Inventors: Ada Lovelace

Even though they were written 100 years before electronic computers were invented, Ada Lovelace's instructions for Charles Babbage's “analytical engine” have been called the world's first computer programs. She was born Augusta Ada Byron in London on December 10, 1815. The short, stormy marriage between her father, George Gordon, Lord Byron, the famous British poet, and her mother, the former Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, ended a month after Ada's birth, when Byron departed, never to see his daughter again. Byron's flamboyant lifestyle had put him completely at odds with the quiet but equally strong-willed Annabella, whose love of mathematics made Byron call her the “Princess of Parallelograms.” (Ada, in turn, was sometimes called “the Enchantress of Numbers.”)

Ada, tutored extensively at home, shared her mother's fondness for mathematics. At a party in 1833 she met mathematician Charles Babbage, who had invented a machine that he called a difference engine. Navigation, insurance, and other fields were coming to depend on tables of figures that required repeated calculations, but these calculations, done by hand, often contained errors. Babbage's machine solved polynomial equations (then called “difference equations”) automatically, making the preparation of tables based on them faster and more accurate.

Babbage had built a small model of his device and obtained a government grant to produce a full-scale version. Unfortunately, the technology of the time could supply neither the power nor the thousands of precisely machined parts that the machine needed, and by the time he met Ada, Babbage had lost the government funding and much of his own money without ever building the machine.

Ada also met a young nobleman, William King, who later became the earl of Lovelace, and they married in 1835. They had three children. King encouraged his wife to pursue her intellectual interests, including her friendship with Babbage.

In addition to the difference engine, Babbage had designed a more general-purpose machine that he called the analytical engine. It would have performed any kind of calculation once figures and instructions were programmed into it. A Frenchman, Joseph M. Jacquard, had invented an automatic loom that wove patterned cloth based on instructions fed into it on punched cards, and Babbage thought that his machine, too, might use punched cards. After the failure of the difference engine, however, no one wanted to invest money in something even more complex, so this second machine existed only on paper. Conceptually it is the ancestor of modern computers.

An Italian mathematician, Luigi F. Menebrea, wrote a paper in French in 1842 that described the workings of the analytical engine and the theory behind it. Babbage wanted the paper translated into English, and Ada Lovelace offered to do the job. Her finished work included notes of her own that were three times as long as Menebrea's manuscript, including sample sets of instructions for the machine. Babbage wrote that these notes “entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.” It was not considered proper for a woman of Lovelace's class to put her name on a public document, so her work, published in a collection of scientific papers in 1843, was signed only with the initials A.A.L. For 30 years no one knew that she was the author.

In her notes to Menebrea's paper, Lovelace offered a warning against overestimating the powers of computing machines that is still timely: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything…. The machines … must be programmed to think and cannot do so for themselves.” On the other hand, she noted, also correctly, that in the process of reducing operations into forms that could be used by the machine, “the relations and the nature of many subjects … are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.” She wrote to Babbage in 1845, “No one knows what … awful energy and power lie yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mind.”

Differences in their working styles (Babbage tended to be sloppy, whereas Lovelace, like her mother, was meticulous and bossy) put a strain on the relationship between Lovelace and Babbage, and the two never worked together on a major project again, although they remained friends.

Meanwhile, Lovelace pursued a variety of interests, including ideas about the functioning of the brain. She hoped to work out “a law or laws for the mutual action of the molecules of the brain … a Calculus of the Nervous System,” an idea that, like her computer programs, was far ahead of its time.

Another interest, unfortunately, was horse racing, for which Lovelace believed that she had developed an infallible mathematical betting system. Lord Lovelace joined his wife in placing bets at first, but he stopped when he lost money. Ada, however, became addicted to gambling and fell deep into debt, having to pawn the Lovelace family jewels twice (her mother redeemed them). She also became addicted to laudanum, or morphine.

Ada Lovelace died of cancer of the uterus on November 27, 1852, when she was only 36 years old, but she was not forgotten. In the late 1970s the U.S. Department of Defense created a computer language for programming missiles, planes, and submarines and named it Ada in her honor.