The Empress of Number: Ada Lovelace
Today computer programs are a given.
We use computer programs everyday. They live on our laptops, desktops, and phones. We’ve given them cute nicknames such as “apps” (short for “application,” another term for a program). Few will argue with the importance of computer programs and computer programming. But how did this all begin? Well, computer programming began with the world’s first computer programmer! Duh… But who was the first programmer? That honor belongs to a computer visionary, a woman by the name of Lady Ada Lovelace.
Lady Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron, nicknamed “Ada” by her father, on December 10, 1815 (“Ada Lovelace.”). She immediately entered Britain’s high societies as the daughter of Lady and Lord Byron. Lord Byron, her father, was a brilliant poet, but he was also a womanizer, hopeless romantic, and incredibly unfaithful. Lady Byron stood in stark contrast. She was somewhat religious, ever logical, and dedicated to a more progressive education (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). Further distancing the two lovers, Lord Byron nicknamed his wife “Princess of Parallelograms” (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). If it hasn’t become clear, Lady and Lord Byron endured a strained marriage. The short lived marriage ended when Ada was just 5 months old and Lady Byron removed him from the home (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
Although Ada would never again see her father (he died when she was eight years old (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”)), he affected her life in some profound ways, Lady Byron made sure of that.
Seeking to distance her fragile daughter from the dangerous life of poets, she enrolled young Ada in a regime of mathematics, music, and French, an education to “counter dangerous poetic tendencies” (“Ada Byron, Countess…”).
Though isolated and held strictly to her studies, Ada Byron developed quite an imagination. Her imagination was strengthened and enabled by her rigorous mathematical and scientific lessons.
A particularly illustrative example occurred at the age of 12, Ada wanted to fly.
She proceeded to study birds and search out suitable materials for wings (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). She dubbed her research “flyology” and drew up a device operated via steam engines that carried an operator on the back of a bird-like contraption (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). Unfortunately, Lady Byron reprimanded her daughter “for neglecting her studies, which were meant to set her on a rational course, not a fanciful one” (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”).
Young Ada quickly developed a special interest in mathematics, yet she was still a young woman in British high society. While math and science were not customary activities for a woman at the time, socializing was. At the age of seventeen she began to socialize in London. She even met the king and began to attend many extraordinary society events. On June 5, 1833, Ada Byron attended a party of fellow socialite Charles Babbage (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
As has been discussed in previous pieces, Charles Babbage was a celebrity of the day. He was well known for his inventions, or rather his failure to complete them… At the time, Babbage was well at work on his Difference Engine, an automatic calculation machine that fascinated Ada. Babbage was proud to show Ada and her mother a smaller prototype of the Difference Engine. Given a mutual interest in mathematics, the 41-year-old Charles Babbage became a mentor to the 17-year-old Ada Byron. They exchanged mathematical ideas, problems, and discoveries for most of the next few decades (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”).
A few years later, Ada Byron met William King and they married in 1835 (“Ada Byron: Countess…”).
For the time being, mathematics was set aside and traded for the life of a housewife and mother to three children (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
In 1837, Queen Victoria assumed the throne of England and rewarded William with the position of earl. He became Lord Lovelace, making Ada Byron, Lady Ada Lovelace a name she retained for the rest of her life. Lady Lovelace still sticks today (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
Though busy managing a household, Lady Lovelace still made time for some math and resumed a busy schedule of mathematics after the birth of her third child (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). Ada pursued Calculus and Algebra, while maintaining correspondence with her mentor, Charles Babbage.
By the late 1830s, the Difference Engine project had failed and Babbage had moved on to an even more ambitious and larger project, the Analytical Engine.
Unfortunately, many in Britain were not pleased with Babbage. He had spent immense amounts of government taxpayer money on a project he never completed and now he proposed a larger, more complex invention.
Babbage failed to gain support in England, but some foreign mathematicians saw immense potential in the Analytical Engine. One of them was Luigi Menabrea (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
Menabrea was an inventor, mathematician, and engineer (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). He loved the Analytical Engine and authored a paper on the device. His paper was published in a Swiss journal…in French (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). Charles Babbage reached out to his academic pupil, Ada Lovelace, for some help. In her endless wisdom, Lady Byron (Lady Lovelace’s mother) had also enrolled Ada in French from a young age (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”).
Babbage asked Lovelace to translate the article and add some of her own thoughts. Babbage understood that Ada had a deep understanding of the Analytical Engine and its mathematical principles. He once noted,
“that Enchantress [Ada Lovelace] who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it” (Padua, “Who was Ada?”).
She tackled the project with fervor, sending nearly daily letters to Babbage (who lived less than one mile away) (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). When the article had been translated, Ada had reached over 20,000 words and made extensive notes. Her notes have given her a stunning legacy, one note in particular, Note G (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). Note G presented a certain difficulty for Ada. She wrote to Babbage,
“My Dear Babbage. I am in much dismay at having got into so amazing a quagmire & botheration with these Numbers, that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. …. I am now going out on horseback”
(we all need a break sometimes) (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
Within Note G, Ada wrote an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers on the Analytical Engine. Note G has come to be known as the world’s first computer program (Garfinkel and Grunspan 46). Babbage was delighted with the paper, nicknaming her, “the Enchantress of Number” (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”).
Although the Analytical Engine was never built, Lady Lovelace’s contribution to early computing and computer programming is profound. Ada not only wrote the first computer program, she envisioned the future. Ada Lovelace saw the potential of a multi-purpose computer. She dreamed of a machine that could handle, display, and create any kind of media, even sounds, such as music, text, and even pictures (Klein, “10 Things…”).
Not even the father of the computer, Charles Babbage, had dreamed up such a machine.
Unfortunately, given the fact that Ada was a woman of the 19th century, many of her achievements faded from history, lost for nearly 100 years. In the interim, nasty rumors surfaced. Many of these rumors deeply affected her character and, given that such little evidence has been found to support them, would only be gossip to repeat (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). Many even hypothesized that many of her notes were never written by Lovelace. Some historians implied that such accomplishments could only be completed by a man, therefore, Ada’s accomplishments must have been exaggerated (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”). Valerie Aurora, director of the Ada Initiative, an organization seeking to recognize and place women in STEM roles, offered her opinion on the ordeal,
“In order to keep that wealth and power in a man’s hands, there’s a backlash to try to redefine it as something a woman didn’t do, and shouldn’t do, and couldn’t do” (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”).
Ada Lovelace finally began to earn her place in computing in 1953 when Bertram Bowden found some of Ada’s notes while researching for his book Faster Than Thought (Wolfram, “Untangling the tale…”). For the first time in the modern era, the world learned of Ada’s many accomplishments. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Government recognized Ada Lovelace’s true place in computing by naming a new programming language after her (Morais, “Ada Lovelace…”).
Ada was a brand new language designed for the United States military, built by the Department of Defense. U.S. Navy Commander Jack Cooper suggested the name “Ada” in recognition of Lady Lovelace. The language merged many differing systems together into one cohesive system. Ada still runs as the dominant language on many critical computer systems including aviation, health care, transportation, space, and financial infrastructures (Klein, “10 Things…”).
The impact of Lady Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computing are profound.
Although lost for some time, her ideas returned in time to inspire a new and modern generation of technology. Lady Lovelace’s notes and ideas were ahead of their time, but were just in time to influence the computers we use everyday. Lady Lovelace also taught us the value of experience and never to disregard others just because of their backgrounds or gender. Lady Lovelace stands alongside Charles Babbage as one of the first computer pioneers.
Lady Lovelace and, most notably, her computer program is the seventeenth major milestone in the history of computing.
More on the History of Computers:
More on Charles Babbage:
Works Cited
“Ada Lovelace: Founder of Scientific Computing.” San Diego Supercomputer Center, www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Ada Lovelace.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Dec. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/Ada-Lovelace.
Garfinkel, Simson, and Rachel H. Grunspan. The Computer Book: from the Abacus to Artificial Intelligence, 250 Milestones in the History of Computer Science. Sterling, 2018.
Klein, Christopher. “10 Things You May Not Know About Ada Lovelace.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 10 Dec. 2015, www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-ada-lovelace.
Morais, Betsy. “Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary.” The New Yorker, 15 Oct. 2013, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/ada-lovelace-the-first-tech-visionary.
Padua, Sdyney. “Who Was Ada?” Ada Lovelace Day, findingada.com/about/who-was-ada/.
Wolfram, Stephen. “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace.” Wired, Conde Nast, 16 June 2017, www.wired.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/.
