Ada Lovelace

By Mark Steer

Ada Lovelace
(1815-1852)

Ada Lovelace came from talented stock. She was the product of a brief marriage between Anne Isabelle Milbanke and the infamous Lord Byron. They split just one month after Ada was born and Byron died eight years later having never again seen his daughter.

Determined that Ada should not become like her reckless father, Anne saw to it that she was tutored in mathematics and music – disciplines designed to counter the dangerous temptations of poetry. But Ada had inherited Byron's creative spark, producing her first designs for a flying machine aged just 13. Four years later she met, for the first time, Charles Babbage whose calculating machine would later give her much food for thought.

In 1835 she married William King who would soon become the 1st Earl of Lovelace, making Ada the Right Honourable Augusta Ada Countess of Lovelace, most often shortened to simply Ada Lovelace. The demands of marriage and bearing three children didn’t, however, stem her growing fascination with Babbage’s Analytical Engine – a project he was working on to produce a machine to make mathematical calculations.

The Analytical Engine followed Babbage’s historic, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to build a Difference Engine. With British investors unimpressed about the lack of a tangible outcome to the Difference Engine project, Babbage had had to look abroad for funding for the Analytical Engine. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and a set of her own notes that she appended to it. These notes held the key to her fame for in them she specified, in complete detail, a method for using the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers – a complex series of numbers which hold great interest for mathematicians. Although, like the Difference Engine, Babbage never managed to complete an Analytic Engine, Ada Lovelace had invented the computer program.

This wasn’t the end of her genius though; she correctly foresaw the potential of computers more clearly than even Babbage himself. When much of the world treated his engines with little more than passing curiosity, Lovelace predicted that they would eventually be used for all sorts of different tasks, including even the production of computer-generated music.

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