Ada Lovelace, known also as Lovelace Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the only (legitimate) child of the English Romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron, is recognized as one of the first computer programmers. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s (1791-1871) Analytical Engine along with the very first description of a computer and software. It is said that in Babbage, Lovelace found “a constant intellectual companion in whom she found a match for her powerful understanding.”
Ada’s mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, thinking it best that Ada circumvent the various eccentricities of her father, suggested more “logical” subjects like mathematics and science, rather than the humanities. From an early age, Ada displayed a prodigious ability at these more quantitative pursuits; her early tutors included the mathematicians William Frend, Augustus De Morgan, and Mary Somerville.
However, even though she was trained in the sciences, Ada showed she had inherited a significant power over the written word, which was evidenced when she translated Luigi Ferdico Menabrea’s sketch (in French) of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, written from the material Menabrea received in a lecture on the Analytical Engine given by Babbage.
Lovelace and Babbage thought it necessary to compile and English version of the article, which Lovelace eagerly threw herself into the work together with Babbage. She had an exceptional command of the French language, but she eventually became completely engrossed in the project, adding more details about the machine than the original article had. She had Babbage check and double-check her work, and eventually, she had prepared a piece suitable for publication. However, a reticence about actually signing her work began to arise from situations where other authors (some of them men) had been unfairly castigated because the publishers thought that as their writings had a feminine quality, they were not appropriate to publish. Consequently, Lovelace thought her work would be ignored. However, Babbage insisted that she sign her article, which she did – ”A.A.L.”
Lovelace set the Analytical Engine up to accept an input, make calculations based on the input, and produce some output for people to see. The Analytical Engine was, therefore, the design for the first general-purpose computer. Today’s computers are modeled after the plans that Babbage had created, and Lovelace had created the means to make it work. She had laid out a program and included within it several loops to compute Bernoulli numbers (a sequence of rational numbers with deep connections to number theory).
The prophetic insights of this woman were greatly ahead of their time, and by some chance of fate, they were actually accepted into the world of men. Lovelace gave birth to a new era of technology, which, interestingly, the U.S. Department of defense recognized in 1977 with the “ADA” computer language – named in her honor.
Celebrated annually on March 24, Ada Lovelace day is a day of blogging designed to draw attention to women who are “excelling in technology.” According to David Neal of vnunet.com, Ada Lovelace day bloggers were asked to sign a pledge: ”I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24 March about a woman in technology whom I admire, but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” According to that same source, there are now 1,600 participants logged.
A wonderful and fitting memorial for a great and sometimes forgotten innovator in computer technology.
– Christopher Hartman
