In Our Time - Ada Lovelace

Episode Date: March 6, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, but they are controlled by a programming language called Ada. It’s named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine called the Difference Engine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be. As such the Difference Engine is the spiritual ancestor of the modern computer.Ada Lovelace has been called many things - the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age – but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an ‘enchantress of numbers’.With Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, their most powerful army on the planet,

and they are in turn controlled by a programming language called Ada. It's named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard-drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, she became the Countess of Lovelace. In her work with Charles Babbage on steam-driven calculating machines, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else,

what a computer might truly be. Ada Lovelace has been called many things, the first computer programmer and a profit of the computer age, but most poetically, perhaps, by Babbage himself as an enchantress of numbers. With me to discuss Ada Lovelace and her work at Doran Swade,

visiting professor in the history of computing at Portsmouth University John Fuji visiting professor in biography at Kingston University and Patricia Farah senior tutor at Claire Corridge, Cambridge. Patricia Farrah, Ada Lovellessie was born in 1815 to two exceptional parents, Lord Byron and the aristocrat Anne Isabel Milbank. Can you explain the circumstances of her birth and a bit about her early life? Well, her parents were only married for a very brief time and only a couple of weeks after Ada Lovelace was born, Baron disappeared

and I think Annabel Milbank acted very, very courageously because she took custody of the child and that was a very unusual thing for a woman to do in those days. And she looked after, Barron went abroad and died a few years later. I never came back to this country and never saw his daughter. He never saw his daughter, although he did refer to her in one of his poems. He mentioned her blue eyes that he would never see again. And one of, Annabel Milbank was a very, very courageous woman. She was also a very domineering woman, a very intelligent woman, and she was

very interested in mathematics herself. And she was determined to prevent her daughter following in the same footpaths as her father had done, as Baron had done. And she brought Ada Lovelace up incredibly strictly and hired a succession of tutors to teach her mathematics and geography and subjects like that. And Ada Lovelace led a very, very disciplined childhood where she was forced to work and there's still survive quite a lot of messages to her mother saying, I'm sorry, I didn't work hard enough yesterday and I'm really, really going to try hard to do my best tomorrow. And she suffered quite a lot of illnesses as a child and as an adult. She had a period of intense headaches when she was quite a little girl. She was completely paralyzed.

paralyzed for about three years and then managed to get back the use of her limbs and started walking and horse riding normally. She came from a rich aristocratic family. Her mother did, yes. So Ada met some of the most elite of London social circles, also some of the high-flying intellectual people. We're going a bit ahead of ourselves, of that, Patricia. So how was her, why was her mother so, driven and how did her mother get educated? Are we talking about a time when women couldn't go to university? We talked about a time when it was thought that it would impair women's

health if they studied mathematics or such as it was too vigorous intellectual exercise for their well-being. So just a few sentences about her, first of all. She's not unique in having a mathematical education. I mean her mother did have a good mathematical education, but several other women did, provided that you had the interest and the ability, provided most importantly that you had enough money and parents who were willing to invest the money in teaching you, there were women who became very, very able in mathematics. There's the French woman, for example, Emily de Chatelle,

but also a woman who became Ada Lovelace's mentor, a woman called Mary Somerville, who was a very, very proficient mathematician. So there were a few isolated women around who could learn mathematics, but there had to be a special combination of circumstances, and money was definitely one of the things you needed as well as ability. Can you just, you've talked about the private tutorials, really, the private teaching that her mother gave to her to love this.

Can you just detail it a little more? She would call in tutors they would come to the house, I presume, and... When she was a child, she employed a succession of tutors for her daughter. One of them was apparently fired for giving her too much geography, too many geography lessons and not enough lessons in mathematics. When she got a bit older, because the family did have a lot of very prestigious friends, Ada had sort of private tuition quite often by correspondence with some very distinguished mathematicians like William Friend and Augustus de Morgan.

But I don't think that was so much on a paid tutorial basis. It was more because they were friends of the family and also, I think, something which governed her whole life. She was the daughter of Barron. She was a sort of rich aristocratic young woman and so naturally people obliged her mother and obliged her and did try to teach her mathematics. Doran Swade, I think it's fair to say that intellectually speaking, the most significant relationship in Ada Lovelace's life

would be with the mathematician Charles Babbage. And in 1821, when Ada was only six, he struck upon the idea for the difference engine. Can you tell us a little about Babbage and what the difference engine is? Well, Charles Babbage was an English mathematician born 1791, a colourful, controversial figure in early Victorian science. He's best known to us for inventing computers and for failing to build them, and he's almost equally famous for both on both charges. The Genesis episode was in 1821 when he and his friend John Herschel, the astronomer, met to check a new set of astronomical tables. In those days, computers were people, not machines,

and the way they generated tables was to get the same set of calculations to two separate computers who would, without collaboration, perform the same calculations. Two people, that are they? Two people. That generally women.

Yes, indeed. Yes. to looking for discrepancies. The idea is if there are no discrepancies, you have a high degree of confidence that these calculations are correct. And Babbage becomes increasingly agitated as the number of discrepancies is very high. And he has a work clasps his hand to his head and he says, I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. Steam being a metaphor for not only the infallibility of machinery, but the model of industrial production. The idea is you could make tables on demand as you needed

them as you know they were astronomers seeing new asteroids they thought they were planets they thought they were stars they needed new tables so this would both solve the problem of supply and solve the problem of human fallibility and he's devoted most of the rest of his life to the development of

automatic calculating and these were vast mechanical machines a quantum leap in logical conception and physical size these weight tons they were side of steam engines these things so The reason Babbage is known most to us as the first pioneer of computing, and his first undertaking, as it were, was to automate calculation.

As it were, he transferred intelligence from mind to machine. It was the first, if you like, the extension of the model of industrial production from things to thought, because up to that point in time, you could only calculate by thinking. So this had profound philosophical significance as well as technical significance. This is a programme about Ada Lovelace, obviously. But Babbage plays a huge part in her life. So can you just give the listeners some idea of Babbage, please, Doran?

Right. As a personality, he was given to extraordinary public outbursts. He was touchy, he was proud, proud of the point of self-destruction on matters of principle. He would tilted windmills always on the best possible grounds. He thought or behaved as though he thought being right entitled him to be rude. his diatribes of incontinent savagery against the scientific establishment, particularly the Royal Society, he impugns the personal probity of Sir Humphrey Davy, people who lent him great support in his pursuit of resources,

government resources to build his engines. He alienated almost everyone whose support he needed. So this is a volatile, excuse me, principled character, given to public outbursts, massively principled, touchy, proud, difficult character. but also hugely charming. He was a raconteur. His Swarys, his Saturdays,

where the social and intellectual literati of London gathered on Saturdays. If you wanted to know what was going on, in intellectual London, you went to Babbage's on Saturdays. So you have a very complex character, massively invented, ultimately embittered by the fact he failed to deliver any one of his vast machines and unable to present to his contemporaries, his great vision.

But he was also a polymath and an occasion professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a post which had been held by Newton. So we're talking about someone of great intellectual vigor and scope. Yes, he was a gentleman of science. His first love was mathematics. He's published about a dozen papers by the time he was 30, and massively polymatic interests, yes.

John Fuji, in 1833, he had one of the swarets, 300 people ran for a party on Saturday night that Doran referred to, and among the guests was Ada Lovelace, then 17. What triggered that first meeting? Had our mother taken her along to meet the great man? Well, we don't have all the details of this, but inasmuch as it did involve such a large number of people,

and you wanted to have sort of the movers and shakers of London society at that time. Mama, of course, had to come along because, you know, her daughter was 17, and you had to have a chaperone at that point. And what Babbage would do at these games, gatherings, and whether he did this in this particular occasion or a few days later is a little bit up in the air, he would demonstrate he'd done a sort of a prototype of the difference engine, which is at the Science Museum. One can scoot over there and see it. And he would run this machine. Well, the two of them, Annabella and her daughter Ada, reacted in an extraordinary

way to what they saw that evening. Lady Byron referred to it as a thinking machine, and she started to make sketches of it. And Ada, and I think this is amazing in terms of a 17-year-old, she sent around the next week to Babbage and said, well, I'd like to look at the blueprints of this machine. Now, how many are going to do this? And essentially for the next 10 years is in a way sort of preparatory work that she studies the blueprints for the stage one machine, the difference engine.

And of course, we need to elucidate then that there's this wonderful phase of new development where Babbage, to the dismay of the government, had come up with a wonderful different idea for something else that was going to happen, the analytical. engine, and of course he then didn't want to really build what he'd been given the money for. So Ada is present, Mary Somerville is present, and her mother, Annabella, is present, as the idea is kicked around of possibly doing this other quantum leap machine, the analytical engine. He'd been given very, very good funding, hadn't he? Doren was talking about him railing against the world compared with almost anybody in British scientific life over many, centuries, he was as well funded

as it's possible to think of, and the difference between. Then he moved on to the analytical machine. So, I just want to get this take-up, nail it really, because it is, you know, it is a moment in Ada Lovelace's life and her mother took her along.

And her mother, again, was making sketches and talking about it, this is a thinking. Can you, can you, in relation to Babbage, can you talk about Ada's mother? Did she see this as an opportunity? for her daughter, or did she, it was just extending her own intellectual interests? Well, I think it was both, and they became very seriously interested in what could be done with machines.

And so one of the things they do very shortly after this meeting with Babbage is they go on a tour of the Midlands, and they go to look at machines. Mother and daughter, off they go, you know, up to the north. And one of the machines that intrigues them, and I think we need to put this in the mix, is the Jacquard Loom. Because the Jacques-Arleum constitutes part of the DNA of this project, is that here was this person off in France who had programmed a loom to be able to do these enormously complex pictures. and I think it was something upward of 30,000 cards that were used to do his portrait. Well, they got interested in this.

Babbage was interested, knew about... Now, I've got to nail this. He's talking about cards, which he put in a loom, and so it replaced the handmaid, closely woven flowers on this cloth, and made it much more quickly in a much bigger corner of them. Yes, exactly. And the other thing...

So he automated a loom. This had been done, in some ways before, but I think what is a particular interest in terms of computer history is that it's essentially an on or off switch, the loom. It either raises or does not

raise the thread so that something is going to go through. And it is that central notion that is going to be of tremendous importance then for the subsequent development within the analytical engine. And so the fact that all parties concerned

know of the Jacquard loom, means that we cannot argue against the fact that it was an integral part of the process. And we have, as you were saying at the beginning, about Ada being driven by her mother. Do you see this is continuing in this period? Well, a great deal is made of this, but in many ways, Lady Byron is very interesting as an educational figure. She has gone to the trouble of going to Switzerland and studying with people, Pestalozzi to study the Pestalozzi methods of education. And she's returned, and so there is a

certain discipline factor involved in this, but she doesn't only apply it to her daughter, by the way. She establishes a whole series of schools, because this is a person who is very seriously interested in social amelioration. And so she makes quite substantial contributions to various social movements. Thank you, slavery and so. Yes, and to the establishment of the university in London, she's very interested in this. She's part of that lovely, huge group portrait at National Portrait Gallery.

She's right there with Wilberforce. So she's a very energetic person to be around, is Annabella. So Annabella and Ada Doran Sweden, and then he's moved on after the difference machine to the analytical engine, which is in a sense is pivotal to the reputation of eight levels.

Can you give listeners an idea of what he was attempting with the analytical engine? The difference engine is what we would now call a calculator. It just crunches numbers the only way it knows how. Whatever numbers you put in, you turn the handle and it does the same thing to them. It performs repeated addition. That's all it does.

It actually evaluates and tabulates complex mathematical functions called polynomials. That's what the difference engine does. We would now call it a calculator. The huge leap from the difference engine to the analytical engine is the leap from something specific that has a fixed set of functions to something that is general purpose. The point about the analytical engine is it is a general purpose computational engine

and embodies completely startlingly almost every single significant logical feature of the modern digital computer. So this is a general purpose computational device. Extraordinary, really? Completely extraordinary. It embodied, there are very few, if any, logical features of the modern computer. They're not explicitly embodied in the detail of the design. So this isn't the backward projecting.

These aren't suggestions. This isn't the backwards projection from our own age. This isn't the coded vagueness of Nostradamus. There are thousands of technical drawings which explicitly embody these concepts in mechanism. So the analytical engine is the first general purpose automatic computational machine. And the fundamental distinction between the difference engine, and the analytical engine is one. The analytical engine was programmable, his general purpose.

It had a repertoire of internal functions, which were completely automatic, so it could automatically execute multiplication, divisions, protection and division. Its internal architecture is mirrored in what came later. So this is, Babbage was led from mechanising arithmetic to fully fledged digital computation, and that's the significance of the analytical engine.

Patricia Farah, in this, there was a 10-year period after that first meeting with Babbage and she gets married, she has three children, we have to put that to one side. As she did. She was not very keen on her children. She did, yes. Well, there you go. And she was, in this next ten years, she was sort of educating herself through Babbage

and with correspondence with various other mathematicians, as I understand it. Can you give me more information on that? Well, there seemed to be conflicting views about this. She certainly was doing a lot of correspondence courses in mathematics. she had friends like William Friend, Augustus de Morgan and Mary Somerville, people like that, and Babbage himself, who were helping her learn mathematics. If you look through the manuscripts that her left,

there seems to be quite a lot of evidence that what she was not very good at is this a routine algebraic manipulation of figures and equations and understanding geometry. On the other hand, her great skill did lie in having a sort of visionary view of what mathematics could achieve. and I think that's why she did become so involved in describing the analytical engine because she understood the sort of concepts and really appreciated the possibilities of the potential in this machine. But I don't think, at the same time, I don't think she was a sort of proficient day-to-day mathematician

in the sense of being able to juggle equations and solve geometrical problems. John Fuji, can you explain how Ada Lovelace came to write the set of notes, which defines her reputation, which we'll talk about in a few moments, how she came to write them. She writes her a machine that didn't exist, and it's based on a lecture given in Italy, which is then taken down by an Italian

who, Italian scientist then becomes Prime Minister of Italy. It's published in French, yeah? And she, who is absolutely, totally, Aida Lovers, totally fluent in French, translates it, and as I understand it, Babbage says, why don't you put a few notes to this as well? and overdo you. Fine.

The thing about, maybe if we give a little bit of background about how this Babbage is getting infuriated. Well, he got infuriated almost everywhere. He went, but he's infuriated

in England, so he decides, well, maybe this is going to work better abroad. And indeed, he might be able to put some pressure on. If the Italians were interested or if Humboldt was interested in Berlin, then

maybe the British government would wise up and would say, okay, look, they're going to do it, and we'll be left at the post, so we better get cracking. So he goes off to Turin, and he delivers his presentation, and takes a set of drawings with him. And interestingly, the more prominent Italian mathematicians decline the opportunity to write up what they think of this. At that point, Menebraea, the future Prime Minister of Italy, is a rather obscure figure, but he says he will do it. So he writes it up and he publishes it in a Swiss journal in French. And this is the precise time that Babbage is having his meeting,

which Doran has described, I think, wonderfully in Cogwell-Brain, of this irascible Babbage goes to me, Peel. Prime Minister. You're the Prime Minister. the Prime Minister has prepared himself by getting a presentation done ahead of time, where he says he's essentially looking for evidence to say that this is worthless, and then he can throw Babbage out on his ear. So Lovelace feels that Babbage's work is so important that there should be something done,

and one shouldn't just leave it at that, with the government having made a horrible mistake. So she does the translation, and the person she's working with is another, interesting figure of this team, I think, and that's Wheatstone. That Wheatstone is very much involved with her in the idea of doing this project. And Wheatstone had also been working on a calculating machine that Babbage knew and that Babbage put down in his notebook in 1937, 1837, excuse me. And so here we have a situation where Ada says, okay, let's go for it and we'll publish it and we'll publish it in English so that people can really see it. And I'll have to correct Menebrae because Menebrae got a lot of things wrong. And so there she goes for the notes. So she goes these notes which

are three or four times as long as Babbage's original lecture, Doran Swade. Now, these are key to her reputation. So what is significant about the notes and was she seeing things that others had not seen in these notes, including Babbage himself? Yes. The notes, as you mentioned, three times longer than the original Menabria article. And the significance of the notes is, firstly, it's the most comprehensive and insightful account of the thinking of that time about computers, i.e. Babbage himself disdained to publish much. He was quite disaffected by his lack of recognition, the fact that government was drawn for the project, which he thought was a great betrayal of the original commitment. And I'm fascinated by this, but just so that there... Yes.

Babbage tried to force Ada to include a diatribe against the government. She refused and was backed by his friends and so he backed off, sorry to use back twice, and she gone with her notes, right? Yes.

It's a pretty, quite a serious stroke of independence on her part. Absolutely. Adela was quite defiant of Babbage. A good relationship evidenced in this flurry of exchanges in the months before the publication of the notes. The significance of the notes is it's the main conduit between that period and subsequent generations

about the significance of Babbage's work. It's the most comprehensive, detailed and insightful account of what was going on. Because, of course, they didn't have the machines. They didn't have machines. They didn't have machines. Anyway. These are virtual machines.

Yeah, virtual machines. Yeah. So it's a main conduit. The question is, is there something there that isn't Babbage's? Did she see something Babbage did not see? The answer unquestionably. is yes, and for all the other reasons that Lovelace has been

lionized, the one that does actually, that is defensible and does hold water, is the notion of hers, a, quote, profit of the computer age. She saw that these machines were not bound exclusively by numbers. There is very little evidence that Babbage saw

his engines outside the context of mathematics. And the essential transition that Lovelace made was the difference between number representing something other than quantity. So for Babbage, these machines were calculation. He had some glimmerings of ideas that these machines could be used for algebra, that is to say, to manipulate symbols to which there was a numerical value, independent of value. But these ideas are very, very hazy, and aren't explicit.

We have Ada, who's not just suggesting this, but she is thumping the table and saying, this is the fundamental significance of the analytical engine. And it's perfectly clear. Babbage pays her a tribute. She says, I wish I'd given this further attention to see the great potential of these things. Having read your notes, I now see that I might have done so. But it's Lovelace who sees the

essential distinction as we sift as it were through the history of competing to see where that essential transition from calculation to computation came. And the essential difference is that if you have a machine to millibiate numbers, and numbers can represent something other than quantity.

They can represent notes of music, letters of the alphabet. You then have a machine that has a grip on the world or representations of the world in ways they are independent of mathematics and arithmetic. So Lovelace is the one that essentially made the transition from arithmetic to symbolic manipulation. A machine that can manipulate symbols according to rules. And that is the essential difference and the essential beginning, if one likes, of the concept of a computer. Patricia Farah, some people say the notes contain what can be thought of as the first computer program recipe for making the analytical engine

produced something called Benui numbers. Can you explain that and why that's important? There's some dispute about whether she actually wrote that bit of it or whether Babbage did. The Bernoui numbers, I won't explain in detail, but basically they relate to the idea of a series.

So a series is something like a half plus a quarter, plus an eighth, plus a 16th. And what she did, or they did together, was write a program to calculate a more complicated version of that sort of series. I think what she did in the notes, including that, is very important. On the other hand, I do think it's also essential to recognize that all her visionary ideas

weren't actually put into practice. So now that looking back 100, 150 years later, we can see that she conceptually grasped the difference between a calculator and what we now call a computer. in a sense she and Babbage didn't really have any influence on the course of computing for the next 100 years. So in a sense, although it was a marvellous dream, I'm not sure it was a hugely influential one. And if you're American, you tell a whole different story

of the history of computing, which goes to Herman Hollerith and the census at the end of the 19th century, and is not necessarily traced back to Babbage. I'll come back to you, Doran in a moment, because we're talking about the influence, So there's some disagreement here. We'll do that in just a moment.

I just want to bring John in to begin this phase of the discussion actually then. But I'll kick off with you, John, because you've studied the correspondence between them very closely. And there is a thought that to go on a bit further from Patricia, further than she has said, is that Ada Lovelace was not as important as Doran has said. Let's put it that way to ease of conversation. and in the development of Babbage's thinking and she was a help but not much more than that. What do you think?

Well, I think what I think is of course a terribly important thing but what the fact say might be an even more important thing and that is that they're all right around here, right around London so one can very easily check this out whether what John says about this

actually checks out. There are three repositories. One is the obvious one is the British Library where you have her letters to Babbage because that's where he placed his things at the end. Then his letters to her end up in the Byron Lovelace archive which is at the Bodhian. And then the family papers of the estate papers

end up at Woking in the county records there. So you've got three locations. At that time in history, you had five deliveries a day of the post and so the people would, you've got all of the correspondence going back and forth. What do you think, given the correspondence, I'm asking your opinion, given that you know

the fact, what do you think of her influence? Well, I think when she says Babbage, look, you've lost this last thing I sent you. I don't know where you've placed it. You know, did you leave it at the printers? Or what the hell did you do with it? You know, and I'm not having you mess with my language.

Don't think you can change my language. I'm not accepting this. And I think, coming back to our thing before, that he wanted to add the diatribe, she says, that's suicidal. You know, that's not going to work. So once you actually get the tone of those exchanges, those five exchanges a day between them, there can be no serious doubt whatsoever as to who is saying we need to move to a new

stage of things. You've done wonderful work, and I'm deeply appreciative of it. but there are several things need to happen. We need to stress the difference. This is Ada in the driving seat absolutely emphatically. We've got to move beyond difference engine discussion to analytical engine discussion. We've then got to move on once we get this published. We've got to then line up the financing.

And we've got to build a prototype. And we've got to do an advertising campaign because other people in this circle are Brunel and Wheatstone, who are used to doing raising capital on. a large scale to carry things out. So she says you've alienated the government. Now we need to use other means. So you were going to come in earlier, Dara, and I wanted to go to John. So can you pick up what you thought it was?

Yes, I'm in vigorous agreement with Patricia about the tenuous connection between Babbage and influence on modern computing. There is no strong connection. There is a continuity in the legend. After Babbage, nobody doubted one could build an engine. But the point I wanted to pick up on it to be exact. backed about Ada being credited with being the first programmer. She published the first thing we would now recognize as a program, although programming is not a word that they used at that time. And it's absolutely understandable that you should be so perceived, because the first series of

steps of instructions, we would now call it an algorithm, the first set of instructions was published under her name, or at least under her initials. The thing is that the work was Babbageus. So she published, she published the first program. That was the first time. an algorithm, as it were, entered the public domain. But the work was babes. The concept of a program, what we've now called a program,

of a stepwise sequences of operations, that a machine was capable of doing this. He's based on Babiages' work before Lovelace had any major involvement in the analytical engine. It's just a question of being exact. It's understandable why people have perceived her in this way, but the actual principle of a program was Babbageus.

And she also has that marvellously poetic phrase that the machine will weave, algebraic patterns like a Jackard loom weaves flowers. And leaves, yes. And I mean, that's such a sort of perfect description. As Doran said, Patricia,

the notes came out anonymously, initials in 1843, although her friends knew it was her. How were they received by Babbage and others who knew the area? I think, for one thing, it was quite normal for women to publish anonymously

in those days. I'm Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an obvious similar example. everyone was full of praise I mean it did have her initials on I think everybody knew who it was who'd done it and the congratulations just flooded in

everyone was very complimentary there's an aspect of her character which is alleged can we be brisk about this John because it would be John Fincher because it would be very silly to admit it altogether there is a racy reputation

side who had a loverless that she was a hard drinker a gambler and so on adulterous did you find in studying the correspondence of these three liars Did you find any relevance for this?

I found that she led really quite a dull life in comparison with many other figures of the day, certainly her father. Well, most of us. Most of us lead to tell life compared with her father. But what is very interesting is that it's very plain from the marriage contract with Love Lace, Lord King at that time,

that he was the owner of 220 estates that stretch from Hempton Court to the sea. Most of the towns that one goes through between the sea were owned by King Lovelace. By the end of his life, he's borrowing from Lady Byron. And it is not Ada, who's doing most of the gambling. This has been completely neglected in the literature. The Earl of Littner, who's the descendant of both of them,

says very delicately in the film to Dream he says he was of a somewhat extravagant nature you know you could actually check this out with his buildings he had so you think she wasn't a gambler I think that she when she wrote off to her mother who said I've gone to the race her mother went to the races too

people went to the races and what about the drink I'm just going to let's nail this quickly it's very nice to because these turn of every time you read about her now what I think is a far more serious thing and would be seriously compared with cholera is the kind of medicine that you were given

because she dies very young and she has a very painful condition, probably cancer of the uterus, but we don't know for sure. But what she was given were clearly opiates. And so, you know, this was standard. This is what you did at the time. And so in her last years,

she is in rather desperate condition, but they're prescribed medications that she's given. If you read a lot of her letters, there's sort of very rambling and very frenetic and show very sudden shifts of mood. So there is one school of historical thought who thinks that she might have had some sort of psychological illness. For instance, she might have been bipolar. I mean, retrospective diagnosis is always very difficult. But between the drugs and the drink and possible mental illness, some of her behaviour is extremely erratic. And that becomes very, very clear when you look at her writing.

And so I think when you read what other people said about her, I think it's important. to bear that in mind because another interpretation of some of the encomia that have been made of her is that these are her friends trying to placate her keep her on the straight and narrow and to be flattering even if they're not really quite sincere

so I think one has to remember that when reading the letters. Fine, but Doran, you said something quite different earlier in the programme. You made a strong case for her seeing much further than Babbage, for her shifting the argument away from mathematics to digital as it were,

for her opening it up to the alphabets, to music, were your two examples, and so on. That's a big thing to see and do. You've also said, about five, ten minutes ago, that to track the direct influence of Babbage and Ada Lovelace on the development of computing is difficult, nothing much. Yet we know that Turing read, from what I've read,

Turing read her notes and took a great deal of notice of them. So can we just try to define this in the last? last stage of the program. It's not unusual in science. Nothing much happens for a very great period of time. These things go underground and then they grow again in better soil, even a century or two later. So can we just try to talk about that of it? The connection is tenuous. There is no direct connection between Babbage and modern computing. Direct meaning that the genealogical metaphors that are used are actually incorrect. He's called the father of computing. And we can be very exact about what we might mean by this. The detail of his designs was not studied with any great

exactness until the 1970s. So Lovelace's notes are the most people had other than encyclopedia articles about Babbage's, primarily the difference engine. So if we look at the conduits, what might people have known and by what route? We're talking about the Lovelace notes, top of the list. Then we're talking about encyclopedia articles. So if we're talking about Babbage's designs being the DNA of modern digital computer design absolutely not possible. But the small coterie of people that

were continuously involved in automatic computation knew of Babbage, the legend persisted. Turing knew of Lovelace's notes, he calls the Lovelace objection, Lovelace statements that the analytical engine has no pretensions to originate anything. This is an objectionary is well known to artificial

intelligence folk. So the continuity is in the legend, the small coterie people who involved in computation all the way through knew of Babbage, but the principles of modern computing were essentially reinvented by the pioneers of electronic computers in the late

1930s, early 1940s. They knew of him, but could not have known of the exact detail on the logic of his systems. But they knew her notes. Turing certainly did, and they knew of Lovelace and Babbage. John Fuge, you know, the thing about the continuity is

through the notes. But I think the other thing we need to stress for audiences is that basically what happens again and Doren can correct me if I'm wrong on this is that what we return to in the 40s under the stress of war

is to throw a lot of money at doing a calculating machine again, that Enniac and those machines that are being created are to calculate and primarily calculate trajectories for shells. And so I don't find any evidence in the 1940s that they're actually moving beyond in the way

the notes move beyond. They're still continuing calculation. They're going back to that, as though they'd gone back to the difference engine rather than the analytical engine. And it's only at some mysterious point later on was very hard to define historically that you then move again away from simply trajectories and mathematics to general purpose computing. The connection there is touring. Turing takes up Lovelace. Turing is the first person to define a computer in general ways that says a machine for manipulating symbols.

Alan Turing, English mathematician, responsible for the Bletchley Park, active in the Bletchley Park code cracking. So he is the one who says, this is a machine that can manipulate symbols which represent things other than number, and the Colossus machine, which decodes German alphabetic. I mean, the inside, the internal language of what Colossus was working on, were German scripts.

So here we have an exact love lace implementation of a machine manipulating symbols other than quantity. So in response to John, the continuities where it re-emergence in modern times is through touring, and it's curious that touring is the one of the pioneers

who makes explicit reference to Lovelace's notes. And I think it's very common for scientists to reconstruct heroic histories for themselves, and I think one excellent example is William Hewell, who is a very, very close colleague of Babbage, and he started the whole idea of scientific history that you're

like Plato's torch, you're passing the torch of genius from one person to the other, and he constructed a whole history of astronomy, which was his own subject, where you go from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo to Newton, to William Hewle, and I think Turing was probably doing the same thing, reconstructing

a heroic history for himself. Finally, Doran Swede, Babbage never built his engine, but you did. It's two metres high. It has four thousand moving part, it weighs a number of tons and does it work? It's 8,000 moving parts and weighs 5 tonnes and it works. It works impeccably.

We like to be underestimated. But it's not binary. It's decimal. It's a decimal machine. It's decimal not binary. All these computers we're talking about are not binary and I think that's another very, very big difference. They're digital but decimal, but they work impeccably. And we can all go and see it. Absolutely. Yes.

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Patricia Farah, Doran Swade and John Fuji. And next week, we'll be talking about Greek myths from the Argonauts to Zeus, Narcissus and Pandora's box, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.