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

am yet quite yet in the spring of life & hardly indeed full blown. I trust I may be spared many years longer, & may thus be allowed the opportunity of showing that I am an altered person .
    Slightly feebly, Ada includes in the same letter a barb to Lady Byron about the lapse of a mother’s power to oblige her daughter.
    If you said to me, ‘do not open the window in my room,’ I am bound to obey you whether I be 5 or 50. But if you said to me, ‘don’t open your room window. I don’t choose you should have your window open,’ I consider your only claim to my obedience to be that given by law , and that you have no natural right to expect it after childhood. The one case concerns you & your comfort, the other concerns me only and cannot affect or signify to you. Do you see the line of distinction that I draw? I have given the most familiar possible illustration, because I wish to be as clear as possible. Till 21, the law gives you a power of enforcing obedience on all points; but at that time I consider your power and your claim to cease on all such points as concern me alone , though I conceive your claim to my attention, and consideration of your convenience and comfort, rather to increase than diminish with years…
    Four days later, however, Ada already backtracked and sent her mother a brief additional letter which contains these particularly illuminating lines:
    You know I always must sermonize a little when I write to you. – I am very well, & the bones are flourishing.

7
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    On June 5 1833, London high society consisted of barely five thousand people, many of whom were related to one another by marriage or infidelity. They had substantial capital in the bank, enjoyed the best food and drink, mostly didn’t need to work, and were waited on by a small army of servants for whom servility was an essential professional skill. Leisured society was a constant round of big lunches, frenetic amorous liaisons, leisurely afternoons and glittering soirées.
    The million or so people who comprised the rest of London’s population, like the vast majority of Britons at the time, scraped by on a diet rarely much above starvation level, and did their best to snatch such grimy slivers of happiness and scraps of life as they could.
    Fashionable society’s London was the comparatively small area of the capital that stretched southwards from Marylebone Road in the north to the River Thames in the south. Charles Babbage, the mathematician who was to become very important in Ada’s life, lived at number one Dorset Street, near Manchester Square, and dwelled only a few hundred yards inside that unmarked but comprehensively recognised northern boundary.
    The aristocracy and the ordinary people were like different species. A commoner might rarely be elevated to nobility by acquiring great wealth or political influence, but the easiest way into the aristocracy – then as now – was through marriage. Most aristocrats married other ones, but occasionally a commoner might get lucky, just as sometimes happens today.
    Many aristocrats had gained their fortune by inheritances that usually dated back to land taken by the invading Normans after 1066 from Britain’s Anglo-Saxons.
    Three decades into the nineteenth century, social conventions of British life seemed, on the surface, to be stronger than ever. But in truth Britain was changing fast. One of the biggest causes of change was the enormous impact of machine technology that so fascinated Ada. In 1829, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle had written an essay that, by 1833, was famous. The essay, ‘Signs of the Times’, elaborated on how Carlyle thought the epoch in which he found himself should be seen:
    Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward