The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 10

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Ada wanted her work to be regarded as a serious scientific paper and not merely a public advocacy piece, so at the outset of her “Notes” she stated that she would “offer no opinion” on the government’s reluctance to continue funding Babbage’s endeavors. This did not please Babbage, who proceeded to write a screed attacking the government. He wanted Ada to include it in her “Notes,” without his name on it, as if it were her opinion. She refused. She did not want her work compromised.

Without informing her, Babbage sent his proposed appendage directly to Scientific Memoirs. The editors decided that it should appear separately and suggested that he “manfully” sign his name. Babbage was charming when he wished, but he could also be cranky, stubborn, and defiant, like most innovators. The proposed solution infuriated him, and he wrote Ada asking that she withdraw her work. Now it was her turn to become irate. Using a form of address typically used by male friends, “My Dear Babbage,” she wrote that “withdrawing the translation and Notes” would “be dishonorable and unjustifiable.” She concluded the letter, “Be assured that I am your best friend; but that I never can or will support you in acting on principles which I conceive to be not only wrong in themselves, but suicidal.”⁴²

Babbage backed down and agreed to have his piece published separately in another periodical. That day Ada complained to her mother:

I have been harassed and pressed in a most perplexing manner by the conduct of Mr. Babbage. . . . I am sorry to come to the conclusion that he is one of the most impracticable, selfish, and intemperate persons one can have to do with. . . . I declared at once to Babbage that no power should induce me to lend myself to any of his quarrels or to become in any way his organ. . . . He was furious. I imperturbable and unmoved.⁴³

Ada’s response to the dispute was a bizarre sixteen-page letter to Babbage, poured forth in a frenzy, that vividly displayed her moodiness, exultations, delusions, and passions. She cajoled and berated him, praised and denigrated him. At one point she contrasted their motives. “My own uncompromising principle is to endeavour to love truth and God before fame and glory,” she claimed. “Yours is to love truth and God; but to love fame, glory, honours yet more.” She proclaimed that she saw her own inevitable fame as being of an exalted nature: “I wish to add my might toward expounding and interpreting the Almighty and his laws. . . . I should feel it no small glory if I were able to be one of his most noted prophets.”⁴⁴

Having laid that groundwork, she offered him a deal: they should forge a business and political partnership. She would apply her connections and persuasive pen to his endeavor to build his Analytical Engine if—and only if—he would let her have control over his business decisions. “I give you the first choice and offer of my services and my intellect,” she wrote. “Do not lightly reject them.” The letter read in parts like a venture capital term sheet or a prenuptial agreement, complete with the possibility of arbitrators. “You will undertake to abide wholly by the judgment of myself (or of any persons whom you may now please to name as referees, whenever we may differ) on all practical matters,” she declared. In return, she promised, she would “lay before you in the course of a year or two explicit and honorable propositions for executing your engine.”⁴⁵

The letter would seem surprising were it not like so many others that she wrote. It was an example of how her grandiose ambitions sometimes got the best of her. Nevertheless, she deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical feats that most of us never would or could attempt. (Bernoulli numbers alone would defeat many of us.) Her impressive mathematical labors and imaginative insights came in the midst of the drama of Medora Leigh and bouts of illness that would cause her to become dependent on opiates that amplified her mood swings. She explained at the end of her letter to Babbage, “My dear friend, if you knew what sad and direful experiences I have had, in ways of which you cannot be aware, you would feel that some weight is due to my feelings.” Then, after a quick detour to raise a small point about using the calculus of finite differences to compute Bernoulli numbers, she apologized that “this letter is sadly blotted” and plaintively asked, “I wonder if you will choose to retain the lady-fairy in your service or not.”⁴⁶

Ada was convinced that Babbage would accept her offer to become entrepreneurial partners. “He has so strong an idea of the advantage of having my pen as his servant that he will probably yield; though I demand very strong concessions,” she wrote her mother. “If he does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot water and to bring his engine to consummation.”⁴⁷ Babbage, however, thought it wiser to decline. He went to see Ada and “refused all the conditions.”⁴⁸ Although they never again collaborated on science, their relationship survived. “Babbage and I are I think more friends than ever,” she wrote her mother the next week.⁴⁹ And Babbage agreed the next month to pay a visit to her country home, sending her a fond letter referring to her as “the Enchantress of Numbers” and “my dear and much admired Interpreter.”

That month, September 1843, her translation and “Notes” finally appeared in Scientific Memoirs. For a while she was able to bask in acclaim from friends and to hope that, like her mentor Mary Somerville, she would be taken seriously in scientific and literary circles. Publication made her finally feel like “a completely professional person,” she wrote to a lawyer. “I really have become as much tied to a profession as you are.”⁵⁰

It was not to be. Babbage got no more funding for his machines; they were never built, and he died in poverty. As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper. Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates. She had an affair with a gambling partner who then blackmailed her, forcing her to pawn her family jewels. During the final year of her life, she fought an exceedingly painful battle with uterine cancer accompanied by constant hemorrhaging. When she died in 1852, at age thirty-six, she was buried, in accordance with one of her last requests, in a country grave next to the poet father she never knew, who had died at the same age.

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.

Over the years, Ada Lovelace has been celebrated as a feminist icon and a computer pioneer. For example, the U.S. Defense Department named its high-level object-oriented programming language Ada. However, she has also been ridiculed as delusional, flighty, and only a minor contributor to the “Notes” that bear her initials. As she herself wrote in those “Notes,” referring to the Analytical Engine but in words that also describe her fluctuating reputation, “In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case.”

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