How Ada Lovelace Predicted The Rise of AI

Vulgar History Podcast

How Ada Lovelace Predicted the Rise of AI 

May 13, 2026

Ann: Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and we are in the Regency Era season; we’ve been talking about people living mostly in England, the late 1700s, early 1800s, what is commonly known as the Regency era, AKA the Georgian period. Today, we’re sort of closing out that chapter, this is not the finale of the Regency Era, that’s next week, but we’re talking about a person who was born in the Regency era, and then she lived a bit later on. So, we’re sort of like, bookending things. And that person we’re talking about is Ada Lovelace. I have a very special guest today, this episode would not exist without her because I didn’t realize Ada Lovelace was interesting until this person made me read about her. Welcome, returning guest, Lana Wood Johnson. 

Lana: Hello. It is me, the resident nerd. [giggles] 

Ann: So, for people who maybe haven’t heard a Lana Wood Johnson episode yet, can you explain your historical interests and expertise, and what sort of episodes people are in store for when you’re on the scene? 

Lana: Expertise is a little bit a strong word. I have a history degree that I used to become an IT nerd and a database person. But when I studied, I studied early modern history. I secretly also studied modern history because that’s what I actually wanted. I have a strange obsession with the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburgs because they’re interesting. 

Ann: Not talking about either of those things today. 

Lana: But we’re not talking about that. Today, today what we’re talking about is what I used my history degree for, which is data analytics, and I actually went into history of population. So, I love technology, and of course, I love anybody that has to do with technology, and more importantly, the social science aspect of technology, not just the hardware and the geekery of it. 

Ann: And Ada Lovelace, before, you know what? I’m going to just throw it out there right now. Trigger warning: Lord Byron. She is the daughter of Lord Byron. So, we’re going to have to talk about him a bit, but he dies very early on in this story. All that I knew about her, I think, I know for a fact, you suggested we should do an episode about her, and I was just like, “Eugh, Lana…” I don’t know what’s wrong with me that when you suggest a podcast idea, they’re always good, but I’m like, “Eugh!” You were the one who was like, “You should do a season on Marie Antoinette,” and I was like, “No, thanks,” and then, you know, that happened. 

Lana: I’ll agree, Maria Theresa was not scandalicious in the slightest, [laughs] but she did give us the passive-aggressive letters. 

Ann: So, when you suggested Ada Lovelace, here’s what I knew about Ada Lovelace, and maybe this is what some listeners also know about Ada Lovelace, so we’re all going to learn together, which I just vaguely knew. I work for a public library, and my job at the public library is I help to choose which books to order for the library. And so, I’m very familiar with the fact that there are numerous, I would say dozens, of children’s book biographies about Ada Lovelace that focus on like “Girls can be computer programmers too! Women in STEM!” You know, like, “Rebel Girls presents: Ada Lovelace. She invented computers!” 

So, all I knew was just she was this person that there’s picture books about, and I, misguidedly, assumed that an oldey times woman or girl who’s interested in science would be boring, would be a person who’s studious and does not get up to anything scandalous, and I was incorrect. [Lana laughs] I was incorrect. Women in STEM can be messy bitches, and that’s what Ada Lovelace is here to show us. 

Lana: When I was pitching this episode to Ann, I’m like, “No, what I am doing is I’m stealing an Allison episode right from under her, because this is like, dirtbag central.” 

Ann: The Ada Lovelace story, it’s really, it’s really at the Venn diagram of your interests, my interests, Allison’s interests. It’s like, right there! And I just didn’t know I was part of that Venn diagram, because I just assumed, based on people who I know in my personal life who are interested in math and science, I thought that the people, all people, who are interested in math and science are just kind of, like, boring nerds. No… no. 

Lana: No. Science… Technology in particular doesn’t move forward without people that have just, like, the most outlandish ideas and intentions, and there’s always two sets of people. Like, in Apple, there was Steve Wozniak, who is the stereotypical hardware nerd, wanted to make computers be computers, and then there was Steve Jobs, who like, studied Zen and was obsessed with health, and made people put their degrees on the outside of their cubicles so he’d know whether or not they were worth talking to. Like, he was a messy bitch.  [laughs] Those two people are necessary to move technology forward, and we have one of those examples for today. 

Ann: She is the Steve Jobs side of that, listeners. 

Lana: Yes. 

Ann: As you might guess, when I told you who her father was, genetically, this woman was not going to not be a messy bitch, at least 50 percent. 

Lana: Her mother tries. [laughs]

Ann: Her mother tries real hard. But yeah, the Byron genes are strong. [Lana giggles] But it’s also an interesting story to do in this podcast in this context because we started the Regency Era series talking about, like, Mary Shelley— Well, actually, no, we start with Mary Wollstonecraft, we’re in the late 1700s getting through. So, you know, Lord Byron looming large over all of this, frankly, in a way that I don’t appreciate. But Ada Lovelace was born, she was born literally in the Regency era. There’s people in this story who we’ve seen before in previous episodes, like, she’s interact— Her mother certainly is interacting with one of these people. 

Last week’s episode, we were talking about, you haven’t heard it yet, Lana, because it hasn’t come out yet – but Lady Caroline Lamb, who, Lady Caroline Lamb was present when Lord Byron met his brief wife. Well, they briefly lived as man and wife. So, just to explain, sort of, where did she come from? 

Actually, no, first, I’m going to say my main resource for this is I read a biography by Miranda Seymour called In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, and it’s a really good read. You were telling me before, when pitching this episode and coaching me through my aversion to learning about scientists, you’re saying like, “No, no, no. Byron, he’s not present, but like, he’s so large in this story.” 

Lana: The genes run true. [giggles] 

Ann: So, I like that this book is called In Byron’s Wake. You know, it’s like, he came on the scene, married her, fathered this child, died, but like, his influence overwhelms both of their lives, really. So, I read this biography by, it’s really good by Miranda Seymour, and then, also just for sort of factual fact-checking, I’ve got the entry here in front of me for Ada Lovelace from, it’s called The Women of World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, kind of just to go through, to make sure I don’t miss any of the facts and figures. 

So, she’s known as Ada Lovelace; she was never called that in her life. Well, she was born Augusta Ada Byron, and we need to get into this… There’s going to be numerous sidebars. Listeners, actually, can I just say? Listeners, if you’re the sort of person who wants a podcast that’s sort of someone just reading out loud an encyclopedia entry, you’re not going to get that here. There’s going to be giggles, there’s going to be sidebars, there’s going to be lots of tangents. So, if that’s you and you don’t like that, turn off this episode now. Don’t leave me silly reviews on Apple Podcasts, being like, “It took them 20 minutes to get to the topic.” Like, that’s the point of this show. And when Lana and I get together, there’s a lot of extra sidebars. So, just trigger warning. 

Lana: We already know at least one. [giggles] It’s just going to be what it is. And if you like this, then on the Patreon, there’s Ann, Allison, and me doing this constantly on our Vulgarpiece Theatre. 

Ann: Exactly. So, yeah, if you like the chit chat, join the Patreon and/or just listen to this episode. If you don’t like the chit chat, peace out and go listen to, I don’t know, Noble Blood, whatever. 

So, we’ve got Augusta Ada Byron, and… Tangent number one, she’s named Augusta after Lord Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh. [Lana laughs] Lana’s chortling because she knows what I have to explain to you now. 

Lana: I’m sorry. This is definitely time to go. 

Ann: There will be giggles. So, Lord Byron had a half-sister called Augusta Leigh. This is crucial, I think. They were not raised together, and they didn’t really know about each other until they were fully adults. And then they met, and then they, by most accounts, had a years-long sexual relationship, half-brother and half-sister. And although we’re in an era where a lot of first cousins got married, siblings was a step too far for this culture. 

Lana: Even the Regency. 

Ann: Even this wild ass, Jersey Shore time period, siblings was a step too far. So, she was named Augusta after Byron’s sister, a person who… So, her mother is Annabella Milbanke. Annabella Milbanke is this, like, really wealthy— She’s very interesting. If one is to read this book, In Byron’s Wake, I learned a lot about Annabella Milbanke. We’ll see this throughout her life, and it transforms in some ways that I find less pleasant, but as a young person, she was so sure of herself. She was, like, the surprise child of older parents, and they just worshiped her, they adored her, they thought she was so great. Everybody loved her in society. She was this heiress, and everyone thought she was so great. 

And then, when she entered the marriage market, it’s like, who’s she going to marry? And everybody wanted to marry her because she was cute and pretty, but also, like, this heiress with lots of money. And she’s just like, “No, no.” And she was in the marriage market for three seasons, like three years in a row, and she just kept saying no to everybody, and her parents were like, “That’s fine. We love you,” which is regrettable, who she ended up choosing to marry. But her thing, why she was turning everybody down, Annabella Milbanke, was because she read a lot of novels, and she really wanted a great love; she didn’t want to just marry some guy. 

Lana: First mistake. [giggles] 

Ann: Oh, second mistake is the novels she read were about virtuous young women who were reformed rakes. So, she wanted to find a guy she could fix. She wanted to find… [laughs] 

Lana: Second mistake. [laughs] 

Ann: Well, and I mean, and the third mistake is that Byron, she’s like, “Oh, here’s a person, here’s a messy bitch who I can fix with my excellence and Christianity,” or whatever. 

Lana: And math, maybe a lot of math. 

Ann: Oh, yeah. No, she loves math. Byron called her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” There’s a lot of cute nicknames. 

Lana: And this man is known for being a poet. [laughs] 

Ann: Yeah. She loves math, and she read a lot of novels, and wanted to fulfill this, like, trope of finding a man and fixing him, but it’s like, “That’s a trope in books, Annabella. This is not how life works.” Anyway, so she chose Byron to marry. 

And the other thing about this— And then he was kind of like, “No, I can’t,” and that just made her even more invested in it because he was behaving – intentionally, because this is how he always behaved – like a hero from a novel, and then she’s just like, “Oh, he’s fulfilling everything.” I mean, we talked about this in last week’s episode about Lady Caroline Lamb. Alexandra Vasti was on, the romance novelist, and like, she hates Byron so much. Like, I hate Byron… 

Lana: [laughs] Who doesn’t hate Byron? If you don’t hate Byron, you’re not in the right place. 

Ann: Well, and she kept saying, Alexandra, she’s just like, “WHY?! Why is everyone drawn to him? Why?” And I understand why people are drawn to him, because he was very hot. 

Lana: He had a lot of charisma. Like, his charisma was very high. 

Ann: He was hot and charismatic. He’s just like, I’m just trying to think of somebody… I don’t know. 

Lana: I’m sure his love bombs were hard. 

Ann: Oh, my gosh, yeah. And he’s a poet, and he’s inspiring this like, “I can fix him” feeling. Like, what I’m picturing is, like, ER-era George Clooney in terms of just, like, handsomeness mixed with charisma, where it’s just like, “Well, I would be helpless in front of that, too.” In modern times, for the younger listeners, I’m thinking maybe Connor Storrie, who is nice, but also very charismatic, very hot. So, it’s just like, you have no chance. 

Lana: Less narcissism. 

Ann: Yeah. Connor Storrie, not exactly right. But like, Connor Storrie if he was shitty. 

Lana: Connor Storrie, if he were actually Ilya. [laughs]

Ann: Yeah. Connor Storrie, if you give him dark hair dye, I think could play Byron in a very— 

Lana: Oh, yeah. 

Ann: He has the curly hair. 

Anyway. So, Byron wins her over, and at this point, it’s like, why? Why Byron? Like, you’re fucking your sister. You’re fucking everybody. Like, why do you want to marry… Lady Caroline Lamb is like… 

Lana: The rich heiress? Why would he want to marry the rich heiress? [laughs] 

Ann: Well, that’s why. Because Lord Byron was very famous and very popular and very hot, but he had never been wealthy, and he needed money. And so, he met Annabella Milbanke, and so they got married. But the thing about this, too, is like, and this is, you know, ladies, spend time alone with a man before marrying him, is one of the things we learned from Annabella Milbanke. Don’t just let this all take place via letters. 

Lana: Especially with a narcissistic poet. [giggles]

Ann: Yeah. So, they agreed to get married, and the first time she’s alone with him was, like, in the carriage ride, like after their wedding, and she was just like, “Oh! Oh, no, he’s shitty,” and she realized pretty much right away, but it was too late, they were already married. And she didn’t know yet, but he’s in this sexual affair with his sister, Augusta Leigh, and why would Annabella think that was happening? Augusta Leigh is on the scene a lot, and she’s like, “This is great. We can be this fun trio: a husband, a wife and the husband’s sister. Pals.” [laughs softly]

Lana: [laughs] “Best friends.” 

Ann: “Chums.” So, Augusta Leigh is on the scene a lot, Augusta Leigh is like being a messy bitch about it. She’s acting jealously, and Annabella Milbanke is just like, “We’re friends. This is nice.” 

Lana: Yeah, Annabella’s situational awareness was not high. 

Ann: No, no. 

Lana: That continues for the rest of her life. 

Ann: Well, the thing with Annabella, too, as I mentioned, she was the only child of older parents. Like, everything had always gone really well for her. She had never had challenges in life. She just assumed everything was nice, always, because she was rich. 

Lana: She’s also kind of the stereotypical homeschool kid. Like, she was really smart, she spent a lot of time… She voluntarily learned things, as opposed to, like, reluctantly learning things. So, she is kind of that homeschool kid that didn’t get out much and maybe doesn’t… [giggles] Definitely reads too much. 

Ann: Yeah, well, definitely takes novels at face value. 

So, this does become important later on. Byron and his sister, Augusta, had a child together. He was the father of Augusta’s daughter, Medora, who comes in later. Medora, similar age to Ada. Anyway, Ada is born, named after Augusta, because Annabella at this point still doesn’t know that Byron is fucking his sister. So, her name is technically Augusta Ada Byron when she’s born. She’s known by everybody as Ada, and when she was five months old, Annabella was just like, she finally figured it all out, and she was like, “Fuck this and fuck you, and goodbye,” and she leaves him.

Lana: She is smart enough to figure it out. Like, “No. Not my child.” 

Ann: Yeah. And part of the reason why the marriage falls apart, despite Annabella being a very conventional, like, following the rules, like the thought of leaving a husband would be… This is a real last resort for her. But he, Byron. [sighs] And you know what? Listen back, listeners, I did a whole episode with Emily Edwards about Byron, but he had various psychological issues, which were not helped by the fact that he drank a lot and seemingly was allergic to alcohol, so when he drank, it like, affected him really profoundly. Anyway, he was abusive to her. 

You know what? Good for her. She figured this out. She married him, bad decision. But like you were just saying, she’s a sheltered homeschool girl, but when she figured out it was a shitty decision, like, this was bad, she left because she knew her parents would always support her and always love her. 

Lana: And that’s more than a lot of the women in his life. She’s like, “No, not my child. Not me anymore. We’re out of here. Go be shitty to someone else.” 

Ann: Well, and this is where, when we’re looking at Ada Lovelace and just in terms of like, fifty percent of her DNA is Byron, and fifty percent is Annabella, who is like a strong-willed person, to be raising her. You know, just imagine listeners what kind of person Ada Lovelace is going to be when these are the parents. Like, could not be stronger personalities in oppositional directions. 

So, usually… Well, legally in this time, the custody of children always went to the dad, and we’ve seen that a bit in this Regency Era season, like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the husband always had possession of the children. This is a reason why a lot of wives wouldn’t leave their husbands, because they didn’t want to abandon their children. But Byron was just like, “No, it’s fine, bye!” 

Lana: If anybody’s going to abandon their children, it’s going to be Byron. It’s kind of his thing. 

Ann: Well, and this is 1815. So, Byron leaves, and this is also at the time period where Byron… So, he was really famous, really popular, and then rumours of his incestuous relationship with his sister started to spread; there were rumours about him having, like, gay relationships. He suddenly was, like, too scandalous for Regency London, which is saying a lot. So, he left to continental Europe. He was just like, “See you later, England,” and this is where he went off, and one of the things he ended up doing was renting a villa in Switzerland, where the Shelleys came. It’s at this point where Claire Clairmont is like, “You know what I’m going to do? Become the love of Byron’s life.” Like, Claire! 

Lana: After seeing all of this, and all of the mess, like, the fact that he couldn’t even keep his own child. [laughs] 

Ann: He’s got a lot going on, Claire. You’re like, 17th in his list of priorities. Poor Claire. 

So, unlike some other relationships with some other couples, Byron was just like… Annabella leaves him, and then Byron leaves the country, and so she just raises Ada by herself, and there’s no like, you know, custody battles or anything, because he’s just like, “Goodbye, everybody!” Like, Annabella is like, “Okay, great. This worked out pretty well, actually.” So anyway, they separated, and it’s kind of like, well, I guess she’s legally in charge, or we’re not sure. But then Lord Byron died in 1824 of a cold when, like, play-acting as a Greek freedom fighter in Greece. Allegedly, his dying words were addressed to his daughter. Allegedly, he said, “Oh, my poor dear child, my dear Ada, my God, could I have but seen her? Give her my blessing.” Don’t think he said that. 

Lana: Yeah, I don’t think he remembered he had a kid. Of the kids he had, I don’t think he specifically remembered Ada either. 

Ann: Nope, I don’t think so. 

So, Ada is growing up in her mom’s household. I do want to say… I will get you, Lana, to explain what it was like growing up with Annabella, but I want to say, I have a cat, her name is Hepburn. She’s asleep right now, but she often likes to stroll around when I’m recording podcasts, and when she comes by, I feel like she’s wondering, like, “Is there a cat in the story? Is this a cat?” And I’m just like, “Babe, I’m sorry. It’s just dogs in this one.” But there is a cat in this story. Ada had a beloved pet cat named Mistress Puff, and in her journals and diaries, she drew pictures of Mistress Puff. She loved this cat, and I was just happy to have a cat moment in this story. 

Lana: So were the children’s authors. [laughs] Children’s authors love having a cat in the story. 

Ann: The picture books feature Mistress Puff, long past the period in which Mistress Puff was on the scene of the story. If you’re writing a children’s book about this situation, just like, “Oh, thank God, there’s a cat.” 

But Lana, can you explain Annabella’s parenting philosophy? 

Lana: Well, Annabella, obviously raised by older people and obsessed with learning, and especially obsessed with math, is like, “I know what will counteract Byron. More math.” [laughs] And basically, anytime Ada presented any sort of personality at all, which she had in spades with these two people as her parents, she was just like, “No! You’ve got to learn more math.” And so, she was a kid, like, 15, 16, 17, writing letters to mathematicians and befriending them, like Faraday, who invented electromagnet— Or well, discovered electromagnetism, and Faraday cages, which is why your cell phone doesn’t work in an elevator, and why microwaves work. 

Ann: I was going to say, so it’s a real like, homeschool kid homeschooling her kid. So, I have some details about the techniques that Annabella used. So, Ada Lovelace, a spirited, young child…

Lana: Her father’s daughter. [giggles]

Ann: And Annabella was just like, “I need to squash any Byron tendency.” But Ada is such a, like, physically active little kid. 

Lana: She has the same charisma, the same charisma. 

Ann: Well, and she’s got the same just sort of like, “I’m going to be a revolutionary in Greece!” Like, she gets real hyper fixations. But she also is fidgety. So, when Ada got too fidgety… Here’s a story. “When a housemaid was summoned to imprison Ada’s fidgety fingers within black cotton bags, Ada bit the maid. Dispatched to a distant corner in disgrace, Ada started chewing on the banister.” [Lana giggles] So, her mother made her this sort of like, ticketing system, where when Ada did something good, she would get a little handwritten ticket, being like, “Ada did something good,” and when she did something bad, the ticket would be taken away.

Lana: So, one ticket back and forth. [laughs] 

Ann: Basically. And then her punishments were just, like, solitary confinement, trapped in closets, like, she had to squash underneath desks. Like, her mother was just kind of like, “I’m going to break your spirit.” 

Lana: And she was incapable of it. 

Ann: And she was incapable of it, that’s the Byron genes. But then— Oh, I actually want to mention, she got a second cat. Don’t know the cat’s name, but it was black. Puff was white; there’s a black cat as well. 

So, her mother’s just like “Math. Math. Study math. Why aren’t you studying more math?” 

Lana: And she liked math! Like, not to get anything wrong, she did enjoy the math. She also had different interests. She liked a lot of things, not just math. 

Ann: Yeah, she was a very creative person, and when she was in her childhood… So, let me see, she was born in 1815, so when she was 13 years old, she decided she was going to invent a flying machine, for instance. 

When you’re talking about the two kinds of sort of scientists, there’s sort of the like, “Let’s sit here and do some computations type person,: and then there’s the like, “Let’s think big picture!” And she’s a real, “Let’s think big picture” type. Her mother’s like, “Do math,” and she’s like, “Invent Da Vinci’s flying machine.” 

Lana: Correct. 

Ann: She’s like a… Imagination is huge for her. 

Lana: If she had been a man, everyone would have known her name from, like, birth. She would have invented things; she would have had all these opportunities because she saw the connections in everything. 

Ann: So, she was going to invent— She’s just like, “I’m going to invent a flying machine.” She makes like a little boat and watches how the sails go, and she’s like, “Okay, we need to harness the wind,” she’s inventing all these things. And because she’s rich and a homeschool kid, her mother’s like, “Great. Child-led learning.” So, they set up all these ropes in this one disused room so she could hoist herself up and feel like she was flying. [laughs] So, she’s really into flying machines for a while, like, super invested in it. But you were saying, like, she’s writing letters to the prominent scientists of the day being like, “Hello, I am a young budding scientist myself, and I have questions about your theorems.” 

Lana: She’s like, reading their white papers, she’s reading people’s theses because she’s so obsessed with figuring out these problems that interest her. 

Ann: So, she moves on from the flying machine into being interested in building a planetarium, her own planetarium. And so, her mother is just kind of like, you know, “I like when you do math. I don’t like when you think about imagination. So, put you in this closet, do some more math, please.” 

Anyway, there’s a period of three years in her teenage life where she comes down with what her mother describes as measles, but it seems like maybe it was polio. For some reason, she lost her sight and became paralyzed for three years, and her mother kept her going with just saying, like, “Ada, what’s 12 times 28? Ada, what’s the square root of…” 

Lana: [laughs] When in doubt, math. 

Ann: Just kept like, “I know you’re blind. I know you’re paralyzed. But like, let’s just do some equations. Math will see us through this.” And it did! She recovered, but she was, like so many people have talked about on this podcast, you know, had symptoms for the rest of her life. And this is… We’re getting just out of the, like, bloodletting cure era, but we’re into the sort of like doctors are— No one knew it was up with her. She had various symptoms for her whole life. 

Anyway, her mother connected her with Mary Fairfax Somerville, a lady mathematician who is, you know, showing like, “Women in STEM! Girls can do anything!”

Lana: Annabella Milbanke would have absolutely been like, “The girls can do anything, as long as it’s science. Here, meet a science lady!” [giggles] 

Ann: Exactly. So, Mary Fairfax Somerville, in the Byron way, you know, she’s really charming, she’s really lovely, she’s also really pretty, and she’s so into math and science. And so, when she meets these adults, they’re like, “Oh my God, you’re delightful! What a delightful little nerd this is. Love this kid!” So, on the one hand, she’s like, seeing Mary Fairfax Somerville, she’s getting… And Mary Fairfax Somerville is her lifelong sort of mentor and friend, like, this is a great relationship. Less great relationship is when Ada fell in love with her tutor, a man, and ran off with him. 

Lana: Because in the end, Byron’s going to Byron. [laughs] 

Ann: So, it’s like, she’s paralyzed for three years, she gets her sight back, and she’s like, “Oh, my God, a hunk! [both laugh] My legs work, I’m going to run away!” Her mother’s looking for math equations, and all she wants to do is run away with this hunk. So, she runs away with her tutor. And I need to say for the first time that we’re going to talk about this, this township a lot. Brighton is where they’re living. We’ll sidebar on Brighton in a bit, but she spends a lot of time in Brighton, which is a place just outside of London; you can get there on the train in about an hour. I visited there when I was in England in March, and it’s… What I will say about Brighton, I’m a big fan of this— Actually, let me see. I don’t want if it’s a city or town. 

Lana: Back then, it wasn’t much. Like, it was just growing. 

Ann: Brighton and Hove is a city. The first results, I’ll just say, “A seaside resort. A seaside resort.” I’m like, yes. But what is it? Is it a city? 

Anyway, Brighton is the gayest part of England. I’ve never been in a place with, per capita, more Pride flags in every business. It was described to me later by one of the podcast listeners I met, it’s kind of like, yes, kind of the San Francisco of England. It’s like, if you’re going to celebrate Pride, like, people go to Brighton for Pride because it’s such a gay city. And you know, I was just strolling around the sort of like, I don’t want to call it downtown, but sort of like, the market, shops area, and all the stores are just kind of like “Free trade coffee,” like, really interesting looking vintage clothes, vinyl albums. I’m like, “Oh, this is just hipster paradise.” Brighton. I’m a fan. Back then, it was just kind of like a place where you go to take the waters if you’re sick, which I think is probably why she was there in the first place. Anyway, that is where Ada Lovelace ran off with her tutor. 

Lana: Which is better than Gretna Green. [giggles]

Ann: Similar to her mom in terms of, like, not really having… She’s been writing letters to the outside, to these scientists, but she doesn’t really have any life experience. So, she ran away to her tutor’s family home, where he lived with his parents, and they were like, “Uhhh…” His parents were friends with Annabella, and they were like, “We’ll just send you back.” 

Lana: “This is not a good idea, either of you.” [laughs]

Ann: No. You don’t run away to your lover’s parents’ house. That’s not how… 

Lana: Who are friends with your mom. [laughs]

Ann: Yeah, that’s not how eloping works. 

Lana: [still giggling] You’re doing this Byron thing so wrong.

Ann: Yeah, you see the Byron thing. 

Lana: She did Byron in the nerdiest way possible, is what she did. 

Ann: Here’s a quote from In Byron’s Wake. “One of Ada’s greatest resources was an absolute refusal to repress her feelings, in marked contrast to the self-control that Annabella had determinedly acquired.” 

Anyway. So, they’re in Brighton, she tries to run away with her tutor, doesn’t work, she comes back. And then she’s at this point… I’m glad she was born in 1815, because I can do that math in my head pretty well… 18 years old, she wants to be presented into society. 

Lana: “If I can’t run off with a tutor, I’m going to get a different man.” 

Ann: Yeah. She wants to be like, “What if I don’t do just math while trapped in a closet all day? What about going to balls? What about meeting people my own age? I love hanging out with elderly scientists, but also, are there other people of other ages in the world?” 

Lana: Yeah. She also befriends Dickens. She likes people. She likes all people. 

Ann: And this is, like you told me before, similar to Byron; she liked meeting interesting people, she liked collecting interesting people. And it’s just, most of the people she met happened to be elderly scientists. 

Lana: Because of her mother. [giggles] Those are the people her mother wanted her to meet. 

Ann: Anyway, so she was introduced at court – and again, this happened in Brighton. So, this is when… Going through the Regency era, you know, Prinny, George the Prince of Wales, he is the Regent. And then, when George III dies, then Prinny becomes King George IV, and then, when he dies, his brother William becomes William IV, he becomes the next king. So, at this point, that’s who the king is, William IV, his wife is called Adelaide. 

So, this is where we need to sidebar about the Brighton Royal Pavilion, because that is where Ada Lovelace was presented to the King, and I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? This is where this happened? Are you fucking kidding me?” Okay. I will say, though, at her presentation, it says “Healthy enough by now to stand for 15 minutes, but no more, without fatigue, she was introduced to the luminaries who were on the scene, including Wellington,” who was good friends with Lady Caroline Lamb, the naval guy. She also met, you know who’s on the scene? The Duke of Orléans, AKA, to this podcast, Ryan Phillippe. [laughs]

Lana: [laughs] She lived in interesting times. 

Ann: Oh, actually, no, it wouldn’t be Ryan Phillippe because he was executed. It would be his son. But still, the connection, the new Duke of Orléans. Anyway, so she’s meeting just all these kind of elderly dirtbags. 

Lana: And asking them interesting questions, no doubt. Like, I have a feeling she gave good grown-up, like there’s certain kids you meet and they can have conversation with grown-ups. I have no doubt she was just peppering them with all of the questions. 

Ann: Oh, for sure. It’s like, when you have an only child of, like, older parents, or in this case, of like Annabella, who is, you know, mentally an older parent. 

Lana: She was born old. 

Ann: She was raised by older— You know, it’s like, they interact… I know friends of mine who have kids, and then the kids go to adult dinner parties all the time, like, those kids can interact perfectly with adults. 

Okay, so sidebar: the Brighton Pavilion, AKA today, the Royal Pavilion. So, when I was in England, one of the places that I visited was Brighton, the gayest city in England. Love the vibe; flawless, perfect vibe. And the one… So, everywhere in England has kind of like, one heritage home. There’s so many palaces everywhere, so each town is just kind of like, “Here’s what our tourism industry is based on. This one home.” You know, it’s like, is it Bess of Hardwick’s house? Is it like, whatever? Like, here’s this one house that we have. And Brighton and Hove, the gayest city in England, their claim to fame is the Royal Pavilion, which was built by Prinny. 

So, I went to visit it because I wrote a book called Rebel of the Regency about Caroline of Brunswick, the wife of Prinny, and I wanted to see this home that he had built. And I want to encourage everybody to visit it, because I support Brighton and Hove. The Royal Pavilion is, like, owned by the city; this is how they make money. And honestly, it’s worth seeing. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m saying don’t see it. I’m just saying it is a nightmare. 

Lana: It’s an experience. [giggles] 

Ann: It’s an experience that you should experience. Okay. So, Prinny, this was an era – not just him, but other people, we touched on this in the Emma Hamilton episode because her husband did this too – everyone was just kind of entranced by the concept of Asia. Very few people in England had been to Asia, but they liked the idea of it. So, Prinny, when he decided to build his home here, and this is, like… Brighton is a seaside spa resort town. The Royal Pavilion is not on the waterfront, it’s in the middle of the city, because what was important to Prinny was not being on the waterfront and seeing the scenery and taking the waters. He wanted to be close to where people would go, like, parading in their outfits every day, so he could watch people. So, he built the Royal Pavilion, not in the whole point of Brighton, which is like the sea, but in the middle of the city, so he could, like, look at people, people watching. 

Later, his niece, Queen Victoria, wrote some scathing remarks about the Royal Pavilion, one of which was basically like, “Why is this in the middle of the city? What the fuck? Why is this here? This house is insane.” I don’t often agree with Queen Victoria, but I do agree with her. [laughs]

Lana: Sometimes she says correct things. 

Ann: Yeah, I think she has a critique, the “oriental decor.” I’m like, “Mm-hmm, you could say that, Queen Victoria.” So, Prinny built this place. 

Lana: The only context I have for the Royal Pavilion is the Great British Bake Off episode in Season 6, “Bread Week,” where Matt made a curry Royal Pavilion out of bread, and that is literally, when she was saying, “Oh, it’s the Royal Pavilion,” it’s like, “Oh! Right! Like ‘Bread Week.’” [giggles]

Ann: And making a curry is a really clever thing to do, making a curry bread pavilion, because the outside of it was inspired by the Taj Mahal. Prinny and his architect had never been to India or seen the Taj Mahal, but they had seen watercolour paintings of the Taj Mahal, and so the outside… I took a picture of this. In Brighton, they’re just like, they know what they have there. They’re not lying in their signage, but they’re being as polite about it as they can be, in a British way. But the sign said, like, “You wouldn’t find a building like this in India. [both laugh] But it took inspiration from the domes of the Taj Mahal.” 

So, it’s kind of like Prinny’s little the Taj Mahal, and he was like, “What if the Taj Mahal had 25 times as many domes? What if it was just all domes? What if you just tried to put 25 Taj Mahals in the footprint of the actual—” So, it’s just, like, domes. Just domes on domes on domes. So, the outside, you’re just kind of like, “Oh, am I hallucinating? Why is there so many domes on this building? Okay.” So, that’s the exterior. The exterior is just kind of like, M.C. Escher presents the Taj Mahal. 

And then inside is inspired, I thought, kind of like Graceland, it’s like, “Here’s the jungle room, and here’s the this room.” Like, each room would have a theme. But instead, no. The theme of almost every room – except for one, which I’ll tell you – the theme is “What do we think China is like?” is the vibe. So, I took the audio tour. 

Lana: They couldn’t be inside of China. It’s not that they couldn’t even go to China, it’s that once you got to China, they wouldn’t let you in. You had to stay on a little island. 

Ann: Mm-hmm. So, it’s kind of like, “What do we think China is like? Maybe.” And so, it’s clearly, here’s what they knew about China: bamboo, dragons, and a sort of like, pagoda-style trim on the ceiling. In Canada, there is a long history – well, in terms of Canadian history – of, like, Chinese food restaurants. Chinese immigrants would come to Canada in the early 1900s, and it’s just like, “What are we going to do? Let’s open a Chinese food restaurant.” So, there’s little Chinese food restaurants in, like, tiny prairie cities all over the place. And those restaurants would be like, “Oh, we’re in a community where people have never been to China. They don’t know what China is like, so let’s just give them the experience,” and that’s what the inside of the Royal Pavilion looks like, except not done by Chinese people to begin with. 

So, again, this is a sidebar, but I have to get this off my chest. When you first walk in, there’s this kind of like grand hallway that you go in, and I was listening to the audio tour, and they were saying, “Okay, you’ll notice…” And so, there’s these sort of wooden statues, I’m holding out my hands, they’re maybe two feet tall. Little wooden, I will call them, like, little Asian people statues. And then, the audio tour mentioned, “Yeah, and there’s a little hollow in the back of the head so that you can tilt them.” And I’m like, “Oh, I wonder what you do that for?” And then they explained, like, what these are is basically, you know in Chinese restaurants, the cat with the hand that goes back and forth, back and forth? Or sort of like a bopping head dog you put in your car? So, Prinny got these, like, bopping head little Chinese statues, so when people come down the hallway, he would get his butlers to nudge the backs of them, so these statues are all just kind of like bowing at you. 

Lana: [laughs] Jeez. And we wonder why the British Museum is the way it is. [laughs]

Aff: And the audio tour was like— And again, the audio tour, so polite. Not lying, but just polite. It’s like, “Yes, and many dignitaries came to visit here, including Wellington and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.” And I thought, “What did Georgiana think of these nodding head dogs? Was anyone impressed by this? These, like, Funko Pop toys?” 

Lana: Oh, Lord. 

Ann: And the banisters, there’s sort of like a grand staircase, and the banisters are like, “Oh, that kind of looks like bamboo.” It’s not, because there wasn’t any sort of trade between China and England at the point in bamboo, but what they had done is just taken British wood, and then they trimmed it to look like bamboo, what they thought bamboo would look like. So, it’s like fake bamboo banisters. And then, I think it’s in the same room, the wallpaper is kind of like… “None of them had ever seen bamboo,” the audio tour said, “but they imagined this is maybe how it grew.” So, it’s like, turquoise and, like, florals coming out of it. It’s kind of like, okay. Okay, bamboo. Okay. 

Everything is carpeted and they… 

Lana: Eww.

Ann: Everything is carpet; it’s not the original carpets, but they painstakingly restore what the original carpets look like. I’m like, “Did you have to do that?” And okay, I won’t tell you every room, but then the dining room was just those giant sort of paintings of like, I’m using finger quotes, listeners, like “oriental maidens” and “oriental warriors.” So, just kind of huge paintings of just kind of people. It’s sort of just like red and gold and like, [dramatically] dragons. And there’s this giant chandelier that just seems, like, very precarious and overly large, and it’s just full of lions and dragons, and it’s huge. 

And what I love is… So, Prinny had this place built. Prinny lived here, he loved it. He lived there all the time because he didn’t want to be king, he just wanted to throw parties. It’s a mixture of like, Graceland mixed with Mar-a-Lago, is what the Royal Pavilion was in Prinny’s day. He would just have everyone come and visit him there, in his preferred holiday home that is tacky as fuck. He died. His brother, William, was like, “Oh God, this is my holiday home?” And he, like, removed as much of the tacky shit as possible, and his wife, Adelaide, was like, “Remove that chandelier. I think it’s going to kill someone one day.” 

Lana: [laughs] It’s unfortunate those two didn’t procreate because that might have actually been rational. 

Ann: Yeah. So, they removed the chandelier. So, by the time Ada went there to have her presentation, like, you’d still have the wallpaper, you’d still have the carpets, but I think maybe the nodding head dogs were gone, maybe the chandelier was gone. Like, William was trying to make it be less tacky. And by the time Victoria becomes queen, she’s just kind of like, “What the fuck is this place?” And she, like, removed… She very rarely went to Brighton; she didn’t like it there, she didn’t like this house, and she removed a lot of the furnishings. But now, in 2026, they have restored it to what it looked like during Prinny’s time. 

Lana: Lovingly restored it. 

Ann: They’ve restored all the carpets, they’ve restored the chandeliers. So, and it’s like, yeah, fair enough. If you have Graceland, make it look like when Elvis lived there, otherwise, it’s just kind of like a weird half-empty Graceland, I guess. 

Lana: You can’t cover it up, really. 

Ann: No, no. And that’s the thing. I was just like, “Oh, Brighton… Bridgerton’s not filming here. It’s too fucked up.” [laughs]

Lana: [laughs] There’s so many things Bridgerton isn’t going to tell you about the Regency, but Brighton is the big one. 

Ann: They’re not going to film a scene in here, I’m so sorry. You’re not getting that income from Bridgerton. 

So, the one room that’s not Asian-themed is instead Versailles/Napoleon-themed. 

Lana: [laughs] I mean, why not? It’s Prinny. 

Ann: Yeah. So, I think the carpet is, like, a phoenix, and then everything is just kind of like, gold filigree, and you know, Lafoufou Versailles.

Lana: Like the White House now. [laughs]

Ann: Yeah, very much like that. Yeah. So, the Royal Pavilion is just, like, honestly, go there, it’s like being inside of Prinny’s brain. It’s so similar— I’ve also been to Graceland, and it’s just kind of like, oh, a kind of like, drug-addicted 50-year-old man who no one had ever said no to him in his life, decided to design a house and here’s what he did. Here’s what he did. And now, cities are struggling to make a tourism economy out of this midlife crisis manifest. 

Lana: [chuckles] For anybody listening, Ann may have only been talking about the Regency for the last few months, but she’s been living Prinny’s nightmare world since she started writing this book, and so this is purging that for her because she’s going to leave the Regency and she’s going to leave Prinny behind, and he will no longer give her jump scares. 

Ann: I’m so excited to never have to think about him again in my life, and I think going to his home in Brighton was just the pinnacle, like, just going in his house and knowing every horrible design choice was his, like… Had there been, you know, like hidden cameras, to capture my facial expressions as I went room to room, I was just like, [horrified gasps and grunts] Like the audio commentary, I was like talking back to it, I was just like, “No!” It’s just like… [both laugh] It needs to be seen to be believed. And as I understand, I met some listeners when I was in London, and I mentioned that I went to the Royal Pavilion, and they were all like, “Oh, no. We haven’t been.” I’m like, yeah, I don’t know how many people in England go to it. But you know what? Take a day trip to Brighton, get some ethically-sourced coffee, you know, visit the vintage shops, and take a stroll around the tackiest… 

Lana: Unethically sourced. [giggles] 

Ann: Unethically sourced, like, I think where cultural appropriation was invented, question mark? If you’ve ever wondered what cultural appropriation is, visit the Brighton Royal Pavilion. [both laugh] 

I do want to say, actually, I have such a fondness now for Brighton and for everything there, because I just had such a nice time. But like, this episode is coming in May. So, for Pride in June, they’re doing, like, Pride at the Pavilion because it’s the gayest city. And I’m like, you know what? Maybe having this camp, tacky home is perfect for the vibe of this city. They just… Anyway, I will mention too. So, from the Royal Pavilion, down the street a bit, it’s like you’re back in kind of the city, because this is in the middle of the city. [Lana laughs] Anyway, just down the street is Brighton’s number one alternative rock bar, Caroline of Brunswick, which had not one, but two Pride flags waving outside of it. 

Lana: Of course. 

Ann: Brighton was Prinny’s, like, place he liked visit, but it’s got such a Caroline vibe now, thank god. 

All of which to say, Ada Lovelace lived in Brighton a lot. She was there a lot throughout her life, and I don’t I didn’t know about her when I was visiting there, and I was looking up later, I’m like, oh, what sort of memorials and whatever do they have to Ada Lovelace in Brighton? Nothing, I don’t think. So, this is where she was a lot. Later in her life, she got a house there and everything. But this is where she was introduced to society, under the reign of William. So, it’s kind of like, maybe he took out some of the carpets, maybe he covered over the wallpaper, I don’t know. But that she went into that Graceland-esque, Mar-a-Lago place, and that is where she was introduced to society. 

Lana: Which seems appropriate. Like, that seems way more appropriate than her going to, like, Buckingham Palace or whatever. 

Ann: Yeah! Her vibe is just… You know, who would love that Pavilion? Is Byron, tragically dead. [Lana laughs] He could never go there. 

Lana: Darn. 

Ann: He would have liked that, I think. 

Anyway, so she is introduced to society in Brighton. So, it’s her first London season, and she is invited by Charles Babbage to view his… difference engine. 

Lana: So, it’s her first season in London, and now, picture Bridgerton, and what does she do? She makes friends with an elderly mathematician who is really obsessed with creating a computer, the very first computer. And so, instead of, like, flirting with boys and making real friends, she’s like, “Tell me more about this math machine you’re making!” 

Ann: And I want to say, this is like, I’ve been… I don’t want to say traumatized, but like, I’ve come to expect a certain kind of story to progress when I’m researching young women for this podcast. When they encounter elderly men, it generally doesn’t turn out into, like, a “Oh, he becomes her surrogate grandpa, and this is sweet.” That never happens. Usually, the elderly man does something shitty to her, even if he’s not, like, sexually assaulting her, maybe he’s trying to get her money or whatever. But Babbage is just like, “This girl gets it. I like this nerd! Let’s be friends. I’m 50 years older than you. Let’s go.” And it never gets creepy, so I found that reassuring and nice. 

Lana: And she helps his career, and they spend all of their time talking about the computers. They’re not weird at all, and it’s mostly because Charles Babbage was very much like her mother, and would rather, like, criticize people for having fun and doing interesting things. 

Ann: Yeah, he was not— He’s the… What’s the other Apple guy? He’s the Wozniak type. 

Lana: He’s very much Wozniak. He’s like, it’s all about the machines, and got to make them better and got to make them interesting. And like, he truly is the first programmer, but he wasn’t thinking creatively. He was very much— I mean, he was creative, but he wasn’t thinking, like, outside of a box. He was creating the box. He was like, “This is going to be the box. It’s going to be a great box.” And he was a genius. 

Ann: Ada’s bringing in her understanding of math and science, but also her imagination. 

I want to just mention at the same time, so at the same time that she’s entering society, like, 1833. So, 1834 is when the word ‘scientist’ was first coined, which is actually in a review of Mary Somerville’s, one of her science papers. So, the word ‘scientist’ had just been invented. Like, science is an exciting new thing people are up to. 

And so, Babbage, what can you explain about the machines that he’s building? 

Lana: They’re mostly theoretical, and that’s the big thing is, like, he didn’t make things. He didn’t create; he didn’t sit in a little shop and tinker. He was thinking through the possibility of what a machine would be like. And so, he was using, like…. Very early, actual computers used punch cards, and if you’re a super nerd like me, who studied population science, you know a lot about punch cards. But if you haven’t, they’re literal, like little three— I can’t remember the exact dimension, but like, three by nine cards, and you punch holes where you want data to go. Because… okay. [giggles] Computers themselves are all just little on and off switches, and this is the part where computers get, like, weird mystical science, even for me. But it’s all on and off switch. Like, is this on or is this off? And that’s how your whole… Like, I’m looking at Ann in Canada, because my computer is turning things on and off really, really fast. 

And so, he was using very big cards to turn things on and off, and that was his idea. And Ada Lovelace, what she brought to the table was the fact that she looked at the cards, and he was thinking math, he was thinking numbers, each of the little on and off switches was zero through nine, and he could do math with this. Ada Lovelace looked at it, and what she thought about was Jacquard looms, which is these really fancy silks, and the beautiful dresses of the time, and the curtains and all of that. What they did with that is they had punch cards too, but some of the punch cards were, like, changing the colour of the thread, or making a little knot there, or changing the way the weave works. And so, she looked at the big picture thing. And so, he was thinking this little math, like basically a calculator, but like, the TI-81 calculator was what he was going for, and she was thinking, me looking at Ann in Canada. [laughs]

Ann: Yeah, she’s just like, “Oh, artificial intelligence. Let’s go.”

So, there’s somebody who witnessed… So, I think when she first learned about this, so somebody named Sophia De Morgan witnessed her… He had built a model of this. 

Lana: What he thought it would do. But it wasn’t really, like, nobody really made it until like, the ‘50s. 

Ann: Yeah. So, other people were just sort of gaping at this, but “Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its workings and saw the great beauty of the invention.” So, I want to mention, health update, Ada Lovelace. 1835, so she’s 20 years old, and she has what is described as a nervous breakdown. 

Lana: I mean, who amongst us? 

Ann: Whomst amongst us? What’s it called? The, like, quarter-life crisis? So many people go to university, it’s like when you’re 20, that’s when a lot of mental health things kick in. So anyway, something happens at this point. She wrote a letter to Mary Somerville, the lady scientist friend, she wrote, “I’m always so exceedingly terrified, and nobody knows what but I can hardly help having an agitated look and manner.” 

Lana: Every time you describe it, I’m like, “Don’t say that she has POTS. Don’t say she has POTS.” [giggles] But as somebody who can only stand up for 15 minutes, and standing up causes me to have an adrenaline crisis, I’m like, this all sounds really familiar. [laughs] 

Ann: I don’t know, Lana, she had a mysterious woman disease. [chuckles]

Lana: That caused anxiety. 

Ann: Yeah, that nobody could figure out. 

Lana: After an extended illness. 

Ann: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Lana: I mean, that’s usually a trigger for those symptoms because, like, POTS is an autonomic disorder, so your nerves get shot. [laughs]

Ann: One million percent. But she’s living at a time where they’re like, “I guess, bloodletting?” And this is the thing, they kept treating her with everybody’s favourite, laudanum, opium mixed with alcohol. And perhaps she inherited from her father, Lord Byron, an allergy to alcohol, so I think being treated with this just didn’t help her, but actually exacerbated things. 

Lana: Alcohol also exacerbates POTS and causes mass cell inflammation, but you know… [laughs]

Ann: That’s the treatment she’s being given. 

Lana: Look. Before I was diagnosed, when they didn’t know it was a thing, I was told to take vitamin D [laughs], and so, like, she wouldn’t have had a chance even in my era. 

Ann: No, that’s the thing, that’s what I was saying. Just kind of like, “Oh, a woman having mysterious symptoms? I don’t know. Have you tried sleeping? Have you tried eating well?” 

Lana: Breathing?

Ann: “Have you tried…” 

Lana: Exercise. 

Ann: Anyway, so Ada’s, like, living with a lifelong condition of some sort. In the midst of this, so she has her nervous breakdown, and she meets William King. “Ten years her senior and a diplomat who had served on various missions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, he spoke several languages, among them Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.” 

Lana: He was an interesting dude. He was a lot like her mother. [giggles]

Ann: He is a lot like her mother, and you know, when you grow up in a family dynamic like that, it feels familiar. And I think Ada needed someone who is kind of like, steady. She didn’t need, like, a Byron-type to marry. She needed to be the, like, kooky one in the relationship; she needed the other person to just kind of like support her. And he also, guess what? Big fanboy of Lord Byron. So… 

Lana: [giggles] She’s not a pointless favour. 

Ann: So, the thing is with Ada, throughout her whole life, she keeps meeting men who are just like, “You’re Lord Byron’s daughter? Oh, my God, I love Lord Byron.” I feel it’s probably the same as, like, Frances Bean Cobain meeting men, where it’s just like, “Oh, my God, I loved your father!” Like, everyone is just obsessed. Like, Byron died when she was very young, but it looms large over her life because he was such a notorious person. 

This is the other thing about her, too, is that because she’s the daughter of Lord Byron, all she’s doing – well, I mean, she did try to run away with her tutor at that one time – but she’s just, like, doing science experiments and math, but the tabloids and the press are just waiting for her to fuck up, like any nepo baby. You know, it’s just like, “What’s she going to do? Her father is crazy. What’s she going to do? Maybe she’ll do something crazy.” So, there’s kind of this extra pressure on her to, like, not act out. 

Anyway, so she marries this guy, William King. In terms of the husbands we’ve had on this podcast, he’s just fine. They liked each other. 

Lana: They maybe weren’t wildly in love, but they liked each other. 

Ann: They liked each other, and he supported her science. He was just like, “You want to do science experiments, babe? That’s great. Do your science experiments. That’s cool. Oh, you have a large dowry? Don’t mind that either. [Lana giggles] Oh, and you’re connected to you’re connected to the current prime minister, Lord Melbourne? That’s great for my potential political career. Don’t worry about it.” So, at this point… They get married in 1835. Two years later, he was elevated to the earldom of Lovelace, so that’s where she becomes the Countess of Lovelace. He has a political career; he’s the Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, but kept supporting. And she’s just like, “I like science experiments! That’s what I’m into.” But she has three children. 

So, do you remember in, I don’t know, anyone who watched Downton Abbey, there’s something where, like, Maggie Smith’s character is just like, “Oh, yeah. No, I raised my children. I visited them every Saturday in the summer,” or something? Aristocrats were not expected to raise their children, right? 

Lana: Correct. Which is why her mother raising her was very weird. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, which is why anytime in this whole podcast, when I’m like “A mother wants to breastfeed her child,” everybody is like, “She’s insane. This person is insane.” Caroline of Brunswick liked to get on the floor and play with her daughter, and everyone was just like, “Send her to the asylum. This is lunatic behaviour.” So, I want to put this in the context of like, Ada didn’t give a fuck about her children, but no one really did. So, this isn’t her as much as just society, I would say. 

Lana: It wasn’t expected of her. 

Ann: No, exactly. And her children grew up, and they’re like, “Our mother was great.” It’s like, yeah, because this is what— It’s just other mothers weren’t spending all their time doing science equations, doing like, science experiments…

Lana: Writing letters to Charles Dickens, having conversations with him about, like, her latest thoughts, or corresponding with the guy that’s figuring out how magnets work, or how electricity— Like, she talked to so many people about electricity. 

Ann: She was into everything. I love, she had a whole— We’ll talk about this in a sec. I’ll wait until I get to that, it has to do with electricity. But I will say just like, yeah, so she didn’t give a shit about her children. This says, “Like most women of her class, Ada left the child rearing to service,” and that’s just, like, normal. 

Lana: Which is probably for the best. 

Ann: Frankly, given how she was raised. 

Lana: Chronic illness, abusive mom, emotionally abusive mom and physically. 

Ann: If she was like, “Okay, children, I have this one ticket. I will give it to you, and sometimes I’ll take it away.” 

Lana: [laughs] Like, it’s for the best. I have a funny feeling that the servants did a better job. 

Ann: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So, she had three children and one of my side conversations we’re going to have later is about the children. Anyway, so she had two sons and a daughter. And like, in the most fucked up way, her first two children were a son and a daughter, and her mother was like, “Call them Byron and Annabella.” Really? 

Lana: The legacy must live! [laughs] 

Ann: Really? Name them after each other? And then, when the news kind of broke that Lord Byron had had this sexual affair with his sister and that this woman, Medora Leigh, was the child of incest, then Ada and her mom – her mom’s still around, like, her mom’s overseeing the child care… Oh, no! – they were just like, “Don’t let any of the siblings be alone with each other.” 

Lana: That’s not how it worked, even for him. 

Ann: “In case they have incest, too.” Like, Lord Byron and Augusta Leigh were not raised as siblings; they met as adults, which is not to excuse the incest, but like, it’s not the same. It’s not the same as these two boys and a girl being raised together. 

Anyway. So, yeah, she left the child-rearing to servants and, asterisks, and overseen by her mother. Anyway. So, she is just like, “God damn it, this difference engine.” So, when she was a kid, she was like, “I’m going to build a flying machine. I’m going to build a planetarium,” and now she’s just like, “I’m going to get in on this difference engine!” So, then she started really getting into math so she could engage with this better, so she could understand it better. She already knew math, obviously, but she’s just getting, like, higher-level mathematical tutoring. 

So, 1842. This is where— It took me while, and this is part of why I went to the children’s biographies, because I was like, “What is this sequence of events?” So, as you explained, Charles Babbage has this machine that he wants to build, but hasn’t built, but theoretically could exist. And he’s just kind of like, “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m a tinkerer-type scientist. Like, I’m just going to build this.” So, a guy named Luigi Federico Menabrea, an Italian mathematician, ambassador to France, future prime minister of Italy, wrote a paper. Okay, so there’s the difference machine, and then there’s the analytical engine, which are two different things. I don’t know. 

Lana: The difference machine is, like, a souped-up calculator. The analytical engine was kind of the first real… Like, the idea of the first real computer. 

Ann: Exactly. And it’s an idea. So, Babbage has the idea for the analytical engine, the first computer. And then this guy, Menabrea, wrote a paper about it in French. So, Ada Lovelace, with her money, with her family connections, she’s supporting Babbage, like, she’s helping to get him funding for his continued research and stuff. And she’s like, “Oh, if I could explain what this machine is, more people will fund it, more people understand it, and maybe he can actually build it.” 

Lana: So, this is where she puts on her black turtleneck and starts explaining what this can do. [giggles] 

Ann: Exactly. She’s in her black turtleneck, she’s walking across the stage, she’s like, presenting to you, like, “Imagine a world where this could happen…” And so, what she’s going to do, what she offers to do, and he agrees, everybody agrees, she’s going to translate this French paper into English so more people can understand about what Babbage wants to do. 

So, this is where, like, I had an only vague understanding of Ada Lovelace going into this, and I’m like, “Oh, Ada Lovelace, didn’t she build the first computer or something?” No. No one built a computer, let alone her. But Babbage had the idea of the concept of a computer, and then Ada translated a paper about it, but as she was translating the paper, she was, like, expanding on it. He wrote this paper, but it was just kind of for science guys, and she’s like, “Well, I want to explain this more thoroughly,” and so she was consulting with Babbage, and she was like, “Well, you know, you want to do this with the machine. But what if we think about the Jacquard loom and what do we think about this? And here’s what it could do.” So, she translated this guy’s paper, but then wrote, like, twice as long of her own, what’s called the notes, explaining “Here’s what it could do, here’s what artificial intelligence could be like.” And then she wrote a program. “Here’s a program that you could put into this computer that could do something.” And this is the first computer program. This is what Ada Lovelace is most celebrated for is, like, writing the first ever computer program, and it was a part of this translation of this paper. But she wasn’t translating it; she invented it. So, her work produced a manuscript three times the original length. [chuckles] 

Lana: She had footnotes and all of the extra stuff in it, and copied his first programming, and then she made her own. She made one program of her own. 

Ann: Yeah, and there’s illustrations as well that she added. 

Lana: She was literally in her black turtleneck, like, that image you have of Steve Jobs standing up front explaining to you why you want an iPhone, what an iPhone is going to do to change your life; why it matters that you can send a text message with a little keyboard to your friend and pictures and all of that stuff back and forth. Like, that explanation of why this is important to you is almost more important, in some ways, than the actual making of the machines. Like, if you don’t understand, if a normal person doesn’t understand why you would want a computer, then it’s not going to change the world. Like, you can have all the iPhone— I had my first phone that acted like an iPhone in 2003 when no one else really did, because no one understood why they would want to, until Steve Jobs put on that shirt. And so, that’s what she was doing. That’s why she is so influential. 

Ann: But when we say she’s so influential… In the 20th century. She was being like, “Here’s what computers could do. This could change the world.” But until like, the 1950s, when people actually started building computers… No one knew how forward-thinking and correct she was at the time. It’s just kind of like, “Oh, Lady Lovelace, she likes to write scientific papers, [singsong] Doo-doo-doo.” It wasn’t a big deal at the time, I don’t think. 

Lana: But okay, [laughs] it wasn’t, like, life-changing at the time, but people started thinking about it. So, this is like the 1830s, and what they started doing is building cryptographic machines that would do translation. And so, it’s a slow build, but it wasn’t nothing. Like, there were things happening; the radio came about and all of this stuff, electricity, plus the ideas of the difference engine, and all of that stuff. Like, it came to a head in the ‘40s when they were trying to break the cryptographic machines, and that’s when people started putting money into it. 

Ann: I want to mention that this is a detail that I appreciate. When she wrote this thing, when she translated and then wrote her notes and made these diagrams, she referred to this as her firstborn child. [laughs] 

Lana: [laughs] Even though she already had three. 

Ann: Yep. But this is the one she cared about. This is the one she actually worked for. 

Lana: This is her baby. [both laugh] She brought this one up. And so, no, people didn’t know who she was; people didn’t really care about Babbage. 

Ann: No. And she couldn’t say that she’d written it because, like, ladies couldn’t, weren’t respected for doing so. So, she just signed it as AAL, like Augusta Ada Lovelace. So, no one knew that it was her who had done this. 

Lana: And no one wanted to, because like, the menfolk scrubbed her off of it. Like, even growing up, I didn’t know much about her. And even computers— Like, honestly, Hidden Figures did a whole lot for just how much women influenced computers. That… Oh, what’s her face? Olivia’s character? The one that went down to the IBM and figured out how to make it work for the flight calculator? She goes down to the basement, and they’re, like, trying to figure out how to make the IBM work, and she opens up the manual and starts reading it. Like, that moment right there. 

Ann: Do you mean in Hidden Figures? 

Lana: Yeah, in Hidden Figures. 

Ann: Oh, yeah. Katherine… 

Lana: Katherine Johnson, she was the mathematician upstairs. Her friend…

Ann: Octavia Spencer’s character. 

Lana: Octavia Spencer! Thank you. [laughs]

Ann: Her character, Dorothy Vaughan. 

Lana: Yeah. Dorothy Vaughan goes down to the basement, starts figuring out the IBMs. Well, the IBMs, what they were doing was, like, they were trying to replace the women that were the computers, like, upstairs. Even the name ‘computer’ comes from women because that was their job during the war, was doing the math. They computed the math. 

Ann: Well, and this is where, like, I don’t— My experience of Ada Lovelace, prior to doing this research, was, like I was saying, there’s all these children’s books about her. It’s like, yeah, because like, ten years ago, she became better known, and it was like, “Oh, wow! Women were involved in computers. Let’s let girls know this.” It’s an important thing, and I celebrate it. I love that there’s all these books about Ada Lovelace in the world. But growing up, for me, there was not a bunch of books about Ada Lovelace. I had never heard of her. So, around the time that Hidden Figures came out, like the book and the movie, and then other people like Hedy Lamarr, it’s like, “Here’s women, and they did science!” Like, people who are… 

Lana: I did know about Hedy Lamarr because I was in wireless cell phones, and the fact that she invented time division multiplexing, so TDMA and CDMA, which are what run the Verizon and what used to be the Sprint Network that’s now part of the T-Mobile network. Like, literally, this Hollywood hotshot starlet figured out how to make it so people can’t overhear your cellphones. She did the math on that. I love her! 

Ann: Well, and you knew that because of your job. But like, now, little kids growing up, there’s so many books about like “Women in STEM!” And so, I celebrate that, and I’m happy about it, but we’re here to celebrate Ada Lovelace, hot mess. 

Lana: [giggles] And she’s about to enter her hot mess era. 

Ann: What I want to say, though, is like Ada Lovelace, I was just like, “Oh, my gosh!” So, like you were saying, you know, she saw the machine, and she saw the potential and what it could do. She grasped the implications of the analytical engine, even though it was never built, it was just a set of drawings. Even so, she issued a warning about AI, and I’m just like, “God damn it, this is so pertinent.” “She intuitively understood the implications of technological change upon the nature of science.” I’m going to read you a quote from her notes. Basically, she’s saying… I’ll explain it as I understand it, and I’ll read what she said. She knew that, like, okay, this computer, you can put information in it, and it can synthesize that information, but it’s never going to come up with its own thought, it’s never going to originate anything. It’s always just going to be, like, taking stuff you put into it and messing around, which is what AI does now, like, as we’re all so familiar. 

Lana: It’s not thinking. It doesn’t do math. It doesn’t think. It’s a predictive engine. 

Ann: Here’s what she wrote in like, 1843: 

The analytical engine has no pretension whatsoever to originate anything, but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another matter, for in so distributing and combining truths and the formula of analysis, they may become more easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and nature of science are necessarily thrown into new light and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect and a somewhat speculative consequence of such an invention.

This is where, when we get into her legacy and stuff, like, later on… So, like, Alan Turing, the Turing test, he’s like, one day computers will become… You won’t be able to tell if it’s a computer thinking or if it’s a person’s thought, like, you won’t be able to tell them apart. And he’s just like, “Ada Lovelace said computers can never think on their own, but they can!” So, he was like, anti-Ada Lovelace with his work. 

Lana: Yeah, they had very different perspectives on things. And I think we could get to a point where computers can originate thought. We’re not even close to that right now. What we have, for AI, [laughs] I’m not going to get on my own rant because this is a history podcast, but what we have for AI is a predictive engine. So, it looks for what’s the next most logical word based on the inputs it’s been given. So, it’s interpreting things based on what it knows. It’s not thinking. That’s why it can’t tell you how many Es there are in the number 17, or something like that. Like, it’s not thinking, it’s just regurgitating. And so, we’re not there yet. 

Ann: I mentioned like… Well, I mentioned to you, I don’t know, I forget if I said it on the podcast, but I was raised around women in STEM. My mother did a math degree; one of my sisters did an engineering degree; my other sister is, like, a robot scientist. And I was always into, like, theatre! [laughs] Fashion. So, you know, I was the black sheep of my family in that way. So anyway, my one sister, who is a robot scientist, when AI started becoming more in the mainstream discussion, she was like, “Oh no, what this is…” What’s it called? An LLM. 

Lana: Large language model, yep. 

Ann: She’s like, “What these do is they just figure out what answer will make you happy, and then they tell you that.” That’s why it’s not giving you good advice; that’s not why it’s not telling you truthful facts. It’s just it’s been trained to be like, what answer will make the user happy, is what it provides you. 

Lana: It’s why there’s literally instructions in the code of ChatGPT that says it’s not allowed to talk about goblins or raccoons, [giggles] because there was a model that was, like, told to be geeky, and it was rewarded for talking about goblins and raccoons and, like, all these creatures [keeps talking through giggles] and now and that infected the other models. So, by default, it really wants to tell you about goblins. [laughs] 

Ann: Because, like, that made one person happy once? 

Lana: That made a bunch of the programmers really happy. [laughs] It makes me happy! Like, I’d almost maybe consider using things that stole my property if it told me about goblins and raccoons. [laughs] 

Ann: It’s just so funny that Ada Lovelace, like, she saw the theory of the concept of a computer, and she was like, “You know what, though? It can’t think for itself, so be cautious about that.” I’m like, that’s so pertinent!

Lana: Like, for the entirety of my career, I’ve been explaining that to people because people want the computers to be thinking. The only thing that Charles Babbage also kind of sort of invented that is evil and does think is a printer, and that does hate you. 

Ann: [laughs] That’s true, yeah. 

Lana: Everything else is not thinking, it’s just doing what is told. 

Ann: I’m going to give you one— We won’t get into a whole AI discussion, but I will just say how it… I was watching, it was a woman who works at, like, the MAC cosmetics counter in a department store, and she was like, “AI is telling people these are the makeup colours you should wear, you should buy them,” and people are coming to MAC and being “I want this lipstick,” and she’s like, “We don’t have a lipstick with that name. That doesn’t exist.” And they’re like, “Oh, no. But I want this lipstick.” She’s like, “Do you want me to show you the lipsticks we have, and I can recommend one?” And the people are so, they’re like, “No, no!” They’re like, so committed to thinking that this AI is some sort of like, Star Trek: Next Generation level intelligence, and they have to do what it says, and she’s like, “But that doesn’t exist!” She’s like, “I’ve never seen people like this. They’re so committed to these things that are just not true.” 

And that’s what you’re saying. It’s like, people want to believe in this higher intelligence that is like gives you the perfect answer where it’s, like, but it’s just a machine that was told not to talk about raccoons. That’s all it is. 

Lana: Correct. And people see humanity. Like, we are coded to see humanity in things that don’t have humanity; it’s why we love our pets, it’s why we see Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. We find humanity and things that don’t have it. It’s why we all cry when Wilson floats away in Castaway. We’re social creatures, and we want it. And so, that’s exactly why the Large Language is dangerous, and what Ada was warning about is that you’re going to find— Like, she saw it. As Byron’s daughter, she saw “We are going to find humanity and things that don’t have humanity to them. It is dangerous. Watch out for it.” 

Ann: Ada Lovelace, she got it. She got it! She saw it! And here we all are living in this world. 

Lana: She’s like this big brain. [giggles] She sees things bigger than people do. That’s why she talked to the guy that did electromagnetism and Charles Dickens, even though I wouldn’t talk to Charles Dickens.

Ann: No. You know who came to visit her and Brighton? Charles Dickens at one point. But we’ll get to that. 

Lana: [chuckles] In her dirtbag era. 

Ann: Oh, we’ll get to that. So, Ada Lovelace. And I think, like part of it is, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there started being this like, “Girls should be encouraged to do computers. Let’s find some heroines from history who they can look up to.” Like, there was that. But there’s also her getting more like, how she saw they were going to be. Her work has become only more pertinent with time, which is so interesting. 

Lana: But that’s not what they talk about; they talk about “She was the first programmer.” 

Ann: Yeah, and she did write this program. So, she wrote this thing, her notes, and she translated this thing. So, Babbage began to refer to— Remember how Byron called her mother the Princess of Parallelograms? So, Babbage started calling her the Enchantress of Numbers. There’s a lot of names. I’m pretty sure that’s the name of one of the picture books. She sent a copy of her work to Mary Somerville, her mentor, who was just like, “Good job! This is great.” And she’s just like, “I am science lady. I did this great science work.” And so, she’s just like, “And now, I launch my scientific career,” and her children are like, “Mummy!” She’s like, “Not now, children.”

Lana: [giggles] “I am spending time with my firstborn.” 

Ann: “My firstborn, science.” 

So, she has, you know, health concerns ongoing, obviously. She visited Brighton a lot. So, that summer, not with her children, obviously, her children are elsewhere. She was just hanging out on the seafront, not near the Royal Pavilion. Anyway, she took daily immersions from a bathing machine, wearing a black, one-piece oldey time swimsuit with a pair of leather boots. And then, she’s just like, “You know what I’m going to be? Championship swimmer!” Because everything she does, she’s just like, goes in a hundred percent and she’s like, “I’m going to do science experiments on myself and my swimming abilities.” Like, everything is just like, “This is what I’ll do!” But this is part of the health thing, right? She’s told, like, “Do exercise, this will help you with your various things.” So, à la Sisi, Empress Sisi, she had gymnastic ropes installed in her various homes. She went to the circus, and she was like, “Great. Should I install a trapeze? Maybe.” So, she’s just like getting all in, and then she’s like, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to do a science experiment or a scientific paper about my own body and symptoms. It’ll be called ‘Calculus of the Nervous System.’” 

Lana: She knew. She knew she had an autonomic disorder. [laughs] 

Ann: She did. She did! This is where I was like, this is like something you would do, Lana. 

Lana: Sounds like work. Nope. 

Ann: Yeah. So anyway, she’s just like, “I’m going to figure this out.” Anyway. So, she’s just doing daily exercise. She set out to make a clinical study of her own afflicted body is what she’s up to. 

And this is where she gets really into Faraday. So, can you explain what he did? He was the electricity guy, right? 

Lana: Yeah, electromagnetism. So, like, it goes so nerdy, and I can go so nerdy, so I’m going to keep it very, very light. 

Ann: Keep it as understandable as possible for fashion enthusiasts like myself, please. 

Lana: Right. So, when electricity goes through a wire, there’s magnet stuff around it, is basically what it is. Understanding that, like how the magnetic stuff around the electricity going through the wire changes things, helped us figure out stuff like microwaves. Like, the microwave, keeping it from frying you while you stand in front of it and look at it, and the fact that, you know how when you’re in an elevator, your cell phone stops working? It’s because there’s steel all around you, and the waves that make it so that your cell phone gets a signal can’t pass through that steel. 

Ann: I never knew that! But when I’m at work, and I’m in the elevator, I’m like, “God damn it, why won’t my phone work?” 

Lana: It is literally… What that is called is it’s called a Faraday cage, because that’s the stuff he figured out, is that when you’re in steel, the signals from outside can’t come through, and the signals from inside can’t get out, the little waves of various things. And so, cell phone signals are electromagnetic waves; microwaves are electromagnetic waves. There’s a whole bunch of them, but those are the two big ones that, like, specifically, Faraday is associated with. 

Ann: So, she wrote to Faraday, and she said, “I present myself as the Bride of Science.” So, nickname count…

Lana: [laughs] That is the most ironic thing I’ve ever heard. 

Ann: Nickname count: three. We have Princess of Parallelograms, we have Enchantress of Numbers, and now we have the Bride of Science. And she was like, “I want to work not only alongside you, but I would like to become your soulmate.” 

Lana: [giggles] “I really like electricity.” 

Ann: And he’s just like, “Oh, my god.” So, her biographer, Miranda Seymour, says… So, she knew that she could yield or wield this Byronic power. She wrote about “The power I know I have over others.” 

Lana: She knew her charisma was hard. 

Ann: Yeah. So, “It was to this most Byronic aspect of Ada’s seductive personality that a dazed Michael Faraday was about to be subjected.” So, when she wants to be your friend, you will suddenly find yourself writing scientific papers with her. Like, this just is what’s going to happen. She did also have… She wrote her desire to become “High priestess of God’s works is manifested on this Earth.” 

Lana: [laughs] Her mother tried so hard, and she just failed so hard. [laughs] 

Ann: Her mother, like, pointed her in the direction of mathematics, but Byron DNA is still going to be Byron DNA. 

Lana: “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to Byron the heck out of mathematics. These poor scientists won’t know what’s coming.” 

Ann: So, he was then, Michael Faraday, “Regarded then as the greatest scientist of the day, had confidence in her, declared belief that she, Lord Byron’s daughter, had been singled out to act as the high priestess of God’s earthly manifestations.” 

Lana: If she lived longer, she would have started a whole on cult. 

Ann: Basically, yeah. But she was just like, “This is what’s happening.” He’s like, “Yeah, okay. I believe you.” 

So, this is where… Okay. She’s involved with Michael Faraday, and then there’s this scientist called Andrew Crosse, C-R-O-S-S-E. We started off this whole Regency Era series with the discussion of Mary Shelley. And so, Mary Shelley was writing about, like, “What if we use electricity to reanimate bodies?” Right? And that was in, like, 1819, I think that she wrote that. So, in 1836, Andrew Crosse actually did the experiment to see if he could make it work. So, like, medical halls have been doing stuff… Like Mary Shelley was personally inspired by the science of what’s happening back then, which is people like, attached electronics to, you know, dead frogs and make the legs jump or whatever. 

But anyway, so Andrew Crosse was into this. He had this crazy sort of like, his house was out in the country somewhere and it was just jam-packed full of just so much science experiments, he was doing stuff all the time. And Ada Lovelace’s mom, Annabella, still on the scene, is just like, “I need to show Ada that if she continues this way, she’s going to become insane.” So, she’s like, “I’m going to send her to this crazy sort of hoarder house to see like how bad it could be.” 

Lana: What could possibly go wrong? 

Ann: And she was just like, “This is the greatest house I’ve ever seen! My house should be like this house!” 

Lana: “So, what you’re saying is there’s electricity inside of me right now. YES!” [laughs] 

Ann: So, she really hits it off with Andrew Crosse. But then, he has a hot son called John Crosse, and she really hits it off with him. So, at this point, we’re in 1845, she is 29 years old. This whole era for her, it’s like what today, a nerd would be their, like, undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD level. This is the age that she is, right? She’s the age of a university student, just doing this self-guided stuff. Anyway, she meets Andrew Crosse’s son, John, and John is like, I think, 16 years younger than her. Is that true? No, because she’s 29. He’s a bit younger than her, not that much. Anyway, they get along really well, and then they spend time together in this house, and they begin some sort of love affair. I don’t know… No one knows. It was probably not a sexual relationship because Ada at this point had a large sore on her cervix that made intercourse very painful, and also peeing. Anyway, she’s got all these health things going on, and she’s just like, “I will fix my health problems through science, through exercise and… electricity.” I don’t know. 

Lana: And unfortunately, even today, we cannot fix what was actually wrong with her and her cervix. 

Ann: Mm-hm. So, she is just like, she’s spending so much time, she’s like, “I’m just going over to Andrew Crosse’s house, do science experiments, don’t worry about me.” And her husband’s like, “Love you, babe! Love your interest in science. Have fun with them.” But really, she’s hanging out with John Crosse. And then, eventually… So, John Crosse, he was interested in, I don’t know what this is. Crystallography. Do you know? 

Lana: No, not off the top of my head. But she also liked some weird stuff. She got into phrenology and, like, all of it. 

Ann: So, okay, John Crosse was interested in crystallography, “the branch of science devoted to the study of molecular and crystalline structure and properties.” 

Lana: Oh. So, like, how things become crystal. How the crystals form. 

Ann: And I just think about in Star Trek: Next Generation, there’s a thing called the crystalline entity, and I’m just like, “Okay. Like that.” So, she’s just like, “Oh, my gosh, I love crystallography.” And then she’s like, “Hey, babe!” She’s like, still at Andrew Crosse’s house. She’s like, “Still here,” writing to her husband, like, “Guess what? I met this guy, and we’re going to do more science, and I’m going to move in here, basically. So, like, don’t worry about me.” And her husband’s like, “Love you, babe. Got it, that’s fine.” So, she was having this relationship with John Crosse that she was not telling her husband about, whatever it was. And then, eventually, she’s like, “Huh, if I come back to London, the newspapers, all they want is for Lord Byron’s daughter to be doing something scandalous. So, I need to, like, not go to London. Where should I go? Brighton!” So, she goes to Brighton [Lana giggles] which is where John Crosse also lives, and they just secretly have this affair in Brighton. 

Now, what she doesn’t know, but eventually she finds out, is that John Crosse is secretly already married to somebody else and has a family. So, some people’s lives start off messy and get less messy, but Ada’s life becomes more messy with time, which is a trajectory that I don’t often find in my research. So, she is like, her health stuff is getting worse, simultaneous with, like, she’s having some sort of affair with John Crosse. 

Lana: At least an emotional affair. [giggles]

Ann: At least an emotional affair. It’s to the extent that, like, after… You know what? No, I’ll tell you later. Well, I’ll tell you right now. After she dies, John Crosse tries to blackmail her husband with the publication of their love letters. So, like, he’s a shitty person. You know what? Here’s the Byron-type relationship that she was inevitably going to be drawn to. 

Anyway, so her sort of final era. Can you explain about… [Lana giggles] Do you want me to explain? 

Lana: You start it. I’m just going to giggle. [giggles] 

Ann: Okay, so she and Charles Babbage, she’s like, “What is a practical use of these computer-type devices? Like, we have these things that can kind of figure out mathematical probability. What’s a practical use for that? I know, predicting horse races.” 

Lana: And Babbage is like, “No.” 

Ann: Oh no, Babbage was like, “Okay! Sure.” 

Lana: Oh yeah, he’s the practical, like, “Oh yeah, let’s figure that out.” 

Ann: “I can make my machine do that, no problem.” Okay, here. “She decided that she could use her mathematical skills to outwit experienced bookmakers, but she could never allow her own name to be used for placing bets,” because she’s Byron’s daughter and she’s, you know… 

Lana: She’s the countess. 

Ann: Yeah, yeah. So, she got some friends to help who could make a little money by, like, placing the bets for her by the use of her computation. 

Lana: Not that she needed money. [laughs] 

Ann: Actually, Lana, she does need money, and here’s why. Her lover, John Crosse. 

Lana: Oh. Right, John Crosse. 

Ann: Owed money to a lot of people, and he needed money. And she couldn’t— Like, she’s wealthy, her mother’s wealthy, her husband’s wealthy, but she couldn’t ask them for money because she couldn’t let them know about her affair. So, she’s like, “I need to find a way to earn money myself to give to my shitty lover.” 

Lana: She didn’t need money; her shitty lover needed money. 

Ann: Yeah, he needed money. It’s almost like he has to pay for a house and a family [laughs] that he secretly has. So, she starts doing this to make money, I think for fun, but also because he needs… 

Lana: I mean, also to prove that her machines work and do something. And so, yeah, that’s it. Start a gambling ring. 

Ann: Yeah, so here’s a quote from the biography. 

How good was Ada at bookmaking, or more accurately gambling on horses? The fact that her ring stuck with her through at least one full racing season suggests she must have had some degree of success. Nevertheless, the few scraps of notes and papers that survived from the bookmakers themselves suggest that the excited countess was doing little more than following tips and making judgments based on the odds. 

So, no one knows, and I didn’t say this at the beginning, but it’s important to know that her mother is so opposed to horse race gambling. It’s like, the one thing her mother is most passionate about in this life, besides math, is being opposed to horse race gambling. So, Ada is like, “My mother can never know about this. No one can know about this.” 

Lana: And that’s also why she picks it. 

Ann: I think so, it’s like, the one thing her mother hates the most in the world. Yeah. So, Charles Babbage is kind of like, if you just have your sort of like little squad, it’s like he’s the one running the numbers, and then she’s kind of like in there too, and then she gets the other, like, their are maids and servants and whoever and other friends to go and actually place the bets. 

Lana: And Babbage is the kind of guy that it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to figure this out to see if I can do prediction analysis,” not “I am secretly the math guy behind a horse gambling ring.” [giggles]

Ann: Mm-hm. So, anyway, just like so many people in the Regency era, she winds up in wild amounts of debt to the point that she and her lover is like, “Oh my gosh, I need money for undisclosed reasons, totally not a secret family.” So, then she pawns the family jewels, literally, the actual Lovelace family jewels, for money for him. By this point, she’s effectively bed-bound. Like, she’s just running this from her sick bed. So, people are coming to her, and she’s overseeing it. And I feel like this is pretty badass, honestly, to be like, so overcome with symptoms that you’re bed-bound, but you’re just like, “You know what I’m going to do? Start a criminal enterprise from my bed. People are going to come to me.” 

Anyway, her mother finds out about this, and she finds where the jewels were pawned, and then she buys them back, and then Ada pawns them again. [laughs] 

Lana: Sounds about right. [giggles] Sounds like their whole relationship. 

Ann: Actually, what she had done, I need to clarify. So, she had arranged with John Crosse to pawn her husband’s most treasured heirloom, the Lovelace diamonds. In their place, she had substituted paste replicas. So, they pawn the jewels, but then replace them with fakes. This is getting into, like, Jeanne de la Motte, Affair of the Necklace level…  Anyway, so this is what she’s up to. 

Her husband, when she started doing the horse racing stuff, there’s a thing where she had to get, for some of the loans she was taking, like, her husband knew about the horse racing stuff. Was he complicit in it? I don’t know. But he was just like, “Love you, babe. Is this your new science experiment? Horse racing? I support it.” 

Lana: Babbage is involved, it must be fine. 

Ann: Yeah! So, her husband had written a paper to one of the, like, money lenders, being like, “Yeah, this is fine. Loan her as much money as you need.” But this was, like, very damning to him that he was letting her do this, so like, he could be blackmailed, and later he was blackmailed by John Crosse about this. So, she gave John Crosse this document that could harm her husband’s future. So, John Crosse is just like… This is a shitty person. This is a horrifying… 

Lana: He does not have anyone’s best interest but his own. 

Ann: No. So, he’s a scientist, but he’s kind of like… I don’t know, as I’m learning, there’s a lot of different kinds of like technologic— He’s like a tech bro, just shitty person. Anyway, so she is just kind of wasting away, basically. Her disease is progressing, she’s been discovered. Her mother now knows that she’s like overseeing a gambling ring, so her mother’s really mad at her.  

So, I need to sidebar about her children. So, her favourite child is her oldest son, Byron Jr., and he’s also my favourite of her children because this guy is great. Byron Jr. was, I mentioned before, the children were sort of raised by the servants. And he was raised, like, it was so foundational to him that he was hanging out with the servants and the servants’ children, and he’s just like, “Oh, I’m like them. I’m not like my family. I’m like them. I want to just be a working-class person.” He was always kind of wild and kind of uninhibited, kind of like Ada herself, kind of like grandpa Byron. He didn’t do well in school, and they’re all just like, “Oh, Byron Jr., what are we going to do with him?” And then, from the time he was five years old, he was like, “I want to be a sailor. I want to go to sea. Just let me go and be a sailor.” So, when he’s 11, they’re like, “Okay, go ahead. Go be a sailor.” 

Lana: His grandfather’s child, too. 

Ann: Oh, it’s like, the best parts of Byron were inherited by Byron Jr., like, the only good parts of him. So, he’s just like “Great!” And then, his first ship assignment, I think he’s like, 13 years old, he’s assigned to this ship that is transporting these three Irish aristocrats who were being sent to Australia as punishment for being Irish, like, nationalists, rebels. So, however long it takes to get from England to Australia, to just, like, hang out and learn from these guys. And he’s just like, “This is great. I, too, will be a rebel! A gentleman rebel.” And so, he’s just like living, he’s loving it. Like they sent him off to sea to maybe sort of train him because he’s supposed to be the heir to Lovelace and everything, and he just comes back, and he’s just like, he’s got tattoos on his hands. This is a part where I was just like, “I love this guy.” 

Lana: And he’s a Viscount! In Bridgerton, he is the same level as Anthony. He’s going to be an Earl, which is higher. [laughs]

Ann: And he does not want to do that. When he was a kid, he went on a field trip to a coal mine once, and he was just like, “You know what I want to do? Work in the coal mine industry as one of these, like, guys with the shovels. That’s my goal and dream.” Anyway, so he comes back for a visit at one point, and he’s tan and, like, handsome and Byron Jr., tattoos on his hand! And his family’s like “Oh no, you can never be a Lord Admiral with tattoos on your hands,” and he’s like “Fuck you, I don’t want to! That’s why I got the tattoos on my hands, fuckos!” And then, they try to get him in sort of a higher-up job on a ship and he ends up I think overseeing a mutiny, and then he leaves the Navy, which we talked about in other episodes is a criminal offense for which you can be like executed, and he’s just like “Fuck all this I just want to go work with my hands and be a worker!” And he does. He goes, and he finds a coal mine, and he’s just like, if there was unions, he would have been on the forefront of that. He was just like “I’m here to support…” 

On one of his first like ship trips, it was somewhere in South America, and he showed up, and he saw that the wealthy people’s house had, sort of, a direct pipeline of bringing fresh water to the wealthy people, and he started digging to redirect the water to the poor. He’s just like… If he was here today, he’d be supporting Bernie Sanders or whatever. Like, I love this guy. He’s just like “Fuck aristocracy, fuck being a Viscount. I just want to be here amongst the real…” But in a genuine way. Not like Byron is play-acting being a hero to Greece. Byron Jr. was just like, “This is me. This is actually me.” 

So, he abandoned his family, he abandoned everything. And then when his mother was sick, he went back to see her, and she’s just like “Oh, my favourite son. Look at you, so tan and handsome, tattoos on your hands. Love you so much, kid.” And he’s like, “I refute my lordship, and I’m just going to go and live in the coal mines and peace out.” He was a stealth major supporting character in the story that I appreciate. He tragically… He was saving enough money to buy a ship so he could go to America, where I think he would have had a fun time, the Wild West, but he tragically died of, like, a brain aneurysm. And that’s the story of Byron Jr. I love him. Anyway, so he did come back when she was sick, and he came to see her on her deathbed, et cetera. 

There’s something about when she was on her deathbed, I mentioned the growth on her cervix, it’s cancer, and it’s spreading throughout her internal organs. So, Charles Babbage was summoned and given a draft of her will, and he was asked to look through certain papers that Ada had given him and to destroy what he judged unfit to preserve. And then, she asked… So, she’s just slowly dying over the month of August. Toward the end of August, she writes to her friend, Charles Dickens, and she’s like, “Dear Charles Dickens, can you please come and read to me about little Paul Dombey gliding into death with a piece that she craved and could not find.” So, like, they had this kind of pen pal relationship, and so he did. He did come to see her in Brighton, and he wrote in his diary that he “Was wonderfully struck with her courage and calmness.” 

So, she’s like, slowly dying, this is when it was discovered that she had pawned the jewels for a second time. [giggles] 

Lana: She has a terrible taste in men. [giggles]

Ann: Yeah, this is genetic. I mean, her mother did, her father did, of course she did. But her husband was like there for her until towards the very end. She told him something, and we don’t know what it was, probably “I’ve been having an affair with John Crosse, who is currently blackmailing me.” Because he suddenly turned against her. Like, he was there for her, and then suddenly he was just like “Fuck this woman,” and he was less kind, and he did not take seriously the various addendums to her will that she had done. 

She recited a line from her father’s poem as she died. Allegedly, she said, “Believe and sink not, doubt and perish.” I don’t know, for last words, what the context of that would be. Her mother, as Ada is in this sort of like, depleted state, she is dying, like, she’s in constant excruciating pain, nothing can help it. Her mother is just like, “Are you gonna see the Lord now and repent?” [laughs softly]

Lana: “Have my trainings finally done something for you now that you’re dying?” [giggles]

Ann: So, her mother later wrote about like, “And on her deathbed Ada found the Lord and turned to Christianity.” It’s sort of like in torture, like, you would say whatever someone tells you to say in that situation. 

Lana: “Yes, mother.” 

Ann: So, she did request that she be interred beside her father near the Byron family seat. I didn’t mention this, but John Crosse, this goes without saying, was a fanboy of Lord Byron, and that’s part of what they had in common. 

So, she dies, RIP. John Crosse threatens to publish their love letters and to ruin her reputation, so then, her husband and her mother are trying to figure this out with him. They pay him off, including they wanted to get that betting authorization that the husband had. So anyway, John Crosse, shitty ass person. Ada Lovelace dies, age 36, the same age Lord Byron died. And then, she is buried with Lord Byron. 

So, talking about… I just want to get to sort of the life and legacy. Like, it sucks. It fucking sucks that she died so young. She was getting into some real interesting stuff. 

Lana: And if she’d been able to shake off John Crosse and all that stuff, like, would she have fallen down deeper into a dirtbag era? Or would she have ushered in an era of computers earlier than we expected? It could have gone either way. 

Ann: Honestly, it could have. So, when she died… Just a sec, I have this… She requested, and it’s like, did she request this, or did her mother just say that she requested this? Her plaque on her tomb, by her specific request, carried only the dates of her birth and death together with the information that she was Byron’s daughter and Lord Lovelace’s wife. So, it’s like, “Here lies a wife and daughter of men.” The typical Vulgar history tomb. 

Lana: Obviously. 

Ann: Yeah. And then there’s a bunch of shit happened later on, where her mother’s name was trashed. It was a lot of Byron acolytes were just, like, “Annabella Milbanke, she sucks.” And so that took a lot of attention. Ada Lovelace died, and kind of wasn’t really remembered for what— Like, she became much better known for what she did much later on. 

Lana: When we were unearthing all of the women, like, the woman who actually discovered DNA that was stolen by Watson and Crick. There was an era where we went back and were like, “Hmm, was there a woman involved here?” 

Ann: Yeah. So, part of it is like, Alan Turing, who is a famous science guy played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie, he published a paper, I just want to see when it was… 

Lana: He was a lot like Babbage in that he had ideas for computers, and he made things that were computer adjacent, but he never actually made a computer. 

Ann: Okay, so in 1953, somebody called B.V. Bowden republished Ada Lovelace’s notes in a book or a paper called Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. This is 1953, this is like, before Hidden Figures, but like when people are thinking, “Oh, computers. This could be a thing.” 

Lana: This is when they were starting to actually build the very first computer. So, the ABC in Iowa, the ENIAC over at University of Pennsylvania… I know a lot about the ABC because I grew up 40 minutes from where it was first built. But the ENIAC is the first, like, programmable computer, and the ABC is the first non-programmable computer. [giggles]

Ann: But I feel like the people in this era, like in the 1950s, are being like, “Wow!” They’re looking back at papers, like they’re looking at Babbage, and then they find this paper or this book about him, and then it’s now known that AAL is Ada Lovelace. This is when Alan Turing, 1950, publishes a paper beginning with the statement “I propose to consider the question: Can machines think?” And so, he’s just like “Ada Lovelace thought that they couldn’t, but she was wrong!” Blah, blah, blah. 

So, this is kind of like, computers started being discussed as a thing and becoming a thing that existed, and her work was right up there in the conversation. I think at that point, like, the nerds are familiar with her work, to the point that the computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defence, was named after her. This is in 1980. 1981, the Association for Women in Computing inaugurated its Ada Lovelace Award. So, by then, 1981, she’s, at least to the nerds… Between her death, so 1852 to, like, 1952, she’s not really discussed or thought about, but then in the ‘50s, her work is regarded, and then they did actually – I forget what year it was, I read it somewhere in my research – but somebody built the actual Babbage machine and then they took her computer program, and there’s one small mistake, but otherwise it worked perfectly. Like, she got it. She was incredibly forward-thinking. 

The British Computer Society has awarded the Lovelace Medal since 1998, and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students. So, I feel like since 2008, we’ve had this like “Women in STEM!” 2013, there’s the Spanish Award, the Ada Byron Award for Women in Technology. I’m not going to read all these things, because there’s a lot of commemorations for her. Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated the second Tuesday of October. It started in 2009 to raise the profile of women in science, engineering, technology, and maths. 

Lana: She’s definitely the poster child for women in STEM. 

Ann: Absolutely. And she is! Like, as a kid, all she was doing was making science experiments. The building of the Department of Engineering Mathematics at University of Bristol near… Oh no, that’s near Bath, it’s not near Brighton. Anyway, it’s called the Ada Lovelace Building. The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived later on, is named after her. Again, nothing in Brighton, a place where she was often. There’s a statue of her in London in the city of Westminster. 

Lana: I was going to make a terrible joke about how we all— Queer people all know we’re bad at math. 

Ann: I just wanted to mention that the statue of her is fully clothed, which I need to say now, since the Mary Wollstonecraft statue. 

Lana: [chuckles] Lord. 

Ann: We’re going to get into the scoring and stuff, but she’s one of the most commemorated people ever, but it’s all been like, since 2008. 

Lana: She got dug up. They went, and they found women in STEM, and they found her. Turing is the only one that was really having a science conversation with her. Even after her death, he was, like, arguing with her, which is the biggest form of respect from a scientist is “Look at this person, she’s wrong! And I’m going to tell you all about it.” 

Ann: “Look at this lady.” 

Yeah. So, in 2015, it was the bicentenary of Ada Lovelace’s birth, ther was a number of events, including a one-woman show called Ada, Ada, Ada, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it used an LED dress. 

Lana: [giggles] Which she would have loved,. 

Ann: Which she would have loved. You know that time at the Met Gala when Zendaya went wearing the LED Cinderella dress? I feel like that’s what Ada Lovelace would have loved. 

Lana: It’s all of her things; it’s being dramatic and electricity. 

Ann: So, she appeared in an episode of Doctor Who, and she appeared on the ITV series Victoria, and there’s various games. The fact that she’s so known by nerds and by women nerds, like, of course, she’s commemorated in all these nerdy ways. I’ve never seen, in popular culture, this part of her Wikipedia, I’m just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. She’s been commemorated. 

Lana: Where popular is used very loosely. 

Ann: “Popular.” But yeah, there’s a board game, she’s been in video games, oh my gosh, there’s so many… Lecture series, buildings, computer languages. I feel like, and I saw this in one of the things I was reading about her, I think, at this point, she’s been commemorated more than her dad. There’s so many active things now that are the Ada Lovelace things versus Lord Byron. If you’re a certain kind of nerd, like a history nerd, a literature nerd, you’ve heard of Lord Byron, but like, Ada Lovelace stuff is everywhere, which I appreciate for her because she’s much more interesting than her shitty dad. And as I said, much more, much more interesting than the very watered-down, understandably, children’s picture book biographies. None of them involve the horse racing grift. [laughs] 

Lana: [laughs] Practical applications of prediction engines. 

Ann: None of them get into that. This is like, if there was a movie about her, I would want it to be about that, but I know it would be about her, like, earnestly doing math equations because… 

Lana: Because it’s the Regency, and what we do is we water it down and make it less interesting. “Oh no, handholding!” Raise 14 children together because you don’t know who the fathers are, but be worried about handholding. [giggles] 

Ann: If anything, I hope that people who’ve listened to this full Regency Era series of Vulgar History now appreciate how preposterous it is that, in common understanding, like, in Regency things like Bridgerton, it’s like “Oh no, a man and a woman were seen together? I guess now they have to get married.” It’s like, actually, everybody was on so much opium constantly, they wouldn’t have noticed or cared that those two people were together. Never mind, they’re all also in like weird toxic polycules. Like… anyway. [Lana giggles] 

So, we’re going to score Ada Lovelace. And what’s exciting about this is once we have her score, I’m going to be able to announce the first brackets of my Diamond of the Season, March Madness-like playoffs that we’re doing for the Regency era, and I’m really curious to see where she lands because this is going to affect… 

Lana: I am too. 

Ann: It’s going to be a bloodbath, this competition. So, Scandaliciousness, Ada Lovelace. Out of 10, where would you rank her? 

Lana: I mean, she starts out so low, and then she just zooms so… [laughs] 

Ann: It’s so unusual! Usually, people start off high, and then they become less scandalous, but she just like… The fact that her lover was blackmailing her husband after her death. She ran away as a— 

Lana: I want to give her so many points just because it’s like, “Hmm, I have invented computers. What shall I do with it? Ah, yes! Horse races.” 

Ann: “Oh, yeah. Start this, kind of like, multi-level marketing scheme, horse racing grift.” 

Lana: “Play the ponies.”

Ann: “To get enough money for my married lover blackmailing me.” Up to that point, she ran away with her tutor, but not very well, and then she came back. She got married, she had kids. She did everything that was expected of her. For an aristocratic young lady, she wasn’t doing any of the shit that, like, Lady Caroline Lamb was up to. She was just like, she was married, she wasn’t really having affairs. But then the final part of her life does get so bananas. 

Lana: Like, she’s dying of cervical cancer while playing the ponies with a machine that she helped invent. [giggles] 

Ann: Yeah. She’s pawning the family jewels twice, getting fake versions of them put in. 

Lana: Like, I want to go at least an 8, but you tell me, because you know relative. 

Ann: Relative. And I’ve been trying to think about where she would land. I think… 

Lana: Like, all of her kids were her husband’s, so that diminishes points. 

Ann: No, that’s the thing. Like compared to Georgiana, Emma Hamilton, she’s… But she was playing the ponies, there was all this stuff, and like, her mother was horrified by all this stuff. This would have ruined her name in society if it came out, but it didn’t. 

Lana: And her husband’s. 

Ann: And her husband’s and his political career. I’m going to say, let’s go… Mmm. It’s tricky. I’m going to say 7. How about that? Because I just don’t think she’s quite at an 8. Because it was such a… Had she lived longer, I think she would have gotten there. But you know, she’s cut down on the crime of her dirtbag era.

Lana: Again, she could have gone either way. 

Ann: For the child of Byron, you know, there was some Milbanke in there that kind of kept her… 

Lana: Tempered her out. 

Ann: Yeah. Well, and also, if she hadn’t had the, like, ovarian cyst, she might have had children with her lover. 

Lana: Yeah, cervical cancer is definitely going to hinder your chances of having illegitimate children. 

Ann: Okay, the next category is Schemieness, and I think for her especially, I want to clarify, it’s not just about like, “Oh, I have a scheme.” It’s just about, like, are you coming up with plans? Are you like doing things? Are you an active member of your life? So, I think in terms of the horse racing schemieness, it’s like, yeah, she’s doing all that stuff. She started a horse racing grift, she pawned the jewels. But also like, in terms of schemieness, she’s coming up with inventions, you know, she’s doing things. She was an active member of her life. 

Lana: She’s predicting the entire future. [giggles]

Ann: Yeah. She predicted AI in, like, 1840. 

Lana: She knew that computers weren’t just going to do math, that they were going to have letters and that they were going to have music and they were going to… Like, she could see what Charles Babbage couldn’t, was that computers were going to be everywhere once we figured them out. 

Ann: Well, and I like her schemieness. She’s like, “I want to learn about this kind of science,” so she writes to that person, and she wins them over, and then she gets to do that kind of science. 

Lana: Like, she took the Byron charisma and is like, “I am going to befriend all of the scientists that are doing the things that I’m interested in.” 

Ann: It’s like “I see it. I want it. I get it.” She used her scheming for mostly science reasons until the very end. But she certainly had it, it’s just she filtered it through science instead of through, like, dirtbagginess. 

Lana: She tried to use it for good until she couldn’t. 

Ann: The Byron stuff just overcame her. So, I don’t know how high does that get her, do you think? 

Lana: I mean, I’m saying, again, I’m going to give her all of the points because I love her. So, I’m going to go for an 8, and you’re going to talk me up or down. 

Ann: I think an 8 is fair. I think she was a very planning… Like, to me, schemieness, like, how schemey can you be when you’re like, an isolated homeschool child? But like, she was. She’s like, “Okay, I’m going to make a flying machine. Okay, I’m going to hoist these ropes up. I’m going to do this.” She was always coming up with a scheme and a plan, it’s just they were science experiments which we don’t usually describe as schemes, but… 

Lana: She’s like, “I need to exercise, so I’m going to turn it into a white paper.” Like, she couldn’t even exercise without a plan. [giggles] 

Ann: Yeah. I think an 8 is very fair for Schemieness. And then we have Significance. 

Lana: See, that’s where I go 1,000. Like, she’s influenced my whole life, and I didn’t even know it half the time. 

Ann: Yeah! I think that her… It’s interesting because it’s like, in her time, it’s like, “Here lies a wife and a daughter of men,” but then, like, her legacy has become so massive. Like, when you’re predicting the future, it doesn’t become apparent that you did that until the future happens, and then you’re like, “Oh wait, she got it.” So, at the time… Even the fact that there’s no… I was saying there’s all these commemorations to her, but she lived in Brighton for such a long time, but there’s nothing there about her. Like, Brighton, get on it. I think you could really lean into this for your tourism industry, but they’re like “No, we’re fine. We have the Pavilion, we’re good. We don’t need another thing.” 

Lana: Even getting Faraday and Babbage to have a conversation. Those are the two people that make computers talking to each other a thing. Like, that is a huge… Like, that’s where superconductors come from— Semiconductors, sorry. Semiconductors come from is the ideas of Babbage, the on and off switches, and the electromagnetism. And so, it’s like, she knew these people were going to be important and got them having conversations. 

Ann: She was also working to, like, increase Babbage’s… Getting more people to know about him, getting people to fund him. Like, in terms of philanthropy, or just sort of… I mean, we can only go as high as 10, but I think she’s for sure a 10 out of 10 for Significance. 

Lana: She’s for sure a 10.

Ann: She just is. I think name recognition, I think what she actually accomplished, and then, retroactively, what she predicted, like, I think, yeah. What I would like to see is somebody replicating her horse racing algorithm and to see if it works today. 

Lana: No, because there’s too many factors. We can’t control for it. We can’t control for the track, we can’t control… Literally, it is what people have been trying to do for so long, but you can’t control for it. 

Ann: Yeah, it’s more just like, card counting, I guess, is where you can get mathematical help with gambling. 

The final category is the Sexism Bonus. I’m going to propose a few things, and then you can tell me what you think. First, I would say, just the fact, like you said, if she was a man doing all the scientific stuff, she would have been famous in her time, and she was not. Although, I would counter that with, like, she’s so famous now because she was so important and she was a woman. Like, the fact that she was a woman has made her more famous now. Her various health conditions… If women’s medical stuff had been taken more seriously back then, maybe she wouldn’t have died age 36, but at the same time, men were dying age 36 of various cancers. 

Lana: Even today, cancer is hard. 

Ann: Yeah, that’s a tricky one, too. But you know, like, her various other ailments. I don’t know, because you know she had to marry because she was a woman, but like, he was fine up until the end. He didn’t get in her way; he didn’t stop her. She had kids, but she did not let that stop her at all; she forgot about them most of the time. So, I don’t know how much… Yeah. 

Lana: She had the wealth and title offset that, like, if she was middle-class… She’s about the equivalent of a middle-class man. 

Ann: Yeah. It’s a bit like in the French Revolution, there was that… Who’s that nerdy woman? Madame… something. Anyway, there was a woman who was… 

Lana: With the salons? 

Ann: Yeah, with the salons where you couldn’t drink or eat. What’s her face? Anyway, she really wanted to be up there, like, writing papers and stuff, and she just could not, she was not allowed to. Like, she was really stymied from living her sort of nerd life. But Ada, because of her wealth, she was able… 

Lana: But also, because she had the Byronic audacity. Like, somebody saying, “You can’t write papers,” she’s like, “Pshh. Watch me.” 

Ann: “I am the goddess of science. Worship me!” 

Lana: “No. I’m gonna write the papers. If you don’t let me publish them, I will just wipe my name off of them. It’s fine. They’re gonna be published.” 

Ann: Yeah, like, the Sexism Bonus is to give points to somebody who maybe could have accomplished more if not for the patriarchy, but I feel like, because of her wealth.

Lana: I think she could have accomplished more if not for the patriarchy, but I don’t think it stopped her from accomplishing. Like, I only think she could have gotten through more doors and maybe talked to more people, or maybe like… But she did enough. Like, if it’s anything, it’s like, a 1 or a 2. It’s not a lot. 

Ann: I think it’s like a 2. I think part of this is like, you know, her mother is like… Well, no one in this story is a good mother, but I think what her mother did bestow upon her was just sort of like… The fact that her mother wasn’t like, “You need to do,” I don’t know, “Ballet lessons.” She was like, “You need to do math.” Like, the fact that her mother was just like, “Here’s what you’re going to do.” 

Lana: Like, “What’s the least Byron thing I can think? Ah, yes. Math.” [laughs]

Ann: But the fact that her mother’s like, “I’m going to educate you so hard.” Her mother did set her up for success in that way. 

Lana: Her mother never thought that there was a problem with her being more sciencey, and I think that that was really a lot of it. 

Ann: That was really beneficial. So, this gives her a total score of 27. 

Lana: Which is good for me! 

Ann: Yeah! I think this might be the highest Lana episode. [laughs]

Lana: No. No. Because I have Catherine de’ Medici, which is my cheat. 

Ann: No, you’re right, you’re right. But you just don’t tend to have people, other than her, with scandal in their lives. 

So, let me just go over here to my bracket for the… So, you know how on Bridgerton they choose the Diamond of the Season? So, I wanted to make it fun because we always give a score to people on Vulgar History, and I thought well, at the end we’re going to see who is the Diamond of our Podcast Season. And then, I was like, well, I want to have it be a public vote somehow, but I want to involve the scores. So, what I’m going to do is I’m using the Scandaliciousness Scores for the seeding. You know what, Ada? I’ve got a little algorithm. Not really. What I have is a little Google Document. But anyway, thank you, Ada, for Google. So, I have the seeding, and that’s how the matchups are going to be paired. 

So, listeners, this is maybe the first time you’re hearing about this. When you hear this episode, starting today, there’s going to be… You can vote on these matchups on Instagram, where I’m @VulgarHistoryPod, it’ll be on my Stories, like, every other day will be a matchup, or around, several matchups. And then if you’re on my Patreon, you can also vote there, so Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, and then I’m going to add up the scores. And then at the end of it, we’ll see who is the Diamond of our Season. And it’s bananas because of the scores that people have. 

Lana: I love that of the bottom five of your scores, three of them are mine, and like, of the bottom ten, most of them, they’re more mine than anything else. 

Ann: Well, I think it’s going to be interesting because… So, altogether there’s eighteen competitors, but for a bracket, you can only have a bracket of sixteen, so there’s going to be two play-in games to begin. And those play-in games are going to be Jane Austen versus Princess Caraboo, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, versus the Brontës. 

Lana: [laughs] I mean, I appreciate that you didn’t put Jane Austen against the Brontës because they don’t belong in the same class. 

Ann: Their scores were really close, though. 

Lana: Yes, their scores are very close, but…

Ann: Let me see, so Ada Lovelace, I’m seeing who she’s up against… I think it’s Ada Lovelace… Oh, I think it might be Ada Lovelace versus Claire Clairmont, [Lana gasps] the battle of the Byron-adjacent. 

Lana: I don’t know if she can beat Claire. [giggles] We’ll see. 

Ann: I don’t know. This is what’s interesting. No, because we’ve got some… Like, every name is pretty well known, but the fact that Jane Austen is towards the bottom because of her lack of, you know, scandalous things. 

Lana: She’s a good girl. [giggles] She’s a middle-class good girl in the Regency; she is what people think the Regency was. 

Ann: In terms of the scores, like, the number one rated seat is Queen Marie-Louise Christophe from Haiti, and then Anne Lister is next, and then Chevalière d’Éon is next. Like, when I say it’s going to be a bloodbath… 

Lana: It’s going to be a bloodbath.

Ann: Like, the opening round, you’re like, “This isn’t the final?” This is going to be bananas. 

But anyway, so if you want— So, for everybody, I know you want to. If you want to vote on this, voting starts today. So, on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod, or if you’re not on Instagram, go to my Patreon, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, and then you can vote, and we’ll see how this all shakes out. I’m excited. I love a match-up. But also, I think some of these are going to be really wild competitions. 

I knew this was going to be a long episode, and I’m glad it is because we had a lot of stuff to get into, and we did. So, Lana, I don’t know, do you have any wrap-up thoughts? Like, next week is going to be officially the finale of the Regency Era, but do you have any Regency era thoughts in general? 

Lana: I’m glad… I’m so glad we got to this point. The very beginning of the podcast, before any of you know about the podcast, was me and Ann talking about how she was going to get her book about Caroline of Brunswick published. [giggles] And so, it’s like, how do we do that? Well, you need a platform. What kind of platform can you do? Okay, a podcast. So, the end of this season is kind of the culmination of the long con. 

Ann: It really is because I started the podcast with an episode about Caroline of Brunswick. Now I have a book about Caroline of Brunswick, Rebel of the Regency. Get it wherever you get your books from. Even if you’re in the UK, I think it’s there now, depending when this episode comes out. May 21st, it’ll be in the UK. But yes, then I did this whole season, the Regency season, to help promote the book, and so it’s like a beautiful full circle thing. 

I will not give any spoilers, but we’re going to have the Regency Era finale next week, and that’s not going to involve the Diamond of the Season. Next week, I’m just having a discussion about Regency era stuff, then we’re going to have a little break, by which I mean me interviewing various authors. And then, we’re going to be back in with a new season, a new era, starting in, like, July or something like that. So, the show is not going anywhere. It’s just this Regency, like from Lana and I scheming with a 10 out of 10, how can Ann get to publish a book about a queen no one’s ever heard of, to the point of me having a podcast, the podcast being successful enough that someone bought the book, the book being published… Yeah, it’s been a beautiful journey, and I’m excited for the next era and where it takes us all. 

Lana: And there’s more schemes afoot, so it’ll be fine. 

Ann: There’s more schemes. There’s always… I, personally, am a 10 out of 10 Schemieness, and I’m also someone who hates secrets. Like, I love other people telling me secrets. I hate having secrets, and it kills me every time. 

Lana: Which is terrible for scheming. [giggles] 

Ann: For a schemey person, I know. I have various things that I can’t tell you about yet, listeners, but it’s all exciting and fun things. Well, including what the theme is for the next season. Can’t tell you that, but it’ll be a good time. 

Lana: Mostly, I’m glad that you’re going to be leaving your Prinny villain era and that you’ll never have to think of him again. 

Ann: I’m excited. Like, after I finished the French Revolution season, a week later, I was like, “What was the name of that guy? Oh, I forgot. Thank God.” Like, I’m excited to forget a lot of Regency era stuff. Everything about Prinny, like, just leave it in the past. One day, I’ll think of the Regency era, and I’ll be like, “Who was the Regent? I don’t recall.” I look forward to that for myself and for my sanity. 

Anyway, Lana Wood Johnson. Thank you for inspiring the show. Thank you for… It’s so funny every time you’re like, “You should do a podcast episode about this person,” I’m like, “Lana, no, that sounds boring.” It’s like, I don’t know why I still don’t trust you. [chuckles]

Lana: Which is funny because the only boring episode was the one you suggested. 

Ann: Queen Charlotte? 

Lana: Yes. [laughs]

Ann: You’ll notice she’s not on my Diamond of the Season bracket. 

Lana: She’s the worst, I hate her. No, wait. Nope. She’s the second worst; her granddaughter is the worst. I hate her the most.

Ann: Victoria? 

Lana: Yes. 

Ann: Yeah. Victoria, the one, you know, like the Brighton Pavilion, when I went there, and it was like, “Queen Victoria came here and she wrote…” and you know, Queen Victoria wrote a diary every day of her life. And when she went to the Brighton Pavilion, she was just like, “What the fuck is this place? It’s like the Taj Mahal on crack. The decor is so offensive, and she’s like, “And why are we in Brighton, but we’re not on the seashore? This castle sucks. I hate it here.” And then, I guess she and Albert tried to go strolling around, and the people of Brighton came up to them too much, and they’re like, “We don’t care for this.” So, they almost never went to Brighton.

Lana: How dare you interact with me? 

Ann: “How dare you? Get away from me and my husband.” Honestly, though, when I was in, it was like “This is the room where Queen Victoria would stay when she came here.” And I was like, “Oh man, Victoria and Albert fucked in this room!” 

Lana: [laughs] Victoria was there, and Albert was alive, that’s what happened. 

Ann: It’s a fuck room! So, you know, we’ve talked about a lot of things in this episode, but what I do want to just emphasize is like, go to Brighton, visit the Royal Pavilion, take pictures and send them to me because everything I’ve described, you’re like, “Ha-ha Ann, that sounds funny.” But when you go, you’re like, “Oh fuck, this place is fucked up! I feel like I’m the worst escape room. Like, what is this? Am I in some sort of movie about being trapped in, like, the ugliest house in the world? What is happening?” So, you need to go because you need to understand what it’s like. It’s like being in Prinny’s head, and it’s like… I’m glad I went. 

Lana: It’s not a good place to be. 

Ann: Next to it or nearby, there’s a pub called Mrs. Fitzherberts, that’s Prinny’s other wife, and it’s a pub. Brighton is just like, go there for Pride. 

Oh! Speaking of, speaking of! I have my fundraiser that’s going on until the end of May, raising funds for the Trevor Project. I have this art, the Regency QueERA. So, it’s this beautiful design made by my friend, Jan Jupiter, which features all the queer-coded people from the Regency season of this podcast, and it says “The Regency QueERA,” and it’s gorgeous. All the proceeds are going to support the Trevor Project. So, get your shirt now. You can also make donations there to the Trevor Project, which is a wonderful, American. 

Lana: Always support the Trevor Project. 

Ann: Yeah, like, suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQIA+ people.

Lana: And support. If you’re all alone, it’s the right place to go. Talk to them. 

Ann: Yes, absolutely. Trevor Project, we love the Trevor Project. And just all the conversations about Bridgerton and like, “Oh my God, what? There’s going to be a sapphic story? That’s not historically accurate,” which is like, first of all, when has Bridgerton ever been historically accurate? And secondly, as I hope I portrayed in this series, the Regency era was queer as fuck. So, like, we made this beautiful design, and I’m having this shirt now, and you can get it at so go to VulgarHistory.com/Trevor, that’s VulgarHistory.com/Trevor, to get your Regency QueERA tee, and then you’ll get it in time for Pride, which is June. So, you can wear it and explain to everybody how the Regency was a wild time, and everybody was queer, really. 

Anyway, thank you, Lana, for joining me yet again. To all my listeners, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

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Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Regency Era artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.

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