QI The Book of the Dead

child to three female staff, whom Ada later called ‘the Three Furies’. They were spies as well as teachers: Ada was allowed no freedom of thought or action and was brought up on an unvarying diet of logic, mathematics and science but ‘ not and never ’ poetry. She was twenty before she even saw a portrait of her father.
    The repressive parental regime backfired in an interesting way. Ada fulfilled her mother’s hopes by developing exceptional gifts as a mathematician, but she also proved herself her father’sdaughter by bringing a poetic imagination to bear on mathematical problems. At thirteen, she was doing Leonardo-like calculations for a flying machine. By seventeen she had survived a debilitating bout of measles and run the full gamut of teenage rebellion from migraines and dramatic weight loss to an attempted elopement. She entered society, keen on both dancing and intelligent conversation. As one of the few women at the time who could talk passionately about algebra, she soon had a group of admirers that included the most eminent scientists of the day.
    One of these was the mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage, who was then trying to fund his Difference Engine, an 8-foot-high, 15-ton, 25,000-part mechanical calculator which he had hoped would render obsolete the notoriously inaccurate books of tables on which the whole financial system depended. The reason such tables were unreliable was that they were compiled by people, known as ‘computers’. (The first use of the word computer to mean any kind of calculating machine wasn’t until 1897, a quarter of a century after Babbage’s death.) Babbage failed to get his Difference Engine built, but he was very taken with Ada and over the next few years shared with her his plans for an even more ambitious project: the analytical engine, a larger, steam-driven calculator that could be programmed by adapting the punched cards recently used to automate French silk looms.
    Babbage could see Ada’s money and connections would be helpful, but he couldn’t have anticipated how fully she would understand the machine’s potential. Despite being married with three children under eight, she offered to translate a description of the engine produced by the Italian philosopher Luigi Menebrea. Her work so impressed Babbage that he asked for her notes. They turned out to be three times the length of the originaltext. Published together, the book became an instant best-seller. It was, after all, by Byron’s daughter on a subject women weren’t supposed to understand. It is also a key text in the history of computing. Not only had Ada produced the very first computer program – a plan to get the machine to produce the complex sequence known as Bernoulli numbers – she also allowed her imagination free rein, predicting that in the future such an engine might be used to compose music and reproduce graphics and become an invaluable tool for science, commerce and the arts. More even than Babbage himself, Ada Lovelace saw the awesome potential of what was one day to be known as the computer. In 1979, the US defence department named their software language ‘Ada’ in her honour, and her portrait is on the holographic stickers Microsoft use to authenticate their products.
    Over the next decade, Babbage again tried and failed to get his engine built. Ada had other priorities. Her social status enhanced by her success, she was busy living up to her Byronic inheritance. Dosed on laudanum or cannabis to dull the pain of a slow-growing cancer, she fell out with her mother and her husband by plunging into a series of intense relationships. She had a brief affair with Dickens and then fell for John Crosse, a professional gambler who inspired her to devise a mathematical system to beat the bookies. There is no record of whether it worked, but her daughter Anne did go on to found the Crabbet stud, from which almost all the world’s pure-bred Arabian horses now claim descent. Ada died at thirty-six, exactly the same age as Byron himself, and, for all her mother’s attempts to keep them apart, she was buried with him.
    Ada’s story is an interesting variant on the absent-father scenario. Whether consciously or not, she established some kind of harmonic resonance with his memory during her short life, nodoubt encouraged by her mother’s hysterical attempts to suppress it. Who knows how the father–daughter bond might have evolved if he had lived? Byron’s life and