James Essinger

Charles Babbage is one of my favorite people to read about, but this has to be one of the most exasperating biographies I've ever read. I was enjoying it up until about a third of the way through, but then I started to notice several odd things.

It's often unclear what kind of audience the author is writing for. There are weirdly basic explanations that anyone who picks up this book is probably not going to need. He seems overly concerned about explaining every single time the spelling is irregular in a piece of correspondence, and I quote, "That circumstances over which I had no control [Charles here spells this word without a 'u']." Thanks, I saw that he spelled it without a 'u'. I also saw the other time that he spelled it with a 'u,' which was also helpfully pointed out. Most of us know spelling was a bit irregular in the 19th century, but it's just kind of strange to be so fixated on it in this book.

It's obvious that a lot of research went into the book, but the writing style is simply peculiar sometimes. The tone is sometimes jarring and would be more at home in a (vaguely) historical fiction/romance. I give you an example that left me scratching my head. "Very possibly it is in fact impossible ever to know anybody completely anyway, even if we think what knowing somebody completely really means." This is a sentence in search of an editor.

Or what about this: Now Benjamin was dead, the only way Charles could have hoped to redeem himself in his father's eyes would have been through necromancy or a seance, and ever since leaving Cambridge and the Ghost Club, Charles had shown no significant interest in communing with spirits."

Um. Ok.

Wait, what?

The text gets really speculative but doesn't provide much satisfying context for its flights of fancy. It is annoyingly insistent that Charles and Ada thought about getting married, with absolutely no source evidence other than what can be skewed and reinterpreted in a way that just isn't convincing. I'll allow that the question could be asked once at the beginning of their relationship (and left unanswered), but the author KEEPS coming back to it, later wondering why Charles didn't write more passionate letters to Ada and concluding that it was because her husband might see them. I don't know, maybe it's because they were actually just friends, with a hefty age gap, and some academic interests in common? That line of speculation just got creepier and creepier, but not because I thought it had a basis in fact, more because the author was so obsessed with it. And trust me, he goes even farther with his speculation, but I won't.

The only thing I felt good about was his defense of Ada Lovelace as a competent interpreter of Babbage's Analytical Engine, which some have chosen to doubt due to her gender and her emotional afflictions.

There are a lot of important facts presented in this work, and some source documents intriguingly cited for the first time, but the writing just didn't make the grade for me.… (mais)

An account of how the invention of a weaving machine led to the birth of computers.

Welp. Chalk this one up on the list of books on fascinating subjects that are poorly written. So disappointing. It reads like an amateurish dissertation, with lots of unnecessary rehashing and arguments made too forcefully (ex: Essinger, in a discussion of an image he shares of an invoice for Charles Babbage's purchase of one of Jacquard's woven portraits, says both that, "This clearly shows the sum he paid - 200 francs," and then later on the same page, "It seems quite clear that Babbage kept the invoice as a record of having purchased the woven portrait and of how much it cost him." I...could not possibly care less how much Mr. Babbage paid for the thing, for sobbing out loud. And dude, just let the thing speak for itself - I'm not an idiot; I can read the invoice. Move on, maybe. And there were moments like this throughout. It made me feel like I was supposed to be grading it as a student paper instead of enjoying a published work on an interesting topic. Gah.… (mais)

The short version of this review is if you're looking for a book about Ada, this is not it.

My biggest frustration with this book is that it is so padded with additional information. It would be one thing if it was other side tid bits about Ada's life that did not necessarily pertain to her contributions that this book claims to be about, but it isn't. There is too much side tracks on people and events that have nothing to do with Ada. The first few chapters go into Lord Byron when he wasn't even involved in her life, and could have been significantly reduced to a few paragraphs to get the same idea across. Babbage I can understand a little more, but even then there were times I was wondering why the author decided to focus on him at some points of the book. There were also periods where the author would go on tangents on other figures that Ada interacted with. While yes these people were in her life, they held no relevance to Ada's work. Honestly, why is Charles Dickens talked about so much??

Whole letters are sited so often that eventually I started to just skim them because it felt like they were being used to make the book longer. Sometimes they were interesting, but again more often than not I was wondering what the point of having this entire letter was. The letters combined with the many irrelevant tangents made this book a slog.

The kicker in all of this is it takes more than half the book to get to the point the author finally talks about Ada's work. Except when he gets to the portion of her notes that talk about her algorithm, the author quickly sums up that yes, Note G is where her algorithm resides and moves on without ever talking more in depth about it. So you slog through all these side stories that don't matter and the background of Babbage's machine just to have the author not even talk about what it is laid out in the title of the book. It is incredibly disappointing and frustrating. At that point I was close to the end anyways and finished the book out of spite more than anything.

There are probably much better informed, and better written, sources on Ada and her work. Save yourself the trouble of this book, because it talks about everything except Ada.… (mais)

So I'm on Storygraph now as well as Goodreads (and LibraryThing--I'm a little bit nuts) and my stats told me that I hadn't read anything but fiction so far this year. Since I'm always agonizing about how to decide what to read next, I figured it was time to fix that.

Through no fault of Essinger's, I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed with Ada's Algorithm. People seem to have a horrible habit of burning the effects of the departed. Instances that stand out in my memory include Art Speigelman's father burning his wife's diaries, as related in Maus; the family of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who championed small pox inoculation to England (see the excellent The Speckled Monster for her story), burning her letters and journals; one of my own relatives burning her husband's career-spanning film archive from the first decades of television; and another relative's plan to burn all family letters from WWII. Ada Lovelace was no exception: upon her death, her mother burned all of her correspondence that she felt displayed the family in too negative a light; it's likely that the only reason as much of her work survived as it did is that Ada's mother, Annabella, Lady Byron, was herself a bit of a math nerd, so she recognized the value of Ada's work with Charles Babbage. Essinger reminds us a couple of times that we have more surviving letters from the year she and Babbage were working on their Analytical Machine than from any other year of her life for this reason.

If you're looking for a full, rich depiction of who Ada was as a person, well, if it could even exist after so much of her life was reduced to ash, this isn't the place to find it: Essinger is upfront (literally in the preface, but also in his occasional lapses into first person) that he is here with an agenda. Many women in science have had their contributions overlooked and dismissed, but Ada has even been called crazy. Most of the blame for this likely rests on the Victorian painkillers she took while dying of uterine cancer; writing about math and science under the influence of laudanum and cannabis are apparently grounds to have your entire intellect dismissed. I suspect that her playful side may have been a source of dismissal as well, as it's all to easy to imagine some stuffy old academic dude seeing a woman describe herself as a fairy and recount childhood dreams of mechanical flight, rolling his eyes, and looking away from anything else she might have to say.

Does Essinger succeed in his mission to rehabilitate Ada's reputation as the woman who wrote the first computer program? I'm...not quite sure. He makes a very convincing case to someone (me) who hasn't read anything else about her. But it's impossible to set aside two facts:
(1) her contribution, remarkable as it was in its foresight of the modern age, resides only in Notes appended to a single article written by someone else (which she translated) and consists mostly of theoretical applications; and,
(2) though remarkable, her speculations about the potential power and influence of an Analytical Engine does not seem to have had any impact in or have been of interest to the contemporary scientific community.

Perhaps Essinger simply didn't write enough about what Ada and Babbage's contemporaries thought of their work after it was published, focusing as he does on convincing us of her work's worth. He places so much emphasis on Ada's Notes that the book's most substantial chapter, which describes them, quotes directly from them directly at great length with, in my opinion, not quite enough helpful interpretation of the dense, 19th-century scientific language and grammar. The final chapter describing Ada's legacy--which is basically entirely tied up with Babbage's--talks about how even Babbage was largely forgotten until the invention of the first computer in the 1940s, 100 years later. So while it's true that Ada's vision of what a computer could be was attributed to Babbage, even Babbage didn't make the splash that the Curies or Watson and Crick did in their fields. Essinger may successfully argue that Ada's ideas were groundbreaking and ahead of their time, but even to someone who hoped to be convinced (me), the idea that she was a revolutionary who "launched the digital age" just doesn't hold up.

A quote from Slate on the back of my edition says, "We need [Ada] as a symbol...of all women who have contributed to the progress of science and technology, and of all the women who might have contributed if given the chance." With so little of her life's work left, and so little of it to begin with, given her early death, I'm not sure whether Essinger's book manages to elevate Ada much beyond just that: a symbol of what what we lost for thousands of years by undervaluing half our species.

So if we know so little about Ada and only one fat chapter is devoted to her article, what else is in this 250-ish page book? If you're only here for the programming (like Areg was when he got the book), you might be a bit bored in the first half. If you have a wide-ranging interest in history, there's plenty to enjoy. Here's one thing that I posted on Facebook that's totally irrelevant but still interesting:

So I'm reading a book called "Ada's Algorithm" and it said that her father, Lord Byron, had a "club foot" but that this wasn't much remarked upon because so many people in the upper class had something genetically off, whether it manifested mentally or physically, because...Regency high society consisted of about 5,000 people, which meant most of them were related to each other somehow. For context, the Amish population of Lancaster County is about 30,000. Yeah. So remember THAT the next time you're watching Bridgerton: historically, all these folks were probably related. Suddenly, it makes so much sense why Gothic and Victorian literature is full of visible disabilities and madness...

There's plenty for Essinger to tell us about Ada's notorious father, George, Lord Byron--a notorious, equal-opportunity rake who had a lengthy affair with his half-sister, lived large and accumulated massive debts, drove his wife away after little more than a year when separation was scandalous, ran off to the continent to escape his debts and live even freer, and, oh yeah, was one of the most famous poets of the age. Ada's mother gets relatively short shrift, with Essinger focusing on her emotional coldness, hypochondria, and manipulations of her daughter's life, but she was also a staunch abolitionist and amateur mathematician. Babbage was quite a character, always coming up with a new idea that rendered his previous one obsolete, and was the subject of one of Charles Dickens' thinly disguised satires. Also on the periphery of Ada's story are Charles Dickens himself, who read to Ada on her deathbed; a remarkable mathematician who likely has whole books dedicated to her, Mary Somerville, for whom the first Oxford College for women was named; and Ada's own husband, who was apparently obsessed with building tunnels on his property (okay, maybe I'm the only one who finds that intriguing...).

Finally, though the thought didn't quite fit further up in my review, I don't want to close without mentioning the what-might-have-been that Essinger relates. Anyone can lament the loss of an intellectual powerhouse before they reach 40; but Essinger suggests that losing Ada also meant losing Babbage. One of their surviving letters includes an offer to act as Babbage's "agent", of a sort, using her connections and calmer personality on Babbage's behalf to help him obtain funding and support for his Analytical Engine while he focused on the practical construction. For an emotional man like Babbage (his disastrous meeting with Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel is a case study in why the argument that women were too emotional for science but men weren't was absurd), a buffer and who understood his vision as well as he did, who had the social skills to champion it and the intellectual vision to focus its development and expand its application, could have been what he needed to actually build his machine: "She would have been better suited to direct his engineers and even his financial affairs with greater charm, clarity and effectiveness" (p. 232-233). But Babbage turned her down. Perhaps his pride got in the way. Perhaps, despite their deep friendship, which many consider borderline romantic, and their close collaborative intellectual partnership, he still didn't see a woman up to the task he'd set himself.

Quote Roundup

p. 33) Lady Byron had left the strange, wayward, selfish, and fundamentally unhappy man she had mistakenly married. And now she found herself in a life she had never planned. Her entire upbringing and attitude to life had been focused on her at some point becoming a wife and a mother.

p. 114) Quick note about footnotes here: There are at least two where Essinger credits one of his researchers with discovering hitherto unknown or forgotten dates of births, deaths, and marriages. He describes Babbage as "generous with his credits" (p. 116), always attributing ideas to their originators, and Essinger seems to have followed suit, which is lovely to see.

p. 141) The idea of the Analytical Engine as a kind of Jacquard loom that wove calculations had a deep and persisting appeal to Ada. ... [Babbage] saw the world, and mechanisms, in a much more literal, factual and - indeed - analytical way than she did. For Ada, inventing metaphors for understanding science was second nature. Babbage hardly ever did this. But the real point - and this explains why Ada's contribution to the idea of the Analytical Engine is so important - is that the brilliance of the conception of the Analytical Engine requires both a scientific and emotive perceptions if it is to be fully understood and expressed. For Ada, Jacquard's loom was a conceptual gateway for developing that emotional understanding.
I think I just resent the use of the world "emotional" because it has historically been used to dismiss women and their ideas. I'd rather think of Ada's contribution as more metaphorical or imaginative, her ability to communicate about and make connections between what exists already and what could exist one day.

p. 150) Babbage recounts in his memoirs a conversation with Ada in which he asks why she chose to translate someone else's article about his machine rather than write one of her own, and she replies that it hadn't occurred to her. As with the quote above about Annabella finding herself in an unexpected position in life, Essinger argues that Ada finds Babbage's confidence in her abilities unexpected. Despite her confidence in her social spheres, and even her acquaintance with Mary Somerville, she "had been told from early youth not to think too much of herself...lest it encourage the wilful parts of her personality. ... [But] in science, her confidence melted away and she saw her role as that of the hand-maiden to others."

p. 191) There is no written evidence surviving that Babbage truly understood what Ada had written about the Analytical Engine. In reading her Notes, he may have focused merely on the complex mathematical material (and attributed - or blamed - what he saw as the more discursive ideas on her 'fairy' imagination).
If there's a tragedy in Ada and Babbage's friendship, it's this: that her ideas and legacy depended so much on him. If he had not encouraged her to write, if he had taken credit for her ideas, if he had understood the value of her imagination and her offer to explain and promote his work...well, at least in the last case, the world might be very different. But because he was unable to completing his Analytical Engine--by failure to focus, to describe its importance, to receive funding--Ada, too, was unable to contribute more. Even the most remarkable women in history were so often dependent on the few men who would support them. If that's not an argument for allyship, I don't know what is.… (mais)