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

and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. … On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster… For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances…. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.
    In 1833, few would have disagreed with any of this, least of all Ada or her future friend Charles Babbage. Yet Carlyle could have said even more. It was not only that the machinery revolution was changing how goods were made and how things were done. Even more importantly, the revolution also helped to liberate people’s imaginations about how things might be done, and allowed creative thinkers to speculate on exciting possibilities for using one type of new mechanical technology in conjunction with another, or with several others, to imagine new uses that were not yet technologically possible. This was precisely the kind of thinking in which Ada excelled; indeed, she was arguably one of the most innovative thinkers in this respect of her epoch.
    As for the spirits of self-analysis and self-appreciation that had so thoroughly infused Carlyle’s essay, these were rife in a Britain that had emerged in 1815 from twenty years of war with France as the world’s richest economy, its military hegemon, and its self-appointed leader.
    The man who had ruled this confident and energetic land since June 1830 was King William IV, the former Duke of Clarence, third son of the famously mad King George III. William, sixty-seven years old in 1833, was an avuncular, self-deprecating, rather comic, silvery-haired fellow, and the oldest person ever to have ascended the British throne. His record still stands today.
    The Prime Minister was Lord Grey. His Whig party had convincingly won the first General Election held after the broadening of the electorate, the creation of new constituencies to accommodate the burgeoning urban middle-classes, and the scrapping of tiny, barely-inhabited constituencies known, appropriately enough, as ‘rotten boroughs’ following the passage in 1832 of the Reform Act.
    Throughout the nineteenth century, the fraction of the British population entitled to vote had grown more and more awkwardly at odds with how Britain was developing as a rapidly urbanising nation. In 1831, for example, just 4,500 people in Scotland out of a total of 2.6 million people were entitled to vote. In Britain in its entirety – which in the 1831 Census was recorded as having a population of 13.1 million – the electorate was only about three percent of adult males.
    But even after the passage of the Reform Act, there was a wealth qualification attached to the right to vote and the vast majority of men were still excluded from voting by it. Women were regarded as inherentlyundeserving of the suffrage. Princess Victoria, the daughter of William IV’s younger brother, was the heir to the throne and looked set to become queen before long, but women were otherwise dismissed in political life. Ada would never have Babbage’s opportunities in a world where women were regarded as providers of pleasure and babies.
    With the 1832 Reform Act on the Statute Book, Britain’s ruling class felt the danger of revolution to be past. Those with money and health could relax; this was a good time to be British.
    The British domestic economy had been growing fast over the past few decades, fuelled by the demands of the increasingly prosperous and populous middle class who wanted good clothes, quality furniture, fine cutlery and excellent ornaments. Yet what had really made Britain the world’s richest country was the