[ID: Screenshot of tumblr tags reading “please op i am desperate for the context.” End ID.]
Sure, here ya go:
- Lord George Gordon Byron was an English poet in the early 1800s.
- He wrote several narrative poems that influenced the gothic genre and was a HUGE fucking slut. HUGE. This bisexual mess slept with so many fucking people it was insane, no gender was safe. Unfortunately that “no one was safe” mentality did not work out well for him bc there were a LOT of rumors that he impregnated his half-sister.
- His only child from a legitimate marriage was from his wife, Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, who straight-up left him after a year. You know how divorce was uncommon in the 1800s? His wife was just so fed up with him that she did not care and left when her daughter was five weeks old.
- This daughter was named Ada and would become known as Ada Lovelace.
- Byron signed the separation papers and then left the country to have sex elsewhere and would later die when Ada was eight.
- During that time if a couple divorced, usually the Dad would get full custody, so just in case he tried anything Lady Byron made sure to play the devoted and overattentive mother.
- Lady Byron was absolutely paranoid that her daughter would become an insane gothic mess like her dad so she decided the only thing to do would be to make sure she did not become a Poet™. So she heavily encouraged Ada’s interests in science and mathematics.
- Around the 1830-40s, Ada met Charles Babbage through a mutual friend and he showed her his prototype for a mechanical calculator. She got absolutely obsessed with this machine and began helping him out with it to the point where her notes on it became more extensive than his.
- She also added notes to a translation of a paper on this engine that is considered to be the first published algorithm.
- These notes on the engine and translation became the basis for computer programming.
- She’s considered The First Computer Programmer™
So, because Lord Byron was a little slut and his wife wanted their daughter to Not Be, we now have to deal with tumblr discourse. Thank you and goodnight.
Vampire fiction and science fiction as we know it today also exist as a direct result of his friends being stuck in a cabin with him during a storm so there’s that as well. Hot vampires and sci-fi nerds are also his fault.
She was one of the people stuck in the cabin (well I think it was more of a 19th century Airbnb that the group of friends rented for a holiday that was then ruined by the weather) with him. Since they couldn’t do any outdoor activities they decided to write spooky stories and read them together instead. She wrote Frankenstein, kicking off the science fiction genre, and Dr John Polidori wrote… I’ve forgotten the title and it might just be “The Vampire” or “Vampyre” or something like that but anyway he did that. Dracula is much more influential now but that was the first big vampire novel. Byron didn’t create either genre but arguably motivated their creation by being an annoying horndog so they wanted to stay in their rooms writing instead of hang out with him.
It’s also worth mentioning that the summer they were stuck in that cabin is referred to as the Year Without Summer and was directly caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before. It is also blamed for failed crops and mass famine on almost every continent, and the explosion could be heard something like 1600 miles away. The eruption of Tambora and the subsequent lack of summer worldwide is estimated to have killed anywhere from 100,000 to many millions of people. If all the deaths from diseases such as cholera and typhoid that found perfect conditions to spread rapidly during the famines are included, the total death toll could be estimated around 40 million people worldwide, which would put it on par with world war one.
TL;DR: Byron being a goth slut led directly to his daughter inventing computer programming, and being stuck in a cabin with him during crazy weather patterns caused by the largest volcanic eruption in modern history on the other side of the globe directly led to the invention of the genres of science fiction and gothic horror
Tumblr dragging Lord Byron is similar to its dragging of Ea Nasir, but more verbose and maundering and blunt and intense, which also describes Lord Byron.
