"The Extraordinary Guests of Charles Babbage’s Saturday Night Soirées"
From Messy Nessy Chic, October 22:
Forget your standard 19th-century dinner parties, where everyone sat
around sipping sherry and discussing the weather. If you were lucky
enough to snag an invite to Charles Babbage’s Saturday night scientific
soirées, you were in for a wild ride through the brainiest and most
bizarre conversations that Victorian London had to offer. Picture a mad
mix of engineers, poets, inventors, and maybe a magician or two, all
crowding into Babbage’s house on Dorset Street in Westminster, ready to
debate everything from algebra to automata (while probably getting a
little tipsy).
Babbage, our host with the most (complex mechanical
calculations), is rightly remembered as the “father of the computer” —
though no one actually knew what a computer was back then. He was a man
who saw the potential of machines to transform human society long before
anyone else could and his vision for mechanical computation laid the
groundwork for the digital age. The concepts he developed—programmable
machines, stored memory, and automated calculation—are the backbone of
modern computing.
At his infamous Saturday night gatherings which he held in the 1830s
and 40s, Babbage would often present his latest ideas and inventions,
using the soirées as a platform to engage with other great minds like
Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, and even literary figures
like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. These events weren’t just
social—they were intellectual incubators where ideas that shaped the
modern world were exchanged and debated. soirées were a Victorian
version of TED Talks, minus the PowerPoints, with a heavy dose of
eccentricity. I thought we could highlight just some of the quirky
characters who made Babbage’s gatherings legendary…
Ada Lovelace: The Original Queen of Code
Ada Lovelace, “the first tech visionary”
You
can’t mention Babbage’s soirées without talking about Ada Lovelace. She
wasn’t just any guest — Ada was basically the queen of mathematics. She
not only worked with Babbage on his never-quite-finished Analytical
Engine but also envisioned that it could do more than just crunch
numbers. Lady Lovelace imagined a machine that could compose music, draw
pictures, and maybe even predict the weather (if only it weren’t in
London). Ada’s sharp wit and even sharper mind made her a star of
Babbage’s soirées, where she held her own among the men, probably while
wearing some killer Victorian gowns. She was also the only legitimate
daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and knew how to flirt with a
scandal or two. Lord Byron, famously mad, bad, and dangerous to know,
was involved in more than a few scandals of his own, including
well-known affairs, rumored incest, and general chaos. Though Ada was
raised by her mother to be the polar opposite of Byron, his
controversial legacy undoubtedly followed her around, particularly in
society circles that loved a bit of gossip.
Lovelace had a bit of a wild streak, and one of the juiciest chapters
in her life involved a rather unhealthy obsession with gambling. After
being introduced to the world of horse racing by her husband, Ada’s
interest soon spiraled into a full-blown addiction. She wasn’t just a
casual gambler, either—she got involved in complex betting schemes,
applying her mathematical genius to the betting systems in an effort to
“beat the odds.” Even beyond the gambling and romantic whispers, Ada
Lovelace was inherently scandalous simply by being a woman operating at
such an intellectual level in the Victorian era. Near the end of her
life, she had a religious transformation and began to repent the conduct
of her life. After confessing something to her husband 3 months before
her death, he abandoned her bedside. It is not known what she told him.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Big Dreamer with a Bigger Hat
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
It’s
no surprise that one of the greatest engineers of the 19th century
would pop up at Babbage’s parties. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with his
iconic stovepipe hat and larger-than-life personality, was all about
pushing the limits of what was possible — whether it was building
massive bridges or railways that seemed to defy gravity. You can bet
Babbage and Brunel spent hours nerding out over mechanical designs while
everyone else in the room pretended to understand. But Brunel’s
larger-than-life ideas matched Babbage’s own, and the two of them were
probably the loudest voices in any conversation about steam engines or,
you know, the future of human progress....
We caught this on the same day NASA announces Boeing's Starliner spaceship will return empty as Space-X rescues the stranded astronauts. It seems to have been all downhill at the Royal Society since Pepys, Wren and Newton ran the place.
