A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age by James Essinger Page B

worth learning; and you, Conybeare, would try to bamboozle them into a belief that it was to their interest to feed you for doing nothing.’
    Obviously relishing the memory, Lyell added:
    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.
    Like Lyell, Ada, for her part, found in Babbage a man whose mind she could engage with and who was as excited about ideas as she was. For her the demonstration piece of the Difference Engine she saw in action that Monday evening at Babbage’s house wonderfully exciting. Seeing it, she felt filled with a completely new sense of purpose and direction.
    From her childhood onwards, she had been torn between two opposite poles. She was conscious of being the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Britain’s most celebrated Romantic poet, a man whose memory in death loomed larger than it had in life, and of being the daughter of Lady Byron, whom her father had – according to her mother – so thoroughly wronged.
    Ada’s mind was circumscribed by her mother’s wishes, and they had often threatened to overwhelm her own personality. But now Ada sensed the possibility that her friendship with Babbage might at some point lead to a new life of her own, a life of the mind that was hers and not that of her family’s.

10
K
inship
    The friendship between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace was to grow one of the great friendships of the history of science. It is possible to trace the friendship in considerable detail by means of following chronologically the extant correspondence between Babbage and Ada. This correspondence spans the years from June 10 1835 to August 12 1852, which was when Ada wrote her last (known) letter to Babbage.
    The surviving correspondence between them consists of eighty-five letters from Ada to Babbage and twenty-five letters from him to her. There are often references in the correspondence to other letters that have apparently not survived. Moreover, in 1853 Babbage wrote a letter to Lady Byron’s solicitor [Woronzow Greig] in which Babbage referred to an ‘extensive correspondence’ he had carried on with Ada ‘for years’. He is surely referring to a correspondence much more extensive than what survives. Indeed, in the year 2000, a small cache of letters from Ada to Babbage turned up in the store-room of the Northumberland County Archive in the north of England. It is possible that more letters between them may yet materialise. Most of the letters that do survive date from the year 1843, the year Ada was at her most productive as a scientist.
    It may well be why so many letters survive from 1843 is that, while Lady Byron destroyed most of Babbage’s letters to Ada after Ada’s death (or delegated the job of destruction to someone else), she felt morally obliged as a dedicated amateur mathematician to keep the letters relating to her daughter’s great intellectual effort of that year.
    At first, the friendship advanced relatively slowly. When Babbage and Ada met, she was still only seventeen and he a widower of forty-two. He was not a shy man but nor was he the kind of man who would have been excessively forward in developing the friendship. Had he been, there was always Lady Byron to contend with.
    Ada was greatly impressed by Babbage. She regarded him with what she was to describe in a letter to her mother in late 1839 as a ‘fondness…. by no means inconsiderable.’ Ada and her mother kept in contact with Babbage and it seems certain Ada saw him on several other occasions as her mother’s search for a suitable husband continued.
    Ada was dealing with the avuncular Dr William King, whom Lady Byron had recruited to be her moral guide They went on ‘pleasant walks’ where he would instruct on how to control one’s imagination and