1While the young man was at sea with his bags of stones, a girl in London was shown a machine. To tell her story rightly we must begin before she was born, among the weavers.
2In the middle counties of England, around the town of Nottingham, thousands of families lived by knitting stockings on wooden frames in their own cottages. It was skilled work and poorly paid. Then the masters brought in wider frames that made cheap, bad cloth with fewer hands. Wages fell. That winter the price of bread was the highest anyone remembered.
3So the stocking-makers went out at night with hammers, and broke the new frames. They went in bands, with blackened faces, and left the old frames untouched. They said they followed a captain named Ludd, whom no one ever found. The government sent more soldiers into those counties than it had sent against some foreign kings. And it brought a law before the lords of the land, to make the breaking of a frame a crime of death.
4One young lord stood up to speak against it. It was the first speech he had ever made there. He was twenty-four, and lame in one foot, and within a month he would be the most famous poet in England. His name was Byron. He told the lords he had been among those weavers and seen how they lived. He had travelled in the poorest provinces of Turkey, he said, and had never seen such misery as in the heart of his own country. It seemed to him that the new law set a man's life below the price of a stocking-frame, and he told them that to carry it out they would need twelve butchers for a jury.
5The law passed all the same. The next winter, seventeen of the machine-breakers were hanged at York in a single month.
6Hold both things in your mind, for both are true. The frames closed the ways of those who had lived by their hands, and no one caught them as they fell. And the frames were only wood and iron, and did what they were set to do. The wrong was not in the machine. It was in who was left to pay for it.
7The poet married a clever, stern young woman who loved mathematics. He called her his Princess of Parallelograms, and not kindly. They had one child, a daughter. A month after the birth the mother took the baby and left his house, and never went back. The scandal was so great that Byron left England. He died eight years later of a fever, in Greece, where he had gone to help that people fight for their freedom. He had not seen his daughter since she was a few weeks old.
8The daughter was named Augusta Ada. She was called Ada.
9Her mother feared one thing above all. She feared that the father's wildness would come out in the child. Poetry was the door through which it would come, so that door was to be kept shut. Ada was to be fed on numbers. She had tutors in arithmetic from the age of four. Her father's portrait hung in the house behind a green curtain, and she was not shown it until she was twenty.
10But a child is not so easily steered. When she was twelve Ada decided she would fly. She did not dream about it. She went about it. She studied the wings of dead birds, and measured how the size of the wing stood to the weight of the body. She tried paper, and oiled silk, and wire, and feathers. She wrote all her findings in a book and named it Flyology.
11Then, at thirteen, she caught the measles, and it left her legs without strength. She lay in bed for the best part of a year, and for two years more she walked with sticks. The girl who had meant to fly could not cross a room. She kept on with her mathematics lying down. It was the only country she could travel in.
12When she was seventeen and on her feet again, she met at an evening party a man named Charles Babbage. He was a man of numbers, famous and quarrelsome, and he asked her and her mother to his house. There in his drawing-room, on a table, stood a thing of brass and steel, two feet high. It was a small part of an engine he was building with the government's money.
13He turned its handle for his guests. Columns of toothed wheels clicked round, and numbers came up on them. It was adding. It added and carried and added again, with never a mistake, by nothing but the turning of wheels. He called it the Difference Engine. When it was finished it would be as big as a room. It would reckon the tables that sailors steer by and print them, and no tired clerk would ever again put a wrong figure in a table and wreck a ship.
14The fine guests looked at it as people look at a clever toy. One who was there wrote afterward that they gazed like savages seeing a looking-glass for the first time. But the young Miss Byron, she wrote, understood its working and saw the great beauty of it.
15Ada went home and asked for the drawings.
16The next year her mother took her through the factory towns of the north, to improve her mind. There she saw the other half of her answer. In the silk mills stood a new kind of loom, the invention of a Frenchman named Jacquard. Above it hung a long chain of stiff cards, laced together, with holes punched in them. As each card came round, rods pressed against it. Where there was a hole, the rod passed through and a thread was lifted. Where there was no hole, the thread stayed down. So the cards told the loom, row by row, what to weave. Change the cards, and the same loom wove a different pattern. A weaver with the right cards could make a rose or a ship or a man's face in silk, and need not know how to draw.
17She stood a long time watching the cards go round. She was the daughter of the man who had spoken for the frame-breakers. And she was looking at a frame that could be told what to do.
18She married at nineteen, a quiet lord who admired her mind, and in time she was Countess of Lovelace. She bore three children in four years. But she did not let go of the numbers. She found a tutor, one of the best in England, and worked at night when the house was asleep.
19Meanwhile Babbage had done a thing typical of him. He had left the first engine unfinished, because he had thought of a better one. He called the new one the Analytical Engine. It would not do one kind of sum only. It would do any sum whatever. It would have a mill, where the reckoning was done, and a store, where numbers were kept until wanted. It could look at its own results and choose what to do next. It would be driven by steam. And it would take its orders from punched cards, like the Jacquard loom.
20The government had paid for one engine and got none, and it would not pay for a second. He was better heard abroad. He lectured in Italy, and a young officer of engineers there wrote an account of the engine in French. Ada was asked to put it into English. She did it. Then Babbage asked why she had not written something of her own, since she understood the engine so well. So she added notes.
21The notes were three times as long as the thing they explained. She worked on them for most of a year. She fought him over every line. Once he changed a passage without asking, and she wrote that she could not endure another person meddling with her sentences. She was twenty-seven. She had found her work.
22Listen to what she saw, for no one else had seen it, and Babbage himself had not seen it whole.
23He thought he had made a machine for numbers. She saw that the wheels did not know they were numbers. A wheel that stands at seven does not know what seven is. It only holds a place. If the places could stand for other things, for the notes of music, say, or the letters of a language, or anything whatever that keeps fixed dealings with other things, then the engine could work upon those as well. It might compose music, she wrote, of any length and any depth of art, if only the rules of harmony could be set out for it.
24She found the words for it by thinking of the looms in the north. She wrote: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
25Then, to show it was no dream, she wrote out step by step how the engine could be made to reckon a hard chain of numbers that mathematicians prize. Each step named which wheels, which cards, what to keep, what to send back and use again. It was a set of orders for a machine that did not exist. People now call it the first of its kind.
26And she was honest about the limit, as a Keeper must be. She would not let anyone think the engine was a mind. She wrote: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." It could follow. It could not find. Whether that will always be true of every engine, she left for others, and it is not this book's question.
27When the notes were ready to print, Babbage did another thing typical of him. He wanted to put a preface in front of her work, without his name on it, attacking the government for not paying him. She refused. It would look as though she had written it. It would turn her careful reasoning into a weapon in his quarrel. He raged. He wanted the whole thing withdrawn. She held firm. He forgave her in the end, and they stayed friends until her death. He called her the Enchantress of Number.
28The notes were printed that summer. She signed them with three letters only, A.A.L. A lady did not put her name to such things. Those who knew, knew. Then they were forgotten, as Carnot's book was forgotten, and for the same reason: the world was not yet ready to need them.
29For the engine was never built. Not a quarter of it. It needed thousands of wheels cut finer than any workshop of that day could cut them, and more money than anyone would give. Babbage tinkered at it until he died. All that was ever made of it was drawings, and a few parts, and her notes.
30Think what that asks of a person. She had written the orders for a machine she would never see run. She had described a country and drawn its map, and there was no ship to go there. Was it worth the doing?
31She seems to have been troubled by that herself. She wanted her mathematics to do something in the world. In her last years she tried other schemes, and some were foolish. She believed she could find a sure method for betting on horses, and she lost a great deal of money, and pawned the family jewels in secret. She had her father in her after all. No green curtain keeps a parent out.
32Then the sickness came. It was a growth in the womb, and the doctors of that time could do nothing but bleed her and give her drugs for the pain. It took more than a year. Her mother moved into the house and took command of the sickroom. She decided who might see her daughter and who might not, and she kept away the friends she did not approve of.
33Ada bore it. But in one matter she would not be ruled. She said where she wished to be buried. It was not with her husband's people, nor with her mother's. It was in the small church in the county of Nottingham where the Byrons lay. She asked to be put beside her father.
34She had never heard his voice. She had seen his face only in paint. But she had read him by then, every line, and she knew whose child she was. And she had found a thing that her mother, with all her care, never understood: that the two halves did not have to be at war. She called her own work a poetical science. She had needed the father's eye to see what the engine might become, and the mother's rule to set it down step by step. Either alone would have missed it.
35She died at the end of autumn. She was thirty-six years old, the same age her father had been.
36They carried her north, into the country of the stocking-makers. The road passed through villages where old men still remembered the night bands and the hammers, and the young lord who had spoken for them. They opened the vault of the Byrons, and they laid her coffin against his, the two of them together for the first time since she was a month old.
37Her notes lay unread for a hundred years. And then, in a time this book has not yet reached, people began to build engines of a new kind, with lightning in them instead of steam. They found three letters at the bottom of some old pages, and under the letters, a woman who had been waiting for them.
38The engine had never turned. But she had thought it through, and written it down, and an idea set down in clear words does not rust. It can lie in a drawer through a hundred winters and come out as bright as it went in.
39That is a kind of fire, too. It burns nothing and it warms no one, until the day someone opens the drawer.
40But in that same year, while she lay dying, another drawer in another English house held a thing more dangerous by far. It had been shut for fourteen years. The man who owned it was sick whenever he thought of opening it.