The First Computer Programmer: Ada Lovelace
Computer science was born from the mind of a little girl who wanted to fly.
Ada Lovelace, circa 1840 via Wikimedia Commons.
Written by Sydney Kim
Upon returning from a year-long trip in Europe, 12-year-old Ada Augusta Byron decided that she would learn how to fly. That is, until her research concerning “flyology”– mimicking bird flight with steam engines– eventually distracted her from her rigorous studies and she got a stern talking-to from her mother.
Byron’s natural curiosity and genius would find another major subject six years later. She soon met 41-year-old Charles Babbage and his prototype of the Difference Engine, a hand-operated brass machine that could use addition and subtraction to raise numbers to the second and third powers, find roots of quadratic equations, print those results in a table, and more. Although the engine itself never was fully developed, mathematicians infer that it might have functioned similarly to a primitive version of what is known as WolframAlpha today.
Age seven, by Alfred d'Orsay, 1822 via Wikimedia Commons
Byron maintained regular correspondence with Babbage following the meeting, which would prove crucial as Babbage shifted his focus to designing an Analytical Engine. Unlike the Difference Engine that was limited to computing differences, Babbage imagined a machine that could perform any sequence of operations. Babbage himself never published any material about the Analytical Engine, but army engineer Luigi Menabrea published his lecture notes in a 1842 paper.
Now the newly named Countess of Lovelace, Ada decided to translate the publication from French to English, adding what would amount to an extensive 12,000 words of her own notes. Lovelace eloquently explained that the computations run by the Analytical Engine would be controlled using punched cards, a system not unlike the Jacquard Loom’s. Instead of weaving silk into images, the engine would create algebraic patterns. “Operation Cards” would define operations and “Variable Cards” would define the locations of values, and the number of cards would be reduced by using loops. Towards the end of her work, Lovelace detailed what would be considered the first computer program today: Note G, a specific calculation involving Bernoulli numbers. Lovelace was so excited by her publication in 1843 that she wrote to her mother, “This is a pleasant prospect for the future, as I suppose many hundreds and thousands of such formulae will come forth from my pen, in one way or another.”
This model of the Analytical Engine is similar to the calculating device that Lovelace worked on with Charles Babbage. Getty Images.
Despite hopes that the translation would lead to a scientific publishing career, Lovelace faced complications that were out of her control. As a woman, she did not have access to the Royal Society’s Library in London even though her husband was a member. More significantly, her frequent health issues had escalated into cervical cancer by 1851; she persisted through her last several months with her characteristically strong-willed intellect. When Lovelace passed away on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36, nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale would remark that her friend “could not possibly have lived so long, were it not for the tremendous vitality of the brain, that would not die.”
Diagram of an algorithm for the Analytical Engine for the computation of Bernoulli numbers, from Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage by Luigi Menabrea with notes by Ada Lovelace. via Wikimedia Commons.
Lovelace began to be rediscovered in the 1940s and further recognized in the 1980s when the United States Department of Defense named its newly developed software language after her. Additionally, beginning in 2009, Ada Lovelace Day has been celebrated on the second Tuesday of every October to recognize the historically underappreciated contributions of all women in STEM fields. Since then, Lovelace’s notes have been widely acclaimed as the earliest account of computers. She was the first to distinguish between computing numbers and manipulating symbolic operations, establishing a solid foundation for the complex programming that is at the core of modern computer science. Undoubtedly, Lovelace continues to inspire young scientists as proof that innovative dreams, from using engines for flight to algebraic computations, can become a reality.
IANDAGNALL COMPUTING / ALAMY
Sources
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.
Wolfram, Stephen. “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace.” Stephen Wolfram Writings, 10 Dec. 2015, writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/.
Zwolak, Justyna. “Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer Who Predicted Artificial Intelligence.” National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, 22 Mar. 2023, www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/ada-lovelace-worlds-first-computer-programmer-who-predicted-artificial.
