SOMERVILLE, Mary (1780-1872)
SOMERVILLE, Mary (1780-1872)
Autograph letter signed ('Mary Somerville') to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, n.p., 12 June n.y. [after 1840].
One page, 110 x 75mm; autograph envelope ('The Countess of Lovelace / 19 Great Cumberland Street').
A letter linking two of the most important female scientists of the 19th century. The letter is a simple note declining an invitation: 'I have an engagement on the 22d otherwise I should have had much pleasure in dining with you that day'.
Although self-taught, Mary Somerville had by the mid-1820s established herself as a significant figure in London scientific circles. In 1831 she published The Mechanism of the Heavens, a condensation of Laplace's Mécanique céleste, and the first in what was to be an immensely successful and influential series of scientific text-books which were to make her arguably the most widely recognised woman of science before Marie Curie. Somerville was not only a friend but an early intellectual influence on Ada Lovelace, and it was most likely she who introduced the then Ada Byron to Charles Babbage in 1833, when she was seventeen.
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SOMERVILLE, Mary (1780-1872)
Autograph letter signed ('Mary Somerville') to Ada, Countess of Lovelace, n.p., 12 June n.y. [after 1840].
One page, 110 x 75mm; autograph envelope ('The Countess of Lovelace / 19 Great Cumberland Street').
A letter linking two of the most important female scientists of the 19th century. The letter is a simple note declining an invitation: 'I have an engagement on the 22d otherwise I should have had much pleasure in dining with you that day'.
Although self-taught, Mary Somerville had by the mid-1820s established herself as a significant figure in London scientific circles. In 1831 she published The Mechanism of the Heavens, a condensation of Laplace's Mécanique céleste, and the first in what was to be an immensely successful and influential series of scientific text-books which were to make her arguably the most widely recognised woman of science before Marie Curie. Somerville was not only a friend but an early intellectual influence on Ada Lovelace, and it was most likely she who introduced the then Ada Byron to Charles Babbage in 1833, when she was seventeen.
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