MATHEMATICIAN AND COMPUTER PROGRAMMER ENGLANDThe more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.
—ADA BYRON LOVELACE
Ada wandered around the party feeling bored. Many of the greatest minds in England were there at Charles Babbage’s invitation, but they were all so old! Whom could she possibly talk to?
Suddenly, a gleam of metal caught her eye. There it was: the Difference Engine! Ada practically sprinted to it (very unladylike).
Babbage’s famous mechanical calculator was as beautiful as Ada had imagined. All gleaming brass, gears, and wheels . . . and the whole thing covered in numbers! Ada’s head practically exploded imagining all the calculations this machine could do! If Babbage ever finished building it.
“You understand it?” Babbage himself was standing beside her.
“Of course,” answered Ada. The seventeen-year-old math whiz proceeded to explain in detail to the forty-two-year-old inventor the various calculations she could accomplish with his machine. Charles was amazed. No one understood his Difference Engine. No one. Ignoring the rest of the partygoers, Charles and Ada discussed the machine’s possibilities well into the evening. It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship and the spark of Ada’s greatest contribution to science.
Ada was looking at a prototype for the world’s first computer, and soon, she would become the world’s first computer programmer.
It’s not surprising that Ada was a trailblazer, a young woman who thought “outside the box.” Her father was Lord Byron, the most famous poet, philosopher, and adventurer of his time—a superstar of the Victorian age. And her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, was an abolitionist (someone who fights to end slavery) and an amateur mathematician at a time when math wasn’t really an option for women. Byron called her “the Princess of Parallelograms.”1
Ada’s education was odd, to say the least. Her mother insisted her teachers speak only the truth to her—no nonsense stories for young Ada! When she was just five or six, she did her lessons while strapped to a “reclining board” to improve her posture. And if she fidgeted, they tied her hands inside bags and put her in a closet.3
Ada’s parents’ marriage was short and stormy. Like some superstars today, Lord Byron was kind of a jerk, and his brainy wife quickly got fed up with his shenanigans. One month after Ada was born, Lady Byron left her husband and returned to her parents’ home in London. Ada never saw her father again.
After leaving Lord Byron, Ada’s mother was terrified her daughter would inherit his “poetic nature,” thus leading her down the same road to ruin.2 Her cure? Math. Ada was introduced to math at a very early age and took to it like a duck to water. Lady Byron traveled a lot, so Ada spent much of her childhood alone. Plenty of time for math. Ada loved numbers and kept herself occupied with math and inventing. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook with calculations, puzzles, and designs for all kinds of inventions.
When she was twelve, Ada designed a flying machine. She built a set of wings and calculated the amount of power it would take to make her creation fly. To test her math, she took a model sailboat out into a storm. The boat’s sails were like wings, so she tested the speed of the ship over and over again, each time making small changes to the sail and adjusting her calculations.
Before she could build her flying machine, however, she got sick with the measles. Very sick. Nowadays, we have a vaccine for the measles, but back then, more children got it. And the results were dangerous and sometimes even deadly. Ada had a high fever for many days, and when the fever left, she was blind and paralyzed. Her sight returned after a few weeks, but she couldn’t walk for three years. During this time, Ada spent even more of her time doing math. Her mother quizzed her with harder and harder problems. Ada could do them all.
Ada’s mother recognized her daughter’s passion and gift for math, so she hired tutors to challenge her further. One of her tutors was Mary Fairfax Somerville, herself a well-known scientist and mathematician who wrote books on both subjects. It was Mrs. Somerville who invited Ada to one of Charles Babbage’s famous gatherings.
The Difference Engine was finally built to completion in 2000. You can see it, in all its glory, at the Science Museum of London.
Charles Babbage was a well-known scientist and inventor of the time. He had spent years working on his Difference Engine, a revolutionary mechanical calculator. Babbage was also known for his extravagant parties, which he called “gatherings of the mind” and hosted for the upper class, the well-known, and the very intelligent.4 Many of the most famous people from Victorian England would be there—from Charles Darwin to Florence Nightingale to Charles Dickens. It was at one of these parties in 1833 that Ada glimpsed Babbage’s half-built Difference Engine. The teenager’s mathematical mind buzzed with possibilities, and Babbage recognized her genius immediately. They became fast friends.
The US Department of Defense uses a computer language named Ada in her honor.
Babbage sent Ada home with thirty of his lab books filled with notes on his next invention: the Analytic Engine. It would be much faster and more accurate than the Difference Engine, and Ada was thrilled to learn of this more advanced calculating machine. She understood that it could solve even harder, more complex problems and could even make decisions by itself. It was a true “thinking machine.”5 It had memory, a processor, and hardware and software just like computers today—but it was made from cogs and levers, and powered by steam.
For months, Ada worked furiously creating algorithms (math instructions) for Babbage’s not-yet-built machine. She wrote countless lines of computations that would instruct the machine in how to solve complex math problems. These algorithms were the world’s first computer program.
In 1840, Babbage gave a lecture in Italy about the Analytic Engine, which was written up in French. Ada translated the lecture, adding a set of her own notes to explain how the machine worked and including her own computations for it. These notes took Ada nine months to write and were three times longer than the article itself!
Ada had some awesome nicknames. She called herself “the Bride of Science” because of her desire to devote her life to science; Babbage called her “the Enchantress of Numbers” because of her seemingly magical math brain!
At age twenty, Ada married William King-Noel and had three children. Her husband was named Earl of Lovelace, which made Ada the Countess of Lovelace (hence her name). Sadly, at the young age of thirty-six, Ada died of cancer, but her influence on the world didn’t die with her. There have been movies and plays made about Ada, steampunk stories and graphic novels written about her. Did you know that October 11 is Ada Lovelace Day? It’s a day that celebrates Ada by showcasing women in science, technology, engineering, and math and by creating role models for girls in these fields.
When Ada’s notes were first published in a scientific journal, she signed it with her initials, “A. A. L.,” so the public wouldn’t know her gender. Scientists of the day might not have given stock to Ada’s ideas if they’d known a girl wrote them!
Young Ada Lovelace imagined the future of computing long before the first computer was ever built. She could see where the Analytic Engine would lead to: computers that could help with schoolwork, play games, and even design the flying machines she imagined as a girl! And although Babbage never finished building his Difference Engine, Ada inspired future computer scientists around the world.