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Byron’s daughter on a subject women weren’t supposed to understand. It is also a key text in the history of computing. Not only had Ada produced the very first computer program – a plan to get the machine to produce the complex sequence known as Bernoulli numbers – she also allowed her imagination free rein, predicting that in the future such an engine might be used to compose music and reproduce graphics and become an invaluable tool for science, commerce and the arts. More even than Babbage himself, Ada Lovelace saw the awesome potential of what was one day to be known as the computer. In 1979, the US defence department named their software language ‘Ada’ in her honour, and her portrait is on the holographic stickers Microsoft use to authenticate their products.
    Over the next decade, Babbage again tried and failed to get his engine built. Ada had other priorities. Her social status enhanced by her success, she was busy living up to her Byronic inheritance. Dosed on laudanum or cannabis to dull the pain of a slow-growing cancer, she fell out with her mother and her husband by plunging into a series of intense relationships. She had a brief affair with Dickens and then fell for John Crosse, a professional gambler who inspired her to devise a mathematical system to beat the bookies. There is no record of whether it worked, but her daughter Anne did go on to found the Crabbet stud, from which almost all the world’s pure-bred Arabian horses now claim descent. Ada died at thirty-six, exactly the same age as Byron himself, and, for all her mother’s attempts to keep them apart, she was buried with him.
    Ada’s story is an interesting variant on the absent-father scenario. Whether consciously or not, she established some kind of harmonic resonance with his memory during her short life, nodoubt encouraged by her mother’s hysterical attempts to suppress it. Who knows how the father–daughter bond might have evolved if he had lived? Byron’s life and relationships were notoriously messy, full of betrayal and recrimination. Her story reminds us that sometimes a dead father, particularly an iconic one, might be more useful than a living one.

     
    Hans, the father of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), died when his son was eleven, but by then the die was already cast. The Danish storyteller responsible for some of the most popular tales ever told endured a life of misery that bordered on the operatic. He was born in an Odense slum, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman (possibly the only thing he had in common with Stalin). The family lived in a one-room house and, even before his father’s death, the young Hans had been subjected to enough trauma to fill a lifetime of therapy. Several biographers have suggested he may have suffered sexual abuse as a boy – in his mostly autobiographical first novel, The Improvisatore , a man called Federico lures a young boy into a cave – and an early teacher called Fedder Carstens, whom Andersen claimed was ‘fond of me, gave me cakes and flowers and patted me on the cheeks’, mysteriously left town within a year of Andersen’s arrival at the school. As an adult, Andersen had a severe dislike of underground places.
    They were a warm family, but his father became obsessed with the idea let slip by his grandmother that the family had once been rich and possibly even royal. This made an impression on the young Hans and fuelled his sense of being different from the other children in his neighbourhood. As soon as his father died, he was forced to work to support himself. It was a dismal experience.While helping his grandmother at a hospital for the insane, he looked through a crack in a door and saw a naked woman in a room singing to herself. The woman noticed him and threw herself at the door in a murderous rage: the little trapdoor through which she received her food sprang open and she glared at him, her fingers scrabbling at his clothes. When an attendant at last arrived,