Charles and Ada E-Book

James Essinger

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 403

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The partnership of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace was one that would change science forever. They were an unlikely pair – one the professor son of a banker, the other the only child of an acclaimed poet and a social-reforming mathematician – but perhaps that is why their work was so revolutionary. They were the pioneers of computer science, creating plans for what could have been the first computer. They each saw things the other did not: it may have been Charles who designed the machines, but it was Ada who could see their potential. But what were they like? And how did they work together? Using previously unpublished correspondence between them, Charles and Ada explores the relationship between two remarkable people who shared dreams far ahead of their time.

Leseprobe

By the same author

Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004)

Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling (2007)

Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age (2014)

Frankie: How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster (with Sandra Koutzenko) (2019)

The Ada Lovelace Project (2019)

This book is dedicated with admiration and affection to Briony Kapoor, queen of Romney Marsh.

Cover illustration: Part of the Analytical Engine (Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)

Every effort has been made to contact the holders of copyright.

First published 2019

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© James Essinger, 2019

The right of James Essinger to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9286 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Lisa Noel Babbage

Author’s Notes

Preface

1 Britain Transformed

2 Boyhood

3 Cambridge Days, and Ada is Born

4 Family Matters

5 The Epiphany that Changed Charles’ and Ada’s Lives

6 1827: Charles’ Year of Disaster

7 Ada Dreams of a Flying Machine

8 The Solitary Widower

9On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

10 Charles and Ada Meet

11 The Remarkable Ada Byron

12 A Fresh Tragedy; the Analytical Engine; and Ada’s Marriage

13 Dabbling in Politics

14 A Stage Play that Held Up a Mirror to Charles’ Heart

15 Ada the Fairy

16 Enchanted

17 Last Days

18 So Why Did Charles and Ada Fail?

Appendix: Information on Sources

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

‘It has done me harm, my friend. It has aged me, tired me, vexed me, disappointed me. It does no man any good to have his patience worn out, and to think himself ill-used.’

Daniel Doyce in Little Dorrit (1857), by Charles Dickens

‘We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’

Ada Lovelace, 1843 (her own emphasis)

FOREWORDBY LISA NOEL BABBAGE

I remember my parents telling me when I was little that we had a famous ancestor. That knowledge only became meaningful for me, though, in the 1980s, when in sixth grade I commuted to the Virginia Highlands area of Atlanta, Georgia, to attend Inman Middle School. During a history class we were told about Charles Babbage, who had designed a computer made out of cogwheels. From that moment I was immensely proud to have Charles Babbage as my forebear (he is, in fact, my great-great-great-great-grandfather), and it’s thrilling that so many people know about him today. Nowadays he is a daily inspiration to me.

It was due to him that I discovered who I could be. In the face of huge odds, Charles (I like to think of him by his first name) faced his dream, staring it down day after day for the better part of a lifetime. And he did this, not solely for himself, but very much for everyone – to make people’s lives better. It is this habitual force of seeing beyond the everyday and maintaining a vision of sublimity that I draw on in my own life as an invaluable insight for how I want to live.

The world we live in today is, I think, much shaped by Charles’ work. To that end I count it a joy to have to explain the peculiarity of my last name to people who don’t know me and who mistakenly call me ‘Lisa Baggage’ or some other inaccurate rendition of our family surname. The Babbage Connection, as my mother calls it, is the stuff of dreams.

To me, the Babbage Connection means that I was born into a lineage that helped me reach beyond the walls of ghetto life in America to what the possibility of living empowered could be. And it was the constant reminder of Charles’ ‘stick-to-it-tiveness’ – his determination never to give up on pursuing his dream – that helped me hold on to my own desires and dreams.

Both my grandparents were well travelled, having served in the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Stuart Barton Babbage, my grandfather, was actually born in New Zealand in 1916. When I visited him in Sydney, Australia, in the 1990s, I found he had lots of family memorabilia in his house, including a copy of the old, yellowing newspaper from 1871 that announced Charles Babbage’s death. Stuart was a remarkable man, who also spent three years in comparative humility as a vicar at an African American church in Decatur, Georgia. It was there in Atlanta that his son, my father Christopher Charles Babbage, married an African American, LaNell Johnson – my mother.

We, within ourselves, are the ultimate drivers of destiny; complexion and gender do not constrain what is inside us nor do the external forces around us ultimately contain it. My great-great-great-great-grandfather gave me that destiny-driven vision and I have held on to it with all I am.

Ada Lovelace, like Charles, has always been a constant figure in my mind. Knowing that her efforts not only supported Charles’ inventions but pushed them beyond what was initially predicted gave me a sense of pride as a woman and as a member of the Babbage bloodline.

I’ve always imagined what their dynamic friendship must have been like, and I have on many occasions tried to put myself in Ada’s shoes. She is a hero’s heroine because she didn’t shy away from doing her best to have an intellectual life, even when it would have been much easier for her to abandon that aim. She and I share a common struggle, both being daughters of a broken marriage. Yet neither of us chose to give up pursuing a dream of wanting to have a significant positive impact on humanity – in that respect, Ada is most deservedly and understandably a role model for millions of women today, worldwide.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

We need to have an accurate idea of the modern value of nineteenth-century monetary sums. A useful rule of thumb is that we should multiply nineteenth-century monetary amounts by about a hundred to give an approximate idea of what the sums would be worth today. There was little price inflation in Britain during the nineteenth century; indeed, prices sometimes actually went down.

Inevitably, it is only an approximation. Food, drink and in particular the cost of domestic service were disproportionately cheaper in Charles Babbage’s time than they are in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In the nineteenth century, even middle-class people who were far from wealthy would have typically had one or more live-in servants. These servants would have been given their board (i.e. food and drink) and accommodation, but only a tiny salary that might have been no more than £20 per year.

In letters I use italics where in the manuscript the word was underlined by the writer. Ada Lovelace was a particularly keen emphasiser.

I have sometimes broken up the paragraphing of source material, both printed and manuscript, in order to make the material more readable. In the case of the printed material, the excessively long paragraphs were usually designed to make the material shorter to save money, rather than done with any concern for readability or posterity.

PREFACE

Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer, mathematician and polymath, designed the world’s first programmable computer. He did this not in our century, or even in the twentieth, but back in the 1830s.

His great friend Ada Lovelace, born Ada Byron, encouraged him and supported him emotionally in his endeavours, and her insights into his work – insights that not even Charles had – help posterity understand just how far ahead of its time his thinking really was. In particular, Ada saw that Charles had in fact invented a general-purpose machine that could govern all sorts of processes, including even the composition and playing of music, whereas Charles thought that he was only designing machines for carrying out mathematical calculations. Charles and Ada were both geniuses and their talents existed in a kind of symbiosis with each other, although neither of them fully understood this at the time. I choose to use their first names because it seems more friendly – and more respectful – than ‘Babbage and Lovelace’.

After first inventing a revolutionary machine he called the Difference Engine, devised to print accurate mathematical and navigational tables, Charles, in 1834, realised that a much more general machine, which he christened the Analytical Engine, was possible. Programs (to use modern terminology) and data were to be furnished to the Analytical Engine by means of punched cards, which were already being used at the time to govern the operation of the Jacquard loom, a remarkable and inspired automatic loom for weaving complex images and patterns.

The Analytical Engine’s output would be a printer, a curve plotter and a bell, and the machine would also be able to punch numbers on to cards to be read into the machine later. The Analytical Engine was the world’s first ever general-purpose computer. Many of the great inventions that have made the modern world possible were devised in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth, but of these none is more important than the computer. Unfortunately, at the time, hardly anyone recognised the importance of Charles’ computer, apart from Ada Lovelace.

Charles and Ada is the first book to make maximum use of the extensive collection of material in the British Library Babbage Archive in London. Anthony Hyman’s 1982 biography, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer, uses some material from that remarkable archive but curiously omits – or perhaps overlooks – abundant personal material which reveals extensive information about Charles’ personality and his feelings towards many of the events of his life, including his tragic private life and the rejection he felt at the hands of the world.

Posterity can be grateful to Charles for many reasons: one is that he had a habit of making handwritten copies of important letters he was sending or of important documents. They may also have been early drafts and it often impossible to know whether an ostensible copy is that or an early draft.

By definition, someone’s archive usually only consists of letters or other documents sent to them, but because Charles made these crucial copies, we have this additional material available. He was a brilliant writer, and while he expressed his own emotions rarely, when he did it was often with deeply moving intensity. Also – and this is by no means a trivial consideration when one sees just how many of the letters he received from others are written in handwriting that is close to, if not completely, unreadable – his own handwriting is usually very legible and there are only a few instances where I have been unable to decipher crucial words.

Anyone seeking to write Charles and Ada’s story ought to be humbled by the task; indeed, if they were not it is difficult to imagine that the resulting biography could have any merit. This biography, like any other, can only ever aspire to offer an approximate idea of what Charles was like when he lived. Still, it is at least a consolation that – with perhaps only two exceptions: his beloved wife Georgiana, who died at a tragically early age in September 1827, and his close friend Ada Lovelace, who also died young – nobody who knew him when he was alive had very much idea of what to make of him either. Today, we do at least have the privilege of being able to look back on Charles’ life in its entirety and to do our best to try to fathom what made this remarkable genius the man he was, and what he was really like.

What is incontestable is that Charles was a far more emotional and deeply feeling man than he has so far been regarded by posterity. Still, if posterity doesn’t usually get him right in this respect, that’s to a large extent his own fault; by all accounts, he wasn’t much of a communicator in private about his personal emotional state, and in public he was even less so, even by nineteenth-century standards.

For example, in his 1864 autobiography Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (meaning ‘scientist’), there is much excellent material about his plans and aims for the machines he called Difference Engine 1 and Difference Engine 2. There is also some first-rate material about the Analytical Engine, but even given the reticence we habitually expect to encounter in autobiographies written during the latter years of the nineteenth century, Passages contains almost no material whatsoever relating to Charles’ personal life. He does not once mention his beloved wife Georgiana by name, although he does refer to her indirectly:

The Queen of Sardinia was the sister of the Grand Duke of Tuscany (Leopold II) from whom I had, many years before, when under severe affliction from the loss of a large portion of my family, received the most kind and gratifying attention.

That ‘large portion of my family’ certainly includes his wife Georgiana. As for Ada Lovelace, Charles only mentions her once in a passage which is explored later.

A major problem with the autobiography is that it has helped to give later generations the impression that Charles was a hard and unfeeling, mathematically minded man without much in the way of emotions. Ada, on the other hand, is popularly regarded as being someone who wore her emotions on her sleeve and was passionate about her work.

At the start of his autobiography, Charles employs a quotation from Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1824). Byron was Ada Lovelace’s father. The quotation, which is completely at odds with the reticence and indeed deliberate evasion surrounding emotional topics in the autobiography, is:

I’m a philosopher. Confound them all.

Birds, beasts and men; but no, not womankind.

In fact, Charles misquotes Byron here: Byron wrote, ‘Bills, beasts and men’ rather than ‘Birds, beasts and men’ – Charles, with an enormous inheritance, was not so preoccupied with money on a day-to-day basis as Byron was.

The misquotation may be due to Charles confusing the lines in Don Juan with an extract from Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which reads:

... and kept

The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay.

This misquotation suggests that Charles was a man for whom women were a spiritually vital part of his life, yet it’s impossible to be certain what they really meant to him. He was capable of very strong attachments and there is no doubt that he and Ada did indeed have a close romantic friendship, but there is no proof as to whether this ever became physical.

Generally, there is very little extant evidence in the documentation that allows much to be written of Charles’ feelings about women other than his devotion to his wife Georgiana and all his children, his terrible distress when his daughter Georgiana died, and his great fondness for Ada.

The Sirens of Machinery

In Greek mythology, the Sirens are dangerous temptresses, who sang charmingly and lured nearby sailors to their deaths on dangerous rocks. Machines can be Sirens too.

Charles and Ada were fascinated by the possibility of what mechanisms could do. Charles once remarked, when talking about a machine he’d seen in the industrial north, how extraordinary it was that every single time the machine operated, a particular part of its mechanism would reach up to exactly the same place as before. This might seem a commonplace observation, but to Charles it was something akin to poetry. As for Ada, she once went on a tour of England’s north with her mother, and enjoyed it very much.

Charles loved mechanical figures and toys that were able to move about by themselves. He grew extremely enthusiastic about them, and when he bought one for his house he would beg his close friends to come and see it and he would introduce it to a wider circle of friends at his regular social soirées. Indeed, its regularity was itself a kind of manifestation of Charles’ love of order, precision and the relentless progression of mechanism. He loved machinery of all kinds, being fascinated by it beyond its own utility. He loved devices for their own sake. Charles was the kind of person who liked to play around with machinery to see what would happen. As we’ll see, he even confesses in his autobiography to having the fundamental problem as a child of being far more interested in what was inside a machine than in what it could do for him.

In his love of and appreciation for machinery, Charles is not only a Victorian genius, but, in a very real sense, a modern genius too. Researching into his life and writing about him, one is so often overwhelmed with a sense that this was a man who was, to a large extent, timeless.

The trouble with loving machines, though, is that they don’t usually love us back. What is true of physical machines generally is especially true of inventions. It’s never enough merely to conceptualise the invention; you need to build one if you’re going to be an inventor of any importance. That can be a task that often requires superhuman persistence and patience. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, James (now Sir James) Dyson, the inventor of the revolutionary cyclonic bagless vacuum cleaner, made more than 5,000 prototypes of the vacuum cleaner he dreamed of building before he finally got it right.

Indeed, machines often have a tendency to turn into Sirens who break inventors’ hearts. The reason for this is that physical materials need to do complex things very accurately and reliably if the invention is going to work.

Most of the technical problems Charles faced throughout his career stemmed from his decision to try to construct his computation machines from cogwheels. These were designed to function in the engines to represent numbers, which in modern computers would be embodied in microchip circuitry.

Charles did not give serious consideration to using any other technology for his machines than cogwheels. Electrical science was nowhere near sophisticated enough in his time to make an electrical Difference Engine or Analytical Engine even remotely feasible. Cogwheels, on the other hand, had an excellent tried-and-tested pedigree within a meticulous, highly commercial, practical science that spanned the globe: the manufacture of clocks and watches. Cogwheels allowed a weight to fall in regular, measured increments and so brought the passage of time – which, until the invention of the cogwheel in the Middle Ages, had been only tracked by sundials and clumsy estimates – under the precise dominion of human awareness and observation.

Charles wanted to extend that same precision to arithmetical and mathematical calculation. With the help of the engineers he employed, he was able to produce the cogwheels he needed for the required accuracy – indeed, there is evidence that his level of accuracy was actually in excess of what was required to make the machines work.

But Charles needed to do more than just produce a handful of cogwheels. The Difference Engine, if it were to be completed, required about 20,000 essentially identical cogwheels at a time when the only way of making them was by hand; this was simply too big an undertaking even for someone as ambitious and wealthy as Charles. The Analytical Engine would need even more. As Doron Swade explains in his book The Cogwheel Brain (2000): ‘The lesson from Babbage’s unhappy fate was that unless he could produce the hundreds of near-identical parts in an incredibly short time and at low cost, the world at large – and bank managers in particular – would lose patience.’

The point is that brilliant ideas are dreams, and dreams need to be made to come true with the investment of time, expertise and hard cash. In imagination things may work perfectly, but making an invention work in reality can be a much more difficult matter.

While heartbreak is the swansong of many an inventor, Charles at least had the defence against the Sirens that he lived very much inside his own mind and to some extent in his own world as well, which could make reality less painful for him. In January 1832, for example, the geologist Charles Lyell travelled to Hendon, today a northern suburb of London but at that time a village separate from the capital, and visited his friends Dr William Fitton and William Conybeare, who were also both geologists. Charles was there as well. As Lyell recalled:

We have had great fun in laughing at Babbage, who unconsciously jokes and reasons in high mathematics, talks of the ‘algebraic equation’ of such a one’s character in regard to the truth of his stories etc. I remarked that the paint of Fitton’s house would not stand, on which Babbage said, ‘no: painting a house outside is calculating by the index minus one,’ or some such phrase, which made us stare; so that he said gravely by way of explanation, ‘That is to say, I am assuming revenue to be a function.’ All this without pedantry, and he bears well being well quizzed by it.

Lyell found his evening in this stimulating company delightful:

Fitton’s carriage brought us from Highwood House to within a mile of Hampstead, and then Babbage and I got out and preferred walking. Although enjoyable, yet staying up till half-past one with three such men, and the continual pelting of new ideas, was anything but a day of rest.

It was in the summer of 1821 that Charles is definitely known to have started working on automatic calculating machines, though it is possible he might have thought of them before then. In Passages he states:

The earliest idea that I can trace in my own mind of calculating arithmetical tables by machinery arose in this manner:

One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room and seeing me half asleep, called out, ‘Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?’ to which I replied, ‘I’m thinking that all these tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery.’

However, Charles adds immediately after this: ‘I am indebted to my friend, the Rev. Doctor Robinson, the Master of the Temple, for this anecdote. The event must have happened either in 1812 or 1813.’

If Charles did mention to a fellow student his plans for using machinery to calculate mathematical tables back in the days when he was at Cambridge University, it seems unlikely that he – a man with a prodigious memory – would not have remembered this himself. This particular anecdote therefore is probably apocryphal, although the fact that Charles put it in his autobiography shows how significant in his intellectual development he saw his notion of mechanising calculations.

Robert Pirsig, in his autobiographical philosophical memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), characterises two kinds of attitudes towards technology. Pirsig depicts himself as interested in the details of maintenance in order that his machine will have the best chance of delivering excellent performance during the trip: the ‘Classical’ approach to technology. His friend John Sutherland, conversely, is shown as having little or no interest in the details of motorcycle maintenance. He basically just hopes for the best and that his own motorcycle won’t break down. Pirsig calls this the ‘Romantic’ approach, suggesting that most people tend to fall into one category or the other when it comes to technology.

Employing this terminology, Charles could be said to have held the ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ attitudes simultaneously. We might say that he was both a Classical and Romantic inventor, capable of being a superb engineer while simultaneously maintaining an idealistic and passionate attitude towards his inventions and remaining deeply excited about the benefits they might bring to humanity, even while behaving much of the time in ways that were fundamentally inimical to any chance of that happening. This, essentially, was the nature of the tragedy of his life.

In time to come, Ada understood this fundamentally self-destructive aspect of his personality, and did all she could to help him overcome it. With what effect, we shall see.

1

BRITAIN TRANSFORMED

‘I can think of nothing else but this machine.’

James Watt, in a letter to Dr James Lind, 29 April 1765, writing about the steam engine

The Britain into which Charles was born on 26 December 1791 was the richest country in the world by aggregate wealth, but a land in which the distribution of wealth was fantastically unequal.

The economist Joseph Massey estimated in the late 1750s that the bottom 40 per cent of the British population, wealth-wise, had to live on 14 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Massey also produced an estimate of Britain’s social structure for 1759, which is still regarded as accurate by modern historians.

According to Massey, only about 310 families in Britain had an annual income in 1759 of more than £5,000; this made them peers and grand landowners. The next category comprised about 1,000 families with an annual income of more than £1,000; these were also gentry, though not quite as elevated as the first category. Next came wealthy merchants and squires; there were about 3,400 families fitting into this category, and they had an annual income of £600 or above. It is important to bear in mind that in those days when industrialisation, while burgeoning, had not been burgeoning for long, most of the wealth of the nation still came from farming. If you owned substantial land, you were rich; if you didn’t, by and large you weren’t.

Next along came small landowners, clergy, traders and professionals who had an annual income of about £100 or more. There were about 105,000 of these families. Then there were about 160,000 families whose annual income was between £50 and £100. These were small traders, lesser clergy and moderately prosperous farmers.

The rest of the population, about 1.1 million families, had an income of below £50 a year and were impoverished and often also malnourished, though this was a time before the discovery of vitamins or any other elements of nutrition, so people tended to measure nourishment according to how full their bellies were. The overall population of Britain was about 6 million in 1750 and had risen to about 8 million by 1790.

It was a Britain hard to imagine today. Until the 1730s, only six decades before Charles was born, there had still been laws in force condemning witches to be burnt at the stake. The first half of the eighteenth century also saw the beginning of what is now known as the Industrial Revolution. The term – believed to have been coined by a Frenchman, the diplomat Louis-Guillaume Otto, who on 6 July 1799 had written to a friend to say that ‘une revolution industrielle’ had started in France – has come to be used to describe the enormous acceleration in the application of steam technology and mass manufacture throughout British industry.

The Industrial Revolution was well entrenched by the time Charles was born. In 1718, businessmen John and Thomas Lombe had set up a silk mill in Derby, five storeys high and powered by water from the River Derwent. The Lombe manufactory employed about 300 people and is regarded as one of the world’s first factories.

The factories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have generally acquired a bad press today, having come to be regarded and thought of by many as ugly, cramped, noisy places of excessively strict rules. Cramped and noisy they often were, but when they were first built they weren’t as bad as they became. They were once new, after all. It’s true that the rules prevailing in them were draconian – for example, in some factories workers were routinely fined more than a day’s pay for being even slightly late, and were sometimes fined the following day’s pay too. Yet we need to bear in mind that, at the time, for many people who went to work in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, the alternative was solitary toil, such as at handlooms up muddy country lanes in damp, miserable cottages for unpredictable and starvation pay. For such people, going to work in a factory at least offered the advantages of regular wages, reasonable working conditions and new social possibilities.

George Eliot, in her inspired novel Silas Marner (1861), tells the story of a solitary weaver of linen who lives in a little cottage and grows half-demented (and extremely miserly) from loneliness until he accidentally becomes the guardian of a little girl on whom he dotes, and who eventually comes to regard him as her father. Mary Essinger, somewhat more recently, worked in clothing factories in the British Midlands city of Leicester in the 1950s and writes, in her memoir Mary, Quite Contrary (2016), about the difference between how factories are often perceived today and what it was like to work in them back then:

The Leicester knitwear industry has all but vanished and I thought of the generations of skilled workers making dresses, jumpers, underwear and socks … Factory workers were considered ‘common’. It made me think of all the beautiful girls who worked alongside me in the factory and the fun we had. And none of them were common.

Factories were not dark, satanic mills, sewing needs daylight and factories had lots of windows. Leicester’s vibrant and creative industry once helped to clothe the world with high-quality knitted outerwear and underwear.

While factory regulations of the early Industrial Revolution do often seem draconian and indeed outrageous to modern sensibilities, the rules were thought necessary at the time to try to create reliable factory workers out of people who had never worked in those places before. Not that this excuses what the regulations were like. In due course, government legislation curtailed much of the excessive strictness inflicted on factory workers – who were usually referred to as ‘hands’, as if that were the only part of their anatomy that really mattered.

Even though most people in eighteenth-century Britain lived in savage poverty, many families were growing more prosperous. Sometimes insights into what a particular period was really like are gleaned from, on the face of it, relatively trivial statistical information that suggests a significant new pattern of behaviour. To take one example, the sale of wallpaper in Britain rose from 197,000 yards in 1713 to more than 2 million yards in 1785, a more than tenfold increase in a little over seventy years.

Inevitably, as the infrastructure slowly became better, this had a beneficial effect on the poor as well as the wealthy. It is, after all, a common-sense fact that if (say) wealthy people install streetlights on a road, then the impoverished can benefit from those lights as well as the rich who installed them. This helps to explain why improvements in infrastructure tend to benefit the whole community, not only the instigators. Moreover, infrastructure improvements, by speeding up social and economic processes and making the process itself more efficient, tend to increase economic prosperity anyway.

The Britain into which Charles was born was going through a revolution in physical communications as well as of industry. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, long-distance travel in Britain was rare. Roads were sometimes little more than dirt tracks, often with deep ruts that would have broken the wheel of a horse-drawn carriage. Often the only reliable way of travelling was on foot. In July 1618, the English playwright Ben Jonson wanted to go to Scotland from London; he did so by the simple but laborious expedient of walking there. It took him two weeks.

In the early eighteenth century the idea of travelling a long distance for pleasure was still generally a contradiction in terms. For example, the fastest journey between London and Cambridge, a distance of about 60 miles, took a long day in a horse-drawn coach that would travel at an average of 5 miles an hour, with the horses usually being changed at every coaching inn for fresh, watered ones. Travelling the 160 miles from London to Shrewsbury by horse-drawn coach could take more than three days. The journey to Edinburgh by coach still took around ten days, not much shorter than Jonson’s walk. Some travellers even made their wills before starting on a journey; this wasn’t at all an irrational thing to do, as coaches often overturned on bad roads, or encountered swollen rivers, often with fatal consequences.

But by the middle of the eighteenth century, things were getting better. Roads were being improved. Privately financed turnpike roads had spread from London and around the capital to major English cities including Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and Birmingham. In the 1770s, these private turnpike roads spread further into Wales and Scotland.

Yet people still braved the old Roman roads and bridle paths, which were often the only routes available in many parts of the country. Some journeys were remarkably ambitious. For example, every year, tens of thousands of cattle from the Scottish Highlands were driven southwards until they reached the Smithfield meat market in London. More and more demand for manufactured goods fostered the spread of inland trade, as did increasing industrial specialisation in British regions.

Altogether, the Industrial Revolution created opportunities for wealth and technological advancement and personal enrichment that were close to unimaginable until it got under way. In May 1733, a singularly ingenious inventor, John Kay, had been granted a patent for his ‘flying shuttle’. This did not literally fly – instead the shuttle was shot very rapidly through a loom along wheels in a track by a weaver, who pulled a cord to operate it. Kay’s invention speeded up the weaving process enormously, and increased yarn consumption so much that the flying shuttle spurred the invention of new machines that would spin yarn from cleaned and combed wool more rapidly than ever before.

The next most significant invention in the fabric-processing industry was the invention by James Hargreaves in 1764 of the ‘spinning jenny’, named after his daughter. The jenny was the first major breakthrough in textile machinery that comprehensively met the challenge set by John Kay. It greatly increased the rate at which yarn could be spun, though the thread produced by Hargreaves’ machine was coarse and lacked strength, making it suitable only for use as weft: that is, the threads woven at right angles across a warp when making fabric.

In 1771, Richard Arkwright, a former barber who had become interested in textiles while carrying on a sideline as a wig maker, patented his ‘water frame’, a water-powered spinning frame that produced a yarn of a superior quality to that yielded by the spinning jenny. Arkwright built a five-storey mill at Cromford, Derbyshire, in the English Midlands. The mill operated round the clock in two twelve-hour shifts, one starting at 6 a.m. and the other at 6 p.m. Arkwright needed 200 workers for his factory, which was far more than the locality of Cromford could provide, so he built housing for his workers nearby, being one of the first employers ever to do so.

Most of Arkwright’s workers were women and children, the youngest being only 7 years old. Later, the minimum age of child workers was raised to 10 – even at the time, many people were uneasy about children working in factories and Arkwright arranged for his employees’ children to be given six hours of education per week. He did this, however, not so much for idealistic humanitarian reasons but so that the children could do the factory’s record-keeping that their largely illiterate parents could not. Arkwright’s factory was the first to be ruled by the clock rather than by daylight hours, and it eventually used hundreds of water frames. His Cromford mill grew to employ about 1,000 people, and later in life he became known as the ‘father of the modern industrial factory system’. Other mills using Arkwright’s machines and employment principles were built under licence, including one at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. When Arkwright died in 1792, he was the richest non-aristocratic person in Britain.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton’s ‘spinning mule’ or ‘mule jenny’ had combined the main benefit of the water frame (the quality of its yarn) with the speed of the spinning jenny. The name Crompton chose for his machine exploited the pun that the name for a female donkey – mules are horse/donkey hybrids – is a ‘jenny’, though in fact a mule has a male donkey for a father and a female horse for a mother. Since around 1790, most of the yarn-spinning machines in Britain had been Crompton’s mules. Meanwhile, Edward Cartwright had in 1784 invented the first steam-powered loom. By 1833, almost all the garments produced in Britain were woven on powered looms.

Steam power – the first practical way of producing motive force from heat – was rightly seen as the practical and mystical catalyst of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power was the wonder of the age, offering the ability to get work completed more quickly and much more reliably than the old energy sources: people, horses and running water.

In the steam engine, iron, coal, water and fire were used to create a noisy, smoky and smelly machine that at first produced up and down motion, but then was ingeniously adapted so that it could also produce rotary movement. Heat produced steam that pushed against pistons to produce reliable power even if there was no source of running water nearby, or if it had dried up.

The man who had made steam the supreme force of the British Industrial Revolution was a Scottish instrument maker and inventor named James Watt. Watt didn’t, in fact, invent the first steam engine – that had been achieved by Thomas Savery, who patented an inefficient steam pump in 1698. But Watt’s engines were much better than Savery’s, and better even than the steam engines of an inventor called Thomas Newcomen, which were themselves a significant improvement on Savery’s.

Watt’s successes at making the Newcomen steam engine more efficient came to the attention of Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham-based industrialist who manufactured decorative items and who engaged Watt to build him a steam engine. Boulton grasped that steam engine manufacture itself could be a highly successful commercial venture, and in 1775 Watt and Boulton went into business together. Their collaboration made Watt rich and Boulton even richer. By 1800, their factory in Birmingham had produced more than 500 steam engines. Boulton liked to bustle influential guests around his factory, boasting that he sold ‘what every man desires: POWER’.

Charles Babbage, as he grew up in the nineteenth century, had an ingenuous – and, on occasion, even naive – fascination with machinery and its reliability, and how it seemed to him to offer human beings a level of control over their environment, and over processes, which was unprecedented. Charles was not so much fascinated by machinery as obsessed with it.

The British postal service was also greatly improved in this period, although it remained far from adequate, mainly because recipients of letters had to pay for them and the postage was expensive; often recipients didn’t want to pay.

London’s first daily newspaper appeared in 1702. By 1760 there were four daily newspapers in London and six evening papers, published three times a week, which circulated in the capital. The provinces were still relatively autonomous culturally and generated their own newspapers, their own books, dictionaries, magazines, printed advertisements and primers.

In 1695, Parliament had passed legislation allowing printing presses to be established outside London; between 1700 and 1750, printing presses were founded in fifty-seven English provincial towns. In 1755, Dr Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary, while too expensive for anyone who wasn’t rich, nonetheless set down for the first time a reliable spelling standard which, while it has been superseded since then in the cases of some individual words, is generally still the standard.

As the eighteenth century came to a close, despite the poverty and want that afflicted far too many people and shortened their lives, the new century, the nineteenth, seemed full of potential. And indeed it proved to be so. Inventions devised in the nineteenth century include international telecommunications (the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1865), the telephone, the typewriter, the camera and, thanks to Charles Babbage, the computer. In a very real sense, we are all to some extent, at least in a technological sense, children of the 1800s.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, London was the largest city in the world, with more than 650,000 citizens. For sheer size, the capital easily dwarfed other British towns. In 1750, its nearest rival in terms of population, Norwich, had been recorded as having fewer than 50,000 people. Even so, the provincial towns, while nowhere near as big as London itself in terms of population, were also growing in size and importance. In 1700, only ten of Britain’s provincial cities contained more than 10,000 people, but by 1750 there were seventeen towns with populations of that size, and by 1800 more than fifty.

As London and the provincial towns and cities grew, they became better organised, better run, and more pleasant to live in.

No other capital in the world was remotely as populous. The UK census started in 1801 and that year the population of London was recorded as 864,845, so we can reasonably assume that in 1791 - the year Charles Babbage was born - the population of London was about 750,000, an enormous number of people by the standards of the world of the late eighteenth century. It was not only the location of the courts and of parliament, but also Britain’s chief port, its financial centre, and the hub of its printing industry and of its communications network.

In London, Britain’s rulers were brought into contact – perhaps not always necessarily willingly – with powerful economic lobbies from all parts of Britain and with a large, constantly fluctuating portion of their subjects. It has been estimated that, in the eighteenth century, about one in six Britons spent part of their working life in London.

And so it was into this world – one of power and machinery, of riches and poverty, of iron, steam engines, enterprise and fortune seeking – that Charles was born, a little over eight years before the end of the eighteenth century. When he came into the world, Ada’s father-to-be Lord Byron, himself born on 22 January 1788, was 3 years old. At that tender age, the future lord, who had a slightly deformed foot (there is no conclusive evidence which foot it was), is recorded by his mother as having reprimanded a lady neighbour who said it was a pity that such a ‘handsome little lad should be born lame’ with the words ‘dinna ye speak of it!’ in the Scots dialect his mother had taught him, and little Byron even struck out at the neighbour with his toy whip. The Byrons had always had a distinct tendency towards self-assertion.

2

BOYHOOD

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth (26 March 1802)

In Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Charles remarks on the supposed origins of his surname. He observes that some have believed ‘Babbage’ to have been ‘derived from the cry of sheep … Others have supposed it is derived from the name of a place called Bab or Babb, as we have in the west of England Bab Tor, Babbacombe, et cetera.’ Charles, though, maintains that he doesn’t believe these rumours. He continues:

The name of Babbage is not uncommon in the west of England. One day during my boyhood [in fact, he seems to have been about 14 or 15 when this happened] I observed it over a small grocer’s door, whilst riding through the town of Chudley. I dismounted, went into the shop, purchased some figs, and found a very old man of whom I made enquiry of his family. He had not a good memory himself, but his wife told me that his name was Babb when she married him and it was only during the last twenty years he adopted the name of Babbage, which, the old man thought, sounded better. Of course, I told his wife that I entirely agreed with her husband and thought him a very sensible fellow.

Charles’ father Benjamin was born in 1753 and was by profession a goldsmith and banker. These two occupations were closely allied in those days; it was sensible and practical for people to keep their valuables in the safes run by goldsmiths, where the valuables would obviously be much more secure than if kept at home and could be used as collateral for loans from the same goldsmith. Whether Benjamin Babbage actually worked as a practising goldsmith is not known for certain. In the goldsmith-turned-banker we have two of his son Charles’ great interests combined: precision manufacture and a quantitative approach to economic and social problems.

Charles, born in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, grew up at a time when the reduction of considerations to quantitative terms was not only an imperative for many professions but was increasingly a cultural imperative too. In 1854, Charles Dickens, in his novel Hard Times, parodied the Industrial Revolution mindset of focusing on hard facts that had by the middle of the nineteenth century made Britain the wealthiest country in the world per capita:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasised his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.

Yet, powerful as the parody undoubtedly is – and Hard Times