When your historical faves cross paths

[primeideal]

 At a fancy soiree in the home of Charles Babbage, designer of the world's first mechanized calculating apparatus, Henry [Wadsworth Longfellow] saw a model of the revolutionary device in action. Babbage's son, "a young and rather raw lad, who is said to be like his father a good mathematician," demonstrated its workings to the American, "which I cannot describe, for I do not understand it," he admitted, unaware that he had just seen the forerunner of what in time would be known as the computer. He was far more impressed that night by having met Ada Byron [Lovelace], the daughter of Lord Byron, "with a countenance like her father's, though rather too red to be handsome. Her figure and manner lady-like and engaging."

--"Cross of Snow," by Nicholas A. Basbanes