Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

Author:James Essinger [Essinger, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-409-7
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

By the end of 1834, the Analytical Engine was not the only thing on Ada’s mind. She had turned nineteen on December 10. Lady Byron was determined that the time had come for her daughter to find a husband. It appears that Babbage hovered on the radar. While Ada had rediscovered her passion for mathematics as a result of Babbage, it may well have been that bachelor of seven years Babbage also rediscovered a sense of vigour about his emotional life that he had lost as a lonely widower.

Did he see himself as a potential suitor for Ada? It’s possible he did, and that Ada did too. Certainly, it wasn’t uncommon at the time for young women of Ada’s age to marry older, wealthy men who had been married before. Besides, Babbage would very likely have regarded Ada as well suited for such a role.

But in any event, it is perfectly clear that, even if Ada had ever mentioned to her mother that perhaps she – Ada – might marry Babbage (there’s no evidence Ada did suggest this, but there’s also no evidence she didn’t), Lady Byron would have been implacably opposed to the idea. She was insistent that Ada would marry an aristocrat, and ideally one whose title was at least a century old, which was regarded as the minimum age of the title (though not of the aristocrat himself) for maximum eligibility for marriage. Thus there was a snobbery even about this among the British upper class at the time.

So if Babbage was interested in Ada as a potential wife who would end his solitary – and indeed often lonely – life, he was doomed to disappointment in that respect. While some of her best friends were middle class, she was decidedly orthodox about blue blood.

Some of her friends understood perfectly what suitability in a husband for Ada actually meant. At this crucial stage in our story, up pops that voyeuristic pedant Woronzow Greig again. Writing long after the fact, he recalls: ‘During the spring of 1835 I suggested to my friend Lord Lovelace, then Lord King, that she would suit him as a wife. He and I had been at college together [this was Trinity College, Cambridge, Byron’s and Babbage’s college] and have continued through life on the most intimate terms.’ Whether Greig was involved or not, the spring of 1835, Ada was introduced to William, Lord King, who was thirty years old, on a visit to the Warwickshire home of a Sir John Philips.

William, in a word, was a catch. Even Lady Byron could hardly wish for much more. Lord King hailed from an influential political, social, intellectual and religious background. With a title created in 1725, his was just on the right side of Lady Byron’s hundred-year watershed. And he came with a number of substantial properties, including Ockham Park, Surrey, the Jacobean family seat (he was Lord King, Baron of Ockham) and Ashley Combe in Somerset. He had also bought 12 St James’s Square, London, two years earlier.

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