Sue Bailey

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! And if you’ve missed it so far,

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.

The woman I want to talk about is Mary Somerville. Mary was born in 1780, the daughter of a vice admiral in the British Navy. In her own words, her education was “scant and haphazard”: she had just one year of formal schooling. But when she was widowed at the age of 24, Mary decided to get herself the education she’d never had. She taught herself astronomy and mathematics, and began to conduct her own scientific experiments. And she flew.

Having become the first female writer to have a paper read to the Royal Society, in 1827 she was asked by the wonderfully-named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to write popular versions of Laplace’s Mecanique Céleste and Newton’s Principia. This began a writing career that lasted until her death at the age of 92, producing books on astronomy, maths, chemistry, physics and geography that remained in use in schools and universities for decades. She was one of the first women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, was given a pension of £200 a year by the King, and even had her scientific work preached against in York Cathedral. Not bad for one who, in her own words, was “allowed to grow up a wild creature”.

There are two things that inspire me about this story. Firstly, the education. It terrifies me how close I came to living a life where no one thought I was worth educating. My own father left school at 15 to start work with no qualifications whatsover. Not that he failed any exams; the school he was sent to simply didn’t offer them. If I’d been my grandfather’s daughter, I suspect I’d have been at home looking after my motherless brothers, not in school learning tricks like reading and writing. I hope I’d have had the strength to do what both Mary and my father did: to take charge of my own education long after the formal system had finished with me.

Mary’s stroke of fortune was her early widowhood, which left her financially and socially secure enough to pursue her own interests. Mine was finding the internet, which was both my second education and a place to parlay that into a living. It’s a thing I’m eternally grateful* to have had available to me, and something I believe should be available to everyone on the planet. It takes education and opportunity out of the hands of the privileged and the fortunate, and dumps it in the lap of anyone who wants it.

And by this circuitous route, we come to my second point about Mary Somerville. She popularised. When I first read about Ada Lovelace Day, Mary’s was (for no apparent reason) the first name that popped into my head. And I almost dismissed her; popular science writer seemed too down-market, not important enough. I was wrong though: popular science writer, popular technology writer, is everything. The person who takes the knowledge from the rarified few to the masses, is the person who changes the world.

This is the thing I’d like to take from Mary Somerville: that science and technology are for everyone. It’s a thing we internauts** forget too often, I think. We get the idea that Twitter matters and we update our Dopplr accounts from our iPhones, and we forget that for most people online email is still where it’s at, and that most people aren’t online at all.

I’d like to change that, somehow.

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* grateful. Seems a strange word. But I am grateful. I’m just not grateful to anything. /secularism.

** it’s a perfectly valid word in French.

Picture of Mary Somerville courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.