A Female Genius: How Ada Lovelace Started the Computer Age Read Free

London.
    Whatever the true cause of Amelia’s demise, her income died with her, and as Mad Jack had by now abandoned his military career, such as it had been, he needed cash badly.
    In the traditional way of handsome aristocratic rakes who did not want to do anything so tedious as earn a living, Mad Jack ventured to Bath, a famous west-of-England spa town whose very name proclaims its primary historical function. The Romans had pioneered bathing in the supposedly healthy water. By the eighteenth century, Bath was still famous for its waters, and also for the opportunities it offered impoverished noblemen for finding a wealthy heiress.
    Before long, Jack’s good looks and easy charm had enabled him to do precisely that. The lady he successfully wooed ticked all his boxes of youth, wealth and vulnerability.
    The lady, Catherine Gordon, was Scottish, a big girl and rather ungainly in her manner, though she liked dancing and was good-natured. Catherine was the oldest and by that time the only living daughter of George Gordon, twelfth Laird of Gight, Ada’s grandfather. Catherine was born in the County of Aberdeen in 1764, and brought up in the Castle of Gight, which is in the parish of Fyvie in the Formatine district of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
    The exact date of Catherine’s birth does not appear to be known, but she was christened on April 22 1764, and so she was probably born about a week before that.
    Catherine had plenty of money due to her family inheritance. Mad Jack was as interested in Catherine’s money as in Catherine, and indeed probably more so. The Byrons were not famous for the longevity of their virtue, or of their marriages. Soon after the happy couple were united, Mad Jack – relishing the prospect of living in a castle, and even more delighted at the juicy prospect of gaining comprehensive access to Catherine’s money – began an orgy of spending.
    Married women had few legal rights at the time and were not even regarded as a separate legal entity from their husband. Any money a woman had automatically became her husband’s once they were married.
    Poor Catherine – she would be poor soon – fell head over heels for Mad Jack, but only because in the classic fashion of rakes, he’d been careful to disguise his true nature until after the wedding.
    Within a year of the marriage being solemnised, John Byron had spent most of his wife’s fortune. Before she met him, she had about £22,000 (£35 million today). The inheritance rapidly disappeared, even to the extent of forests on Gight land being felled in order for the timber to be sold and the money to line Mad Jack’s pockets for the brief tenure it had in them before being expended on some insane frivolity.
    Within eighteen months of the marriage, there was almost no money left in the estate, and what was still there was paid to Mad Jack’s new creditors because, in common with many of his Byron forebears, he wasn’t only content to spend money he had, but also money he didn’t. Catherine remained not only in love with her husband but infatuated with him. The scale of his financial extravagance, however, upset her profoundly. She was left only with the income from about £4,200 that her trustees had managed to sequester from her husband.
    Before long, the threat of jail for debt induced Mad Jack to flee to Paris. Flitting off to the Continent was the usual Byron technique for dealing with debt. By the end of 1787, Catherine – unwilling, despite her persisting love for her husband, to spend any more time in Paris living in straitened circumstances – came back to London. Mad Jack couldn’t join her in London because if he had, he would have been jailed for debt right away. By now, she was pregnant, and on January 22 1788, her son and only child came into this world. Catherine named him George Gordon, after her father.
    The future poet Lord Byron was born with a caul, a harmless membrane, over his head. In medieval times a caul had been seen as