The Bride of Science by Benjamin Woolley, Macmillan, 拢18.99, ISBN
0333724364
ADA, it was thought, was a prey to objectionable thoughts and needed
discipline. She was prescribed a course of trigonometry and sums to calm her
down sufficiently to withstand the shock of beholding a portrait of her
father鈥攖he dangerous, dissolute Lord Byron. When she was a month old her
mother had fled Byron and covered his likeness with a green curtain. Now 20 and
fortified by tuition, Ada gazed on the painting of Byron in Albanian
costume鈥攚ith little reaction.
Ada is better known for her work with another man鈥擟harles Babbage. She
has been iconised as a woman whose contribution to technology鈥攁s possible
author of the first computer program, for Babbage鈥檚 mechanical computer鈥�
has been hidden. The truth, as always, is complicated.
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The Victorian age conjoured up by the image of Babbage鈥檚 machine is one of
great stability. Society seemed organised in such a way that everyone knew their
place; God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. It was also the
age of Byron, and a time of enormous change, seething with ideas and invention.
Religion was no longer immune to challenge, Darwin had revolutionised thinking
about the development of life on Earth and technology was on the march.
Still in her teens, Ada was stimulated by the intellectual ferment around
her. She met Charles Babbage via her friendship with the mathematician Mary
Somerville. Babbage had constructed a section of his famous Difference Engine, a
mechanical computer he displayed to the public in unsuccessful attempts to get
money to continue development to full scale. His obsessions with calculating
machines were far ahead of contemporary technology鈥檚 ability to translate them
into hardware. They fascinated Ada, by now married to the Earl of Lovelace. She
wrote up a description for the general reader of Babbage鈥檚 proposed Analytical
Engine, whose conception baffled the most advanced scientists and mathematicians
of the time. Many claim that in the course of documenting the Engine she wrote
the first 鈥渃omputer program鈥�.
But Benjamin Woolley鈥檚 biography The Bride of Science is much more
than a recital of the events in Ada鈥檚 scientific life. He plunges the reader
into that seething Victorian England, the swirl of ideas that captured Ada. She
was interested in almost every new technological or philosophical development:
electricity and magnetism, sexual freedom and phrenology, geology and
physiology. And all of these activities were still threaded through with the
sinister influence of her wild romantic father, famously described by Lady
Caroline Lamb as 鈥渕ad, bad and dangerous to know鈥�.
There have been biographies of Ada before, but this is the first to present
the whole woman, intellectual, emotional sometimes to the point of frenzy,
driven, but always human. It鈥檚 a thriller.