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 The entrance to the crypt where Lord Byron was buried inside the Church of St. Mary Magdalene at Hucknall Torkard. Picture by Androom (22 Jun 2009) |
Byron, Ada, Lady Lovelace |
| NOBLEMAN, MATHEMATICIAN (ENGLAND) |
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BORN 10 Dec 1815, London: 13 Piccadilly Terrace (now: 139 Piccadilly) - DIED 27 Nov 1852, London: 6 Great Cumberland Place, Marylebone BIRTH NAME Byron, Augusta Ada CAUSE OF DEATH uterine cancer GRAVE LOCATION Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire: Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Ogle Street |
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Daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke. Byron left Annabella a month after Ada's birth and she would never see her father again. At seventeen Ada met Mary Somerville, one of the few successful female mathematicians. Her mother also took an interest in maths and had even been called Princess of Parallelograms by the poet. In 1833 she had an affair with a tutor and tried eloped with him after it came out. The affair was hushed up to avoid a scandal. In 1835 she married William, 8th Lord King, who later became Earl of Lovelace. Therefore Ada was known as Ada Lovelace since 1838. She became involved with Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine and translated and annotated Luigi Federico Menabrea's description of it ("Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage" (1842), translated as "Elements of Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine"). The annotations were more extensive than Menabrea's description and an important addition was her analysis of how the analytical machine could be programmed to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This is why she was regarded as the first computer programmer in the twentieth century. After the birth of her third child she suffered a mental collapse and her doctors gave her a prescription for a combination of alcohol and drugs, among them laudanum. She had hallucinations and at one time thought she was communicating with God. She managed to stop using the drugs, but then started to bet on horse races. She used Babbage to bring her money to the bookmakers to hide her gambling habit. At the time she was dying of uterine cancer she was in debt as well as being blackmailed. Her mother refused Babbage to see her at her deathbed. Her husband had left her bedside after she had confessed something to him on August 30th, what it was is unknown. Charles Dickens - with whom she had stayed in Brighton in 1849 - did visit her and was one of the last persons (apart from her family) to see her alive. On her own request she was buried beside the father she had never known. Like Byron she had only reached the age of 36. Family • Father: Byron, George Noel Gordon • Mother: Milbanke, Anna Isabella • Daughter: Noel, Anne Isabella, 15th Baroness Wentworth • Sister: Byron, Allegra Related persons • cooperated with Babbage, Charles • has a connection with Dickens, Charles • has a connection with Menabrea, Luigi Federico, Marquis of Valdora Events |
| 1/11/1816 | Ada Augusta Byron is baptised. By that time her father, Lord Byron, had already left England for the continent and he would never see her again. |
| 0/0/1829 | Ada Byron suffers from the measels and becomes and invalid |
| 0/0/1833 | Ada Byron regains her health. She had been an invalid since she suffered from the measels in 1829. |
| 8/7/1835 | Ada Byron attends a conference where Babbage's Analytical Machine is presented. She soon befriends Babbage. [Babbage, Charles] |
| 0/0/1840 | Ada Byron starts studying mathematics with Auguste de Morgan |
| 0/8/1843 | Ada Byron publishes her translation and notes on Menebrae's description of the Analytical Engine. It was a translation of a description that was written and published by L.F. Menebrae. Ada added lots of notes to the translation. The Analytical Engine was designed by her friend Charles Babbage. [Babbage, Charles][Menabrea, Luigi Federico, Marquis of Valdora] |
| 0/0/1850 | Ada Byron visits Newstead Abbey. It was the former home of her father Lord Byron. |
| 15/6/1938 | Lord Byron's tomb is openend. That afternoon and evening Hucknall Parish Church was closed for the public. In the tomb the coffins of Byron and his daughter Ada were found. After Byron's coffin was openend it became clear that his body was reasonably intact. There was still hair on his head, body and limbs. Parts of his body were skeletized. There were holes in his head and his breast where his brains and bowels were removed. The tomb was photographed, the body wasn't. [Byron, George Noel Gordon ] |
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The entrance to the crypt where Lord Byron was buried inside the Church of St. Mary Magdalene at Hucknall Torkard. Picture by Androom (22 Jun 2009) |
Sources • Crawford, Anne and others, The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women, Europa Publications Ltd, London, 1983 • Longford, Elizabeth, The Life of Byron, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1976 • Seymour, Miranda, In Byron's Wake, The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron's Wife and Daughter, Simon & Schuster, London, 2018 • Woolley, Benjamin, The Bride of Science, Romance, Reason and Byron's Daughter, MacMillan, London, 1999 |
