Who was Ada Lovelace?

posted 4/27/22 by Anna Gdalevich

When people think of the first programmer, they may imagine Bill Gates working on Microsoft or a man working on the room-sized computers of the 1950s. What most people don’t imagine is a young woman writing out codes for a calculator, almost two hundred years before the founding of Microsoft.

Ada Lovelace was born in England on December 10, 1815. She was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron. Lord Byron left the family soon after she was born, but her mother was very involved in her education. She insisted that Ada have expert tutors to teach her math and science, which she excelled in.

When she was seventeen, Lovelace met Charles Babbage, a mathematician. Babbage wanted to create a machine that could help people with long calculations. He imagined a steam-powered or hand-cranked machine that could compute numbers correctly every time. He called it the Difference Engine. It was an early version of the calculator, and Lovelace was fascinated with it. Lovelace soon began working on the engine and Babbage became her mentor.

She married William King in 1835, who later became the Earl of Lovelace, making her the Countess of Lovelace. They would have three children, and on top of being a wife and mother, Lovelace would continue working with Babbage.

Babbage began developing a new machine in 1843, the Analytical Engine, a more complicated version of the Difference Engine. He asked Lovelace to help by translating a French paper, Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage by engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, into English. Lovelace would translate the paper, but also add her own notes. Her notes were so extensive, that when the English translation of the paper was published, most of it was Lovelace’s own work.

She compared the design of the Analytical Engine to the way weaving machines worked, as weaving machines followed patterns to create a design. She based this off of the Jacquard Loom, which used punch cards. One card corresponded to one row of textile. If the card was punched, the thread for the loom would be raised. If it was not punched, the thread would not move. This allowed people to create multiple different patterns in textiles.

Lovelace theorized that the Analytical Engine could also follow patterns to calculate numbers and be programmed like a Jacquard Loom to carry out different instructions, “It would take input from punch cards, and store variables for use in diverse sequential operations” (Lynx Open Ed). The difference between this and the Jacquard Loom is that the loom had a set amount of patterns it could execute, while the Analytical Engine programmed this way could conceivably calculate any possible combination of numbers. She had come up with the idea of a computer language and individual programming decades before the invention of the first computer.

She also theorized that machines like this were capable of many diverse activities, such as forming letters and writing music, “Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose… pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent” (Lovelace). Far beyond her time, Lovelace imagined applications for computers that took decades for others to implement.

Unfortunately, Babbage never received enough funding to build a completed Analytical Engine, and Lovelace’s notes went unpublished and were forgotten. However, in 1953, her notes were published in a book about digital computing in order to show how computers follow patterns.

Lovelace died on November 10, 1852, at only thirty-seven years old. One hundred years later, she would begin receiving recognition for her important contributions to computing. Because she theorized the idea of computers following set patterns, she is considered the first programmer. In 1979, the US Department of Defense named a new computer language, Ada, in honor of Lovelace and her work. Lovelace’s contributions to the field of computer science helped lay the groundwork for over two hundred years of innovation in technology.

Sources

"Ada Lovelace." Famous Scientists, www.famousscientists.org/ada-lovelace/

Hilfrank, Elizabeth. "Ada Lovelace." National Geographic Kids, 26 Feb. 2021,

kids.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ada-lovelace

"Ada Lovelace, 'Notes' to a 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, by L.F. Menabrea,' in Scientific Memoirs (London, 1843), Vol. 3." Lynx Open Ed, lynx-open-ed.org/node/356