientifically.
The pulsations of the air, I'm quoting, once set in motion by the human voice,
ceased not to exist with sounds to which they gave rise.
The waves of that air thus raised Perambulate the Earth's and
ocean’s surface.
Every atom of which must continue
to influence its past throughout its future existence.
The air itself is thus one vast library,
on whose pages are for ever written.
All that man has ever said a woman whispered.
>> [LAUGH] Okay.
So again, I think that kind of thing,
it's quite clear that this appealed to Ada and it, it set,
it raises crescents well, that intensity in some.
And one other further note I want to, is that mention that Ada also read,
let's see if I can get this up quickly, just get up this image.
It'll do.
Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences.
And this set her on the path of this discussion of what is discovery
because you put forward the notion of induction
which very simply meant that facts are gathered, gathered and gathered and
finally they get threaded on a string and you have a law, all right?
It's a very crude way of putting what it is but
later then becomes fascinated by the so notion, what is discovery?
How does it work in a human mind?
It's very important.
We're in an age of great discovery.
What kind of imagination is it that discovers things?
And she writes, I intend to incorporate with one department of
my labors a complete reduction to a system of the principles,
and methods of discovery, elucidating the same with full examples.
And I am already noting down a list of discoveries hitherto made,
in order myself to examine into that history, origin and progress.
So, she's going to write an even better book than.
Now, it's one of the many projects she didn't write, but
it's very important that she was thinking like that.
And it's partly the result of reading these books,
at this treatise and then the history of induction.
And of course, from that, just read that [INAUDIBLE] note on imagination which
referred to, which I think was partly inspired by Hubert,
also by Courage and the Biographica and his idea of the imagination.
And she says it's three things, the confining faculty, the conceiving faculty,
and third, imagination is the discovering faculty, pre-eminently.
It's that which penetrates into the unseen world around us, the world of science.
And again, repeating that theme.
So, that comes partly from her reading, and partly from her own fascination with.
Now Granted, there's a curve to describe what I'm going to do,
but basically, it's speeding up and speeding up and speeding up.
I think it's an acceleration curve, all right?
Because I'm aware that the evening is drawing to a close.
Faraday, we know about the extraordinary dialogue, set of letters between them.
That he refuses in the end to take her on as a pupil.
You know, I don't think anybody's made the famous quote that this is
introducing Ada to Faraday.
That enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract
of sciences and has grasped it with a force that few masculine intellects
in our country, at least, could have exerted over it.
And that wonderful introduction, and in fact,
what then happens is Ada says that she wants to work out this.
System, the nervous system, and analysis of the nervous system, and then,
she says to Faraday, I mean, unless you disguise me to undertake
your researches for a review, or at any rate, as the hinged center for
an electrical article probably to be published by the quarterly.
And again, she's taking on, she wants to explain this instinct to be
the theme here, is that science needs popularizing, and
explaining in a way that most have done and Ada also wants to do that,
which she did, of course, brilliantly.
It was a beauty.
But she also wants to do it for Faraday.
We mentioned mesmerism.
I just want to say a word about that.
She, another amazing range.
Ada gets interested, from a technical point of view, in mesmerism.
Harriet very interesting, a woman journalist who traveled
in America with a best selling book on political economy, and then, got very ill.
And incidentally, with an illness similar to what the illness that killed Ada,
some form of uterine cancer.
And there was no way of treating this, except Opium.
And she went and took up rooms in Newcastle,
and she decided to try mesmerism as a treatment.
And she says we're holed up there for three or four years,
having a of course of mesmerism.
And the amazing thing is she was cured, she was cured.
She came down and she lived till 1876 [INAUDIBLE].
Now, the reasons for that cure, of course, are, that's the question.
Is it a form of the placebo principle, very probably,
or does it depend on the kind of disease it was and so on.
And Ada got fascinated by this but she was also interested in testing it.
She wasn't happy just to accept the letters on mesmerism.
And here's a passage she writes that one has to be
careful about what she calls scientific amateurs who lack
the really requisite extensive precaution and skepticism.
And against the avowedly scientific,
who are far too easily operated on an instant by enthusiasm.
The human tendency to snatch at the occult, the mysterious and
indefinite, rather than simple facts.
So a bit of self criticism going on there.
And her notes on that,
she then links it to the work on from mesmerism to animal magnetism.
And from that to the development of photography
because that is a way of possibly recording
what might be the magnetic influence which is produced by mesmerism.
But it needs to be tested.
What we believe that it is yet unsuspected how important a part
photography is to play on the advance of human knowledge.
And in the development of the occult in nature by which she doesn't mean
what we mean.
She simply means what is not visible.
We need to develop instruments in order to discover that.
Mr. Anonymous, very suitable cuz we've got four minutes.
This extraordinary book,
called the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844.
Anonymous because it put forward an early theory of evolution,
The Examiner magazine.
This is the first attempt that has been made to connect the natural sciences in
a history of creation.
And it covers the early history of mankind,
on the mental constitution of animals and the purpose of the animated creation.
And he mounts all kinds of arguments.
But basically giving straight scientific explanations.
For example,
there's a wonderful section on the constitution of animal intelligence.
And he argues that there's a straight panorama through the simplest animal
intelligence to human intelligence, and it can be traced through.
Now this is a very dangerous example, but that's why he was Mr.
Anonymous, all right?
Now, we know Ada got hold of that book.
In fact, Babbage famously said to her husband.
Has she read it if she hasn't actually written it?
>> [LAUGH] >> And indeed, a man called Cedric,
Adam Cedric, who was a very conservative reviewer academic,
reviewed it with great insinuations that it was so outrageous, this book.
That it must have been written by a woman or.
>> [LAUGH] >> Also a very interesting start,
this is the moment 1844, that Darwin is suddenly hustling and
bustling into writing that preliminary essay about evolution.
Of course he doesn't publish until 1859 but he writes very, very rapidly.
Having read The Vestiges and there all sorts of passages.
I'll just read you one cuz we got two minutes.
No I won't, because I want to send the hare running.
It was going to be about photography and
chambers suggests that photography is a form of memory and illustration memory.
I would also have talked about Humboldt.
Two minutes, we know that Ada read Cosmos.
She was absolutely fascinated by Humboldt's idea of universal geography,
and wrote about it, and wrote about German science in general.
And here's the hare I want to start running, is that did she read Tennyson?
Did she read Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850?
But even more than that, this poem called The Princess,
which seems to be almost entirely forgotten.
We know that Babbage knew Tennyson, and know it for a very good,
Babbage-like reason, that he wrote to Tennyson in 1850,
said I much enjoyed your poems.
There's one line that worries me a bit.
And the line is every moment dies a man,
every moment one is born, all right?
Babbage said [LAUGH] not yet dancing,
there's seems to be a contradiction here because this
implies that the human population must be static.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
then he makes this wonderful Babbage suggestion.
May I suggest every moment dies a man,
every moment one and one-sixteenth is born.
>> [LAUGH] >> And then the absolute,
why Babbage is so great, is one more sentence.
He says, dear Tennyson,
may I add that the exact figure is 1.167- >> [LAUGH]
>> But something must, of course,
be conceded to the laws of meter.
>> [LAUGH] >> You know why Ada loved Babbage.
Okay, the hare I want to run is that Tennyson published
a almost-forgotten poem, now, called The Princess,
which is about an extraordinary subject.
Look at the date, 1848, which is about a university entirely of women.
Women professors, women students, all right?
And he explores, also, their studying a lot of science.
There's a wonderful description of here's a lecture.
Then we stroll, they visit
a group of men dress up as women in order to get into university.
And then they observe the teaching, which is formidable.
And then we stroll for half the day through stately lecture theaters.
Benched crescent wise.
In each we sat, we heard the grave professor woman professor.
On the lecture slate,
the circle rounded under female hands the slate a big black board.
With flawless demonstration followed in a classic lecture.
We dipped in all the total chronicles of man, the mind, the star,
the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower, electric,
chemic laws, all the rest and whatsoever can be taught and known.
So it is partly is satiric but it is not entirely satiric and
there is a very interesting thing here.
The lead heroine, her name is princess Aida.
All right, now I throw it out,
I throw it out that was there proof that Tennyson knew about Ada?
Certainly he knew about the great movement which was beginning for women's education.
Queens College in London was founded in that, in fact the year he was writing for
him, in 1847.
And of course we know Cambridge 71 and Somerville next door in 78.
So I let that hare run.
And I finish with this.
That's the third and the last, in fact,
cuz we know it's a big error type on display, and I also was talking about it.
Very touching photograph., of a painting.
Pretty well reckoned fo be 1852.
Which is very, very late.
And there is a description of Ada having to be really held up because its so
painful for her.
And she's playing the piano,
which I suggest to you is a machine in some
way related musically to the computer.
This is one of the last things she wrote about the future.
She's dying, but she writes this.
I have, however, the hope that my theories will be most
harmoniously disciplined troops, consisting of vast numbers and
marching in irresistible power to the sound of music.
Is not this very mysterious?
Certainly my troops must consist of numbers, or
they can have no existence at all.
But then what are these numbers?
Now there is the riddle, question mark.
All right?
Remember, my title has a question mark.
And I want to put two short excerpts against this.
Remember that Ada associated Brighton with health and
she went down to, and the sound of the sea and so on.
And she also knew David Brewster, who had written the first biography of Newton,
first edition published in 1831.
And it's that book, that biography,
which makes famous this remark that you all know, but it's so lovely to read.
And remember think of beaches, Ada.
This is Newton as quoted by David Brewster.
I do not know what I may appear to the world.
But to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or
a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me.
One might want to replace boy with girl.
And my final quote is this.
We know that when Ada was dying, Dickens came to see her, her old friend Dickens.
She'd read his American notes, she'd read a number of novels, but Dombey and
Son was her favorite.
And we know that he read something about the death of little Paul.
And people usually assume that it's the moment that little Paul actually dies,
which is a heart breaking moment.
Little Paul is in Brighton and he can hear the sea.
And I suggest this short passage is what Dickens read to Ada.
Paul fell asleep and
slept quietly for a long time.
Awaking suddenly, he listened, started up, and sat listening.
His sister Florence asked him what he thought he heard.
I want to know what it says, he answered, looking steadily into her face.
The sea, Florey.
What is it that it keeps on saying.
She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves, thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
