Product Description

Romantic heroine and computer pioneer, this is a remarkable story of Lord Byron's daughter. Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron was born in 1815 just after the Battle of Waterloo, and died aged 36, soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851. She was connected with some of the most influential and colourful characters of the age including: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. It was her work with Babbage that led to her being credited with the invention of computer programming and to her name being adopted for the programming language that controls the US military machine. However, what makes her story so fascinating is the way she personified the seismic historical changes taking place. This was the era when fissures began to open up in culture: romance split away from reason, instinct from intellect, and, art from science. Ada came to embody these new polarities. "Woolley has a great story to tell and does it with racy vigour." - Maggie Gee, "Daily Telegraph". "A splendid and enthralling portrait." - Miranda Seymour, "Sunday Times". "An amazing story" - Ruth Padel, "The Independent". "An entertaining and thoughtful biography," - "The Guardian".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356453 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ada Lovelace, the result of Lord Byron's short- lived marriage to Annabella Milbanke, is an extraordinary figure in 19th-century society. Not only was she the daughter of a celebrity, but she was the first computer programmer the world has known.

From the moment she was born, in 1815, Ada was a controversial figure. Her mother, a woman known for her piety and intellect, had fled the marital home taking her three-week-old baby with her. In this first comprehensive biography of Lovelace, Benjamin Woolley contends that the child embodied a chasm between Romanticism as represented by her father, and Reason as represented by his wife. He examines how, as an adult, she struggled to reconcile these opposites by creating a "poetical science". But first he deals with her childhood. We learn of Annabella's ferocious educational regime, and a young girl who, understandably, took refuge in the imagination.

Woolley's achievement is in making accessible the scientific theories that absorbed Lovelace and that led to her breakthrough in computer science. His approach to her work is grounded in her domestic setting which he portrays as oppressive, and as hastening her early death in 1852 from cervical cancer. The Bride of Science is a powerful piece of work, entirely appropriate for a revolutionary woman. --Lilian Pizzichini

From the Back Cover

Known in her day as the "Enchantress of Numbers," Ada Lovelace was one of the most fascinating women of the 19th century. She rubbed elbows with many of the brightest scientific lights of her day, including the brilliant experimentalists Michael Faraday and Andrew Crosse­­arguably the model for Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. She was the protégé of the "Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science," Mary Sommerville. And, with mathematician Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine­­the mechanical "thinking machine" that anticipated the modern computer by more than a century­­she developed a set of instructions for mechanically calculating Bernoulli numbers, in effect, creating the first computer program. In recognition of her accomplishment, the US Department of Defense, in 1980, named its standard programming language, "Ada," thus, nearly one hundred and thirty years after her death, granting her the immortality she so craved.

Yet, as noted British journalist Benjamin Woolley reveals in this captivating, finely-nuanced portrait of that remarkable woman, Ada was far from being the cool and dispassionate exemplar of the modern scientific spirit. Born in 1815, the product of one of the most sensational (and disastrous) marriages of the 19th century­­that between the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" poet, Lord Byron and the celebrated intellectual reformist Annabella Milbanke­­Ada, perhaps more than any other figure of the early Victorian period, came to embody the widening rift between the worlds of Romanticism, typified by her brilliant, sybaritic father, and of reason and technology represented by her severe mother. In The Bride of Science, Woolley vividly details how, throughout her brief life, Ada struggled to reconcile those opposites, sometimes with disastrous results. He relates how, in her efforts to appease her "wayward" passions and to satisfy an equally powerful desire to leave her stamp upon the face of science, she openly experimented with the social and sexual conventions of her day, dabbled in the "dangerous" new ideas of mesmerism, phrenology, and materialism, and, ultimately, formulated the concept of a "poetical science" with which she hoped to bridge the gap between imagination and reason.

The Bride of Science is both the story of a life lived passionately and an intriguing rumination on the death of Romanticism and the birth of the Machine Age, offering profound insights into the seemingly irreconcilable gulf between art and science that persists to this day.

"A splendid and enthralling portrait."
­­The Sunday Times (London)

"It's a thriller."
­­New Scientist

"Her life spanned the era that began with the Battle of Waterloo and ended with the Great Exhibition­­a period of barely forty years that saw the world transformed. This was the age when social, intellectual and technological developments opened up deep fissured in culture, when romance began to split away from reason, instinct from intellect, art from science. Ada came to embody these new polarities. She struggled to reconcile them, and they tore her apart."
­­The Bride of Science

About the Author

Benjamin Woolley is a writer and broadcaster who has contributed to numerous BBC programs, including a Horizon on artificial life and a Bookmark on Aldous Huxley. His articles have appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, Virtual Worlds, examined the cultural impact of computer simulation and virtual reality.

Customer Reviews

Science and Poetry
Who better than Ada Byron can represent the turn from Romanticism to Victorian age in England? Ada, the heiress of the great poet Lord Byron has not only lived in such transitory epoch, but Passion and Science were running in her very own blood. She was brought up by her mother, Lady Byron, and initiated by her to mathematical and rational studies, everything that would keep Ada as far as possible from the tenebrous, irrational, dangerous and very passionate style of life of her father. This life style is what had led to the separation after only one year of merriage between Lord and Lady Byron, accompained by scandals, grief and resentment. Lady Byron's reaction to it was to try to repress Ada's paternal romantic vein with science. This will bring Ada to be in contact with the best scientists of the moment and even to be remembered as the first computer programmer, but won't preclude her from being a real Byron...

Moving, compelling, painlessly edifying, funny, exciting....
Human drama, poetry, science, historical fact and the most vividly and lovingly portrayed characters make this the most readable biography I have ever encountered. More amazingly, the technical bits that in similar books I would have skipped, were as exciting and compelling as the rest! Nobody could fail to be captivated by the remarkable Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

A good tale, well told, but too much about Ada's parents.
The title suggests that the emphasis of this book is science and the emerging role of woman in modern society and in science in particular. However it is more a study of changing Victorian values and ranges freely over the many passions into which men and women of the period could devote their energy - always provided that they had the financial means to support them.

Engineering and science are powerful passions but struggle to emerge from the much more powerful passion of sex. Benjamin Woolley's book is a sexual romp through the first half of the 19th century. It covers the sexual peccadilloes of Lord Byron, his sister Augusta, his wife Annabella and the attempts at suppressing the latent sexuality of Ada Byron. Sexual exploits of other members of the landed gentry are included to add spice where necessary.

The main science to emerge is ADA's 1843 paper about Babbage's Analytical Engine. It is this event, possibly the first example of a computer program, which gives the name ADA to a programming language used by the American military. Mary Somerville, who translated Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, was a good friend of Ada's and introduced her to Babbage

Other figures of science are woven into the tale: Andrew Grosse, whose experiments with electricity may have been the model for Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein; "Faraday was a fan of Ada's and asked Babbage for a portrait of her", Wheatstone suggested to Babbage that Ada was the person to write the English translation of Luigi Menabrea memoir on Babbage's Analytical Engine, and it was Babbage himself who suggested that Ada should add some notes of her own to the translation. Charles Lyell was later called in to arbitrate over whether a note added by Babbage should be identified as such in the published notes.

It is a good tale, well told, although the amount devoted to Ada's parents, whilst necessary background, seems unnecessarily long. The book is 416 pages and has a good index of 14 pages, with 22 pages of notes and selected bibliography.