That acquaintance, as it turned out, did come her way. After he was introduced to her formally, Byron decided that she might make a suitable wife. It was, for him, a rare display of reason over romanticism. Rather than arousing his passions, she seemed to be the sort of woman who might tame those passions and protect him from his excesses—as well as help pay off his burdensome debts. He proposed to her halfheartedly by letter. She sensibly declined. He wandered off to far less appropriate liaisons, including one with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. But after a year, Annabella rekindled the courtship. Byron, falling more deeply in debt while grasping for a way to curb his enthusiasms, saw the rationale if not the romance in the possible relationship. “Nothing but marriage and a speedy one can save me,” he admitted to Annabella’s aunt. “If your niece is obtainable, I should prefer her; if not, the very first woman who does not look as if she would spit in my face.”¹⁰ There were times when Lord Byron was not a romantic. He and Annabella were married in January 1815.

Byron initiated the marriage in his Byronic fashion. “Had Lady Byron on the sofa before dinner,” he wrote about his wedding day.¹¹ Their relationship was still active when they visited his half sister two months later, because around then Annabella got pregnant. However, during the visit she began to suspect that her husband’s friendship with Augusta went beyond the fraternal, especially after he lay on a sofa and asked them both to take turns kissing him.¹² The marriage started to unravel.

Annabella had been tutored in mathematics, which amused Lord Byron, and during their courtship he had joked about his own disdain for the exactitude of numbers. “I know that two and two make four—and should be glad to prove it too if I could,” he wrote, “though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert two and two into five it would give me much greater pleasure.” Early on, he affectionately dubbed her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” But when the marriage began to sour, he refined that mathematical image: “We are two parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet.” Later, in the first canto of his epic poem Don Juan, he would mock her: “Her favourite science was the mathematical. . . . She was a walking calculation.”

The marriage was not saved by the birth of their daughter on December 10, 1815. She was named Augusta Ada Byron, her first name that of Byron’s too-beloved half sister. When Lady Byron became convinced of her husband’s perfidy, she thereafter called her daughter by her middle name. Five weeks later she packed her belongings into a carriage and fled to her parents’ country home with the infant Ada.

Ada never saw her father again. Lord Byron left the country that April after Lady Byron, in letters so calculating that she earned his sobriquet of “Mathematical Medea,” threatened to expose his alleged incestuous and homosexual affairs as a way to secure a separation agreement that gave her custody of their child.¹³

The opening of canto 3 of Childe Harold, written a few weeks later, invokes Ada as his muse:

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!

Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart?

When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,

And then we parted.

Byron wrote these lines in a villa by Lake Geneva, where he was staying with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife, Mary. It rained relentlessly. Trapped inside for days, Byron suggested they write horror stories. He produced a fragment of a tale about a vampire, one of the first literary efforts on that subject, but Mary’s story was the one that became a classic: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Playing on the ancient Greek myth of the hero who crafted a living man out of clay and snatched fire from the gods for human use, Frankenstein was the story of a scientist who galvanized a man-made assemblage into a thinking human. It was a cautionary tale about technology and science. It also raised the question that would become associated with Ada: Can man-made machines ever truly think?

The third canto of Childe Harold ends with Byron’s prediction that Annabella would try to keep Ada from knowing about her father, and so it happened. There was a portrait of Lord Byron at their house, but Lady Byron kept it securely veiled, and Ada never saw it until she was twenty.¹⁴

Lord Byron, by contrast, kept a picture of Ada on his desk wherever he wandered, and his letters often requested news or portraits of her. When she was seven, he wrote to Augusta, “I wish you would obtain from Lady B some accounts of Ada’s disposition. . . . Is the girl imaginative? . . . Is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in the family.” Lady Byron reported that Ada had an imagination that was “chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity.”¹⁵

Around that time, Byron, who had been wandering through Italy, writing and having an assortment of affairs, grew bored and decided to enlist in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. He sailed for Missolonghi, where he took command of part of the rebel army and prepared to attack a Turkish fortress. But before he could engage in battle, he caught a violent cold that was made worse by his doctor’s decision to treat him by bloodletting. On April 19, 1824, he died. According to his valet, among his final words were “Oh, my poor dear child!—my dear Ada! My God, could I have seen her! Give her my blessing.”¹⁶

ADA

Lady Byron wanted to make sure that Ada did not turn out like her father, and part of her strategy was to have the girl rigorously study math, as if it were an antidote to poetic imagination. When Ada, at age five, showed a preference for geography, Lady Byron ordered that the subject be replaced by additional arithmetic lessons, and her governess soon proudly reported, “She adds up sums of five or six rows of figures with accuracy.” Despite these efforts, Ada developed some of her father’s propensities. She had an affair as a young teenager with one of her tutors, and when they were caught and the tutor banished, she tried to run away from home to be with him. In addition, she had mood swings that took her from feelings of grandiosity to despair, and she suffered various maladies both physical and psychological.

Ada accepted her mother’s conviction that an immersion in math could help tame her Byronic tendencies. After her dangerous liaison with her tutor, and inspired by Babbage’s Difference Engine, she decided on her own, at eighteen, to begin a new series of lessons. “I must cease to think of living for pleasure or self-gratification,” she wrote her new tutor. “I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems to keep my imagination from running wild. . . . It appears to me that the first thing is to go through a course of Mathematics.” He agreed with the prescription: “You are right in supposing that your chief resource and safeguard at the present is in a course of severe intellectual study. For this purpose there is no subject to be compared to Mathematics.”¹⁷ He prescribed Euclidean geometry, followed by a dose of trigonometry and algebra. That should cure anyone, they both thought, from having too many artistic or romantic passions.

Her interest in technology was stoked when her mother took her on a trip through the British industrial midlands to see the new factories and machinery. Ada was particularly impressed with an automated weaving loom that used punch cards to direct the creation of the desired fabric patterns, and she drew a sketch of how it worked. Her father’s famous speech in the House of Lords had defended the Luddites who had smashed such looms because of their fear of what technology might inflict on humanity. But Ada waxed poetical about them and saw the connection with what would someday be called computers. “This Machinery reminds me of Babbage and his gem of all mechanism,” she wrote.¹⁸