Ada Byron meets Charles Babbage. He designed an early computer, and she would write the first computer program.
Ada’s father was the poet Lord Byron, but her parents separated when she was a month old. She never knew her poetically wild father. Ada was fifteen when she met Cambridge mathematics professor Babbage, who was working on a “difference engine” that could do mathematical calculations. He nurtured an even bigger idea: an “analytical engine” that “could not only foresee but could act on that foresight.”
After Babbage gave a seminar on the analytical engine in Italy in 1841, Ada (who had married and become Countess of Lovelace) translated an article about the presentation and showed it to him. Babbage, apparently better at conceiving things than explaining them (unheard-of in a mathematician, eh?), suggested she expand the article with her own notes.
Countess Ada’s “notes” tripled the original article. She predicted that a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics, and find application, so to speak, in business and science.
She also wrote a plan for the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It’s now considered the first computer program. The countess originated the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a “snake biting its tail.”
Countess Ada was a friend of novelist Charles Dickens and scientist Michael Faraday. She was also an opium addict who had numerous affairs and gambled away much of her family fortune, dying at age thirty-six.
The Countess of Lovelace has attained recent fame through Betty Toole’s 1992 edition of her correspondence Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, and Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s 1997 film Conceiving Ada, starring Tilda Swinton. The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language Ada in her honor.—RA