The Enchantress of Numbers: Lady Lovelace’s Objection

“Ada: Forget this world and all its troubles

and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—

every thing in short but the Enchantress of

Numbers, my dear and much admired

interpreter.”

– Charles Babbage to Ada Lovelace

Alone in my study, I crank the gears of my prototype ‘thinking machine’ for the first time. There is only one question I need answered. Will it succeed? Will I have my answer? The grinding gears go: clang, chang, ching. And the rotating symbols turn—a wheel covered in a carousel of numbers—put in motion by nothing more than a handheld crank and a simple bevel gear, turning perpetually under the constant tension the oscillating weight places on the mainspring. I gasp in anticipation. Then my heart falls. Thirty-six! Damn you—thirty-six—you horrid, infernal number that haunts my days! Should I tell Babbage what I have done? No, certainly not. Not until I perfect the instrument.

I write out a letter longhand with my steel point inkwell pen: “Dear Charles, My only objection to your most extraordinary design for the analytical engine would be, that while it will greatly improve the grindingly tedious labor of manually checking tables—the machine can only do as it is instructed and does not originate anything or anticipate and comprehend any analytical relationships or scientific truths. As a proper companion to man’s intellectual labor, what would truly be revolutionary would be a ‘thinking machine’ with its own mind and intellect that could act as an assistant and proceed with a series of tasks at its own direction, coming up with original ideas on its own and coming to its own conclusions after reviewing a body of evidence. Such a thing would, I dare say, change the course of history. With a machine’s ability to instantly check figures and accurately run endless calculations without wearying and a man’s creativity and intuition to wield against the difficulty of a problem, such a machine could save much trouble. It might succeed where fatigue and a muddling of the senses bring tedium and inaccuracy into our own efforts. Results could be worked out by the engine without having been worked out by human head and hands first. 

Will you come at nine on Saturday and stay as long as we find requisite? I say so early an hour because we shall have much to do, I think. And it certainly must not be later than ten ‘o clock. I think you will be pleased with my work. Your puzzle-Mate! P.S. I hope all is going well with your logarithms for the life-insurance startup and that your life-table calculations have proved most accurate. Imagine, can you, if a machine could look at the mortality tables and one’s individual family history and location and tell one the age, lo—the very date—of one’s own death? Could such wonders be possible? August 6, 1836.”

Thirty-six! A mind without an anchor. My father left when I was but a month old, and due to my parent’s separation, I never knew the man. His passions left him untethered to the world—or as my mom put it—raving mad. And he was gone at thirty-six, when I was only eight. He left me forever. All I have are the Byronic myths, rumors, and legends. I did not wish to be a poet like Lord Byron, seduced by madness and heroic ambition. Those two opposite forces that tug on the waffling soul that lacks security in itself. Instead, I found poetry in numbers and the correct answer to a specific problem—the certainty and safety and security of a right solution—of a known commodity—and a language that holds the promise to govern the whole universe.

My father: A Calvinist and a sodomist. Opium addict. The original Don Juan. A Vice Admiral who circumnavigated the globe. He was a necessary paradox—a tension of wrestling opposites. The first open water swimmer, who swam from Europe to Asia across the Hellespont Strait. A cripple with a withered right leg, known as “the limping devil”—who overcame his limitations and defied stereotypes—as if subverting expectations were a sport itself. A hedonist ruled by passions—simultaneously a devotee of discipline from his school days at Trinity College, Cambridge, where I also studied from time to time. Who wrote: “high mountains are a feeling.” Who also obsessed over the fates of Prometheus and Cain, as if he knew he was the rogue who bears the mark of his own misdeeds and not the child of promise, like so many of his sycophants would let him believe. A boxer and bulimic. An incestophile and a satirist. An English Lord and a Highlander. An exile from Britain and an adopted son of Greece. A literal tragic Greek hero, welcomed with adoration and open arms, as if he were the anointed one himself. Dare I say, as much as I hate the man—and I do hate him—I am jealous of his fame and the recognition he received for such trivial and meaningless things. The man had great press.

But this is not his story. To me, he was merely absent. He was a shadow without a body. And he left me before I ever knew him at all. Will it be the same for my poor children?

Thirty-six! The devil’s number: the sum of the integers from 1-to-36 is 666. A square. A cursed number. The number of the interior angles of a pentagram. The computer’s language. 36 bits is the largest numeric base possible for computer code, as it exhausts the numerals 0-9 and the letters A-Z. The eighth triangular number, representing the set of 3-2-1 in triangular dots—and thus the countdown. The number of the countdown for a hanging or a beheading by guillotine or a firing squad. Nine positive divisions, including nine itself. An irreducible, final verdict. A number of deathly promises. 

Thirty-six is the number of beginnings and endings. Of completion and rebirth. The decu-ple of thirty-six or 360 is the degrees of the circle. And all the mythology of thirty-six confirm it as the number of perfections. The Jewish Midrash relates that the first day’s light shone thirty-six hours. Therefore, at Chanukah, there are thirty-six candles lighted on the menorah—a symbol of the cycle of redemption and exile—and representative of the “hidden light” that is in the world. The Jewish myth of the “Lamed Vav Tzadikim” maintains that there are exactly thirty-six righteous people in a generation and that if it were not for them, all of them, if even one was missing, the world would come to an end. The circle would never close. The Ouroboros would never bite its own tail. 

Thirty-six is the number of mysteries and things hidden. These thirty-six are the “Nistarim” or the concealed ones, who the Hasidic Jews say are responsible for accomplishing all man’s purposes in each generation. Revelations is made up of John’s thirty-six visions. Likewise in Hindu Shaivism, the thirty-six tattvas are the principles that combine to form the Absolute. In Egyptian tradition, the thirty-six decans are the gods presiding over the degrees of the zodiac, and both Hipparchus and Ptolemy calculated the precession of the equinox as the mille-ple of thirty-six—36,000 years.

And I will die at thirty-six in only eighteen short years. There is scarcely enough time to do everything. There is much to do! I must start at once!

* * *

On Friday evening, we were in attendance for King William IV’s dinner party for the Duchess Victoria. We had travelled several hours from Surrey to Windsor Castle in Berkshire. We were all seated in the Queen’s Drawing Room enjoying a cool Autumn evening and waiting for the doddering old King to arrive. The ornate hand-carved wood paneling was enlivened by huge life size portraits framed by ornate oriental panel rugs and a painted ceiling reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel. Two huge rope chandeliers hung from the ceiling and gave a warm light to the room.

I had been dressed-up for the occasion by Mommy-dearest in an ivory satin chemise with velvet red trim and fur lapels, a crinoline skirt above my hooped petticoat, a high gold couture bow belt to accentuate my slender and youthful waist, and a gold crystal tiara to finish the look, my hair parted in the middle in a Victorian tripartite updo with the back section coiled into a chignon, the lengthier parts pinned in a coiled knot next my ears. I looked like a painted Frozen Charlotte cast in glazed porcelain.

Next, my mother offered me up to this pack of hyper intellectual ogres who did not so much want to defile my virtue as to dominate and dismiss my ideas. This assembly, gifted though they may be, hid behind their air of prominence and genius and did not deign to entertain the scientific musings of a mere eighteen-year-old girl. I wanted more than anything for them to give the smallest tip of the hat to one of my ideas. But they were jealous monsters whose approbation was hard won. They shooed off anyone who might want to eat some crumbs off their table. And bared their sharp ogre teeth as they hoarded the feast of ideas for themselves, while the rest of us starved and labored away in obscurity.

“Preposterous!” said Charles Dickens. “A thinking machine! What an ugsome concept. ‘Tain’t possible for metal and wood to muse over the cosmos any more than a poodle can read Shakespeare!”

Mr. Faraday chimed in, “I am busy just now again with an electric motor. Now, that is an idea whose time has come. But one cannot animate dead objects, my dear, and give them a form of consciousness, any more than Mary Shelley’s freakish Frankenstein could be re-animated from dead parts.”

Sir David Brewster said, “Imagine the optics, dear girl. It would be an ungodly abomination. A thinking machine would have no morals or conscience—it might very well turn on its creators—to borrow a theme again from Mary Shelley.”

“Wait, wait,” Faraday said, “it must be said that one would have been laughed at in 1800 if they suggested that portraits could be drawn by chemistry or metals could be extracted through electromagnetic current. I do suppose we should not be so quick to dismiss a new idea.”

“Yes, yes,” Dickens said. “But it is like telegraphy—speaking over a wire is no substitute for the face of a friend who lends the soul encouragement. Men will never speak to family and close acquaintances from a distance. By the same token, a machine could never carry on a lively discourse like a man—at best it would be a form of adept mimicry—such as would be the lot of a mechanical parrot.”

“It is like the sweet embrace of candlelight,” Faraday said. “Man’s inspiration when the mind considers the symbolic or superstitious is not susceptible to mechanical imitation. A mere machine could never produce a canto or a story or a painting that could compare in skill or artistic merit to that of a human artist.”

“Dear, dear Ada, don’t be dismayed. What ever became of that flying machine you fashioned when you were twelve—why don’t you turn back to that? Now there is an idea that has promise—a chariot of the gods that could carry men over seas and mountains like an eagle!”

Andrew and John Crosse were also there and comforted me while these ogres tore my flesh and picked my bones.

Just then, the staff ushered us into the dining room, and I realized with shock and exasperation that there were thirty-six guests and thirty-six seats. The drunken doddering king immediately commenced with what appeared to be a toast and launched instead into a searing rebuke of the Queen.

"I trust to God that my life may be spared for nine months longer ... I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the exercise of the Royal authority to the personal authority of that young lady, heiress presumptive to the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers and is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the situation in which she would be placed."

Victoria burst into tears at the lambasting of her poor, soon to be widowed mother and left in an uproar, with King William following shortly behind. The rest of us sat in stunned silence and ate our wild turkey, citrus fruits, almonds and pudding.

True to his word though, the unfortunate Sailor King who defied expectations all his life fought on through dementia and bronchitis the appointed nine months, avoiding the effect of the Regency Act of 1830, waiting it out stubbornly and grimly until Victoria turned eighteen. Queen Victoria would usher in the Victorian Era and reign sixty-three years and would one day be known as the Empress of India! It isn’t quite so lovely as the Enchantress of Numbers, but fitting, nonetheless.

Who could have predicted it! I dare say, I know one that did.

* * *

The Derby Stakes in Epsom was the most important horse race of the year and I had put up my family jewels and all the money I could find, putting a total of $400,000 out on a straight-win bet for Rat-trap. 

Babbage and I had done a good many calculations and had concluded that the favorite, Rat-Trap, was statistically certain to carry the day. Rat-trap was a stately steed who looked like the ropy muscular embodiment of Chiron and seemed to be carved out of onyx. 

What Babbage didn’t know is that I had run my own calculations with the prototype, and the prototype was in agreement. At last, I might have confirmation on this fine May-Day that all of my painstaking work in private would amount to something after all. I had taken a healthy dollop of opium earlier and was still under the spell of its effects, with all my senses sharpened and my nerves as cold as ice water.

As soon as they were out of the gates, Phosphorous overtook Rat-trap and continued on at an unrelenting pace and he pulled ahead by a body length at the clubhouse turn heading toward the chute. His footfalls were like the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer on iron. The two were galloping with clipped heels and Rat-trap had to jockey around Phosphorous on the back stretch. I screamed, “on the outside, on the outside.” Babbage put his hand on my leg, and I realized I had shot nearly out of my chair in excitement.

I had considered Phosphorous, but he was a weak-looking little cripple bay horse with three white feet. His odds were 36/1 and I should have known to pay more attention to that ghastly shadow of a horse. I dare say the sickly-looking steed had been doped up with some kind of amphetamine, for he came out of the gates like the fiery red second horse of the apocalypse, eyes aflame and raging forward in a reckless, flailing fervor. Certainly, he could never keep this up. He would drop off before the far pole.

Good lord! As they neared the far pole, Phosphorous was going away, while Rat-trap was going backward. Rat-trap was in tight and not responding. “On the inside, on the inside,” I shouted.

Down the stretch Rat-trap was steadily fading in the final furlong, while Phosphorous loomed boldly forward. His lean muscles rippled and twitched beneath the ragged, thin coat. His nostrils flared and snorted like a thing possessed. The creature’s eyes bulged and seemed ready to bolt from its forehead from the intensity of the pace. His head scissored forward through the air in a crazy looking dance with its fluttering lips revealing his muzzled teeth.  

The race was Phosphorous’s. Rat-trap came sixth. What rotten luck! What had gone wrong? I would be at the mercy of my bookie after this disgraceful performance. My husband must never find out.

Babbage turned to me and said, “I suppose our formula for predicting horse races yet needs improvement.”

“I’d say it needs a bit more than that,” I muttered.

* * *

Dear Charles,

I have been working on a calculus of the nervous system. It is a selfish project, as I find myself quite on the verge of madness most days. Even the opium is not enough to clear my mind. My sweet girls! It leaves me ill equipped to work, and my dreaded thirty-sixth birthday is on the horizon. I do imagine there is some formula that may be applied, similar to Faraday’s electrical and magnetic experiments, by which the stimulation of our bodily engine may be regulated so as to operate harmoniously and steadily.

Your Puzzle-mate, The Enchantress of Numbers

November 20, 1851

* * *

The dreaded day came at last.

Charles Dickens read to me from his book Dombey and Son:

“Dombey, exulting in the long-looked-for event, jingled and jingled the heavy gold watch-chain that depended from below his trim blue coat, whereof the buttons sparkled phosphorescently in the feeble rays of the distant fire. Son, with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly.”

So beautiful! It was November and Lake Horsley was frozen nearly solid outside my dear country estate at Horsley Towers.

My husband had abandoned me since August. I had told him of the debts which he now must pay and of my affairs with Charles Babbage and John Crosse. And though I had lost my love and would die alone, I had unburdened my soul.

And Babbage would be coming presently. I had only a short time to explain to him all I had done these eighteen years, and to leave him the prototype.