Hello!
Today we’re going to be reading Ada Lovelace,
Poet of Science: The First Computer Programmer
by Diane Stanley.
Long, long ago, on a cold winter day, a lonely
little girl walked from room to room in a
big, old, dark country house.
Her name was Ada Byron and she was looking
for something to do.
Ada was good at imagining things.
She imagined it would be fun to fly.
Then she went about it in a scientific way.
First she studied the flight and the anatomy
of birds.
She decided on her wings would be like theirs,
only larger, in proportion to her size.
She would build the frames out of sturdy wire
so her wings would be strong, then cover the
frames with oil-rubbed silk so they would
also be light.
Finally, she designed a harness to attach
the wings to her back.
She thought it would be fun to fly from house
to house delivering the mail.
She’d need to bring a bag for carrying the
letters, a map, and a compass for navigation.
She decided to write a book about her flying
project, illustrated with pictures and diagrams.
She would call it Flyology.
And when she had finished that, Ada had a
plan to build a steam-powered flying horse.
Her mother, Lady Byron, was away at the time,
so Ada sent regular updates on the flying
project.
She signed the letters, “Your affectionate
young Turkey” or “Your affectionate Carrier
Pigeon.”
She had never been so happy.
But Lady Byron was worried.
Ada seemed overexcited.
Worse, she showed dangerous signs of too much
imagination.
In other words, she was acting like her father.
Ada’s parents were as different as chalk
and cheese.
Her father, the famous poet Lord Byron, was
a worldwide celebrity, the rock star of his
time.
Her mother, Lady Byron, was interested in
math and science.
She was rational, respectable, and strict.
The marriage only lasted a year.
Ada never knew her father.
He left England soon after she was born and
died in a faraway Greece when she was eight.
She wasn’t even sure what he looked like.
His portrait had been covered with a cloth.
Being Lord Byron’s daughter shaped Ada’s
childhood in important ways.
Ada’s mother wanted her to be calm and rational,
not emotional and creative like her father.
She hoped the study of math and science would
suppress her daughter’s imagination.
So Ada was given a world-class scientific
education.
Her imagination was not harmed in the least.
Ada loved machines.
She lived during the Industrial Revolution,
when things that were once made by hand – from
ribbons and spoons to paper and glass – were
being mass-produced in factories.
When Lady Byron suggested a trip to see the
new factories, Ada was thrilled to go.
Everything they saw was interesting.
But by far the best was the mechanical loom
designed by a Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard.
It could automatically weave cloth I any design
you could imagine, from a simple plaid, to
fancy brocade, to actual pictures of people,
trees, and animals.
But how did the loom know which pattern to
weave?
That was the amazing part.
The design was translated into a pattern of
holes punched into heavy paper cards.
Long chains of these cards were fed into the
loom, giving it instructions.
To change the design, you only had to change
the cards.
Ada was amazed.
It was a brilliant idea – and not just for
weaving cloth.
Why not use punched cards to direct other
machines for other purposes?
Ada was onto something.
Soon she would see how right she was.
At seventeen, Ada’s quiet childhood came
to an end.
Her mother took her to London for the summer
social season, a round of teas, dinners, and
dances.
Ada was dazzled by the gilded ballrooms and
the beautiful ladies in their gleaming satin
gowns.
Everyone wanted to meet Ada because she was
Lord Byron’s daughter.
But Ada didn’t know what to say to them.
She didn’t care about fashion, fox hunting,
or court gossip.
Then she went to one of the weekly gatherings
at the home of Charles Babbage, the great
mathematician and inventor.
All the interesting people went to his parties,
from the writer Charles Dickens to the scientist
Charles Darwin.
As Ada moved through the crowd, from one amazing
conversation to another, she grew almost dizzy
with excitement.
They talked about important things: astronomy
and politics, literature and art, and the
latest engineering marvels.
These were her kind of people.
A few days later, Ada went to see a working
portion of Babbage’s new invention: a calculating
machine called the Difference Engine.
It could solve arithmetic problems at the
turn of a crank.
People called it a thinking machine, but Ada
knew better.
The intelligence was not in the machine itself,
but in the genius of its designer.
Ada felt an instant connection with Charles
Babbage.
She even dreamed of one day helping with his
important work.
And so began one of the most remarkable friendships
in the history of science.
But Lady Byron had other plans for her daughter.
Ada didn’t need a profession.
What she needed was a husband.
So at nineteen Ada married a wealthy aristocrat,
William, Lord King.
When he became the Earl of Lovelace, Ada Byron
King changed her name one again.
She would go down in history as Ada Lovelace.
By the time she was twenty-four, Ada had two
children running wild in the nursery and one
still crying in his cradle.
But she hadn’t lost sight of her dream,
just postponed it.
Now at last her moment had come.
Babbage was working on a revolutionary new
machine called the Analytical Engine.
It would be powered by steam (there was no
electricity in those days) and it could do
much more than just add and subtract.
The Analytical Engine could run any kind of
mathematical calculation, then store the results
for later use.
Best of all, he had borrowed Jacquard’s
idea of using punched cards to direct his
Engine, so it could easily change from one
operation to another.
In short, Charles Babbage had invented the
first fully programmable all-purpose digital
computer.
But there was a problem.
So far his Engine was just a plan on paper.
It would cost a fortune to build.
To raise that kind of money, Babbage needed
publicity.
This was Ada’s chance to help.
An article had been written about the Analytical
Engine, but it was in French.
Ada translated it into English so it could
be published in Britain.
Then Babbage asked her to add some footnotes
at the end, explaining what an all-purpose
computing machine could do.
She was perfect for the job.
She understood how the engine worked.
She was a good writer.
And she had the vision to see, better even
than Babbage himself, how much more a computer
could do besides just processing numbers.
It could work with any kinds of symbol, from
words to musical notes.
Ada imagined the Analytical Engine writing
text, composing music, reproducing images
– even playing games like checkers or chess.
But before the machine could do any of those
things, the symbols and rules of operation
had to be changed into digital form.
Today we call that programming.
Ada needed to explain to her readers exactly
how that could be done.
As an example to work with, she and Babbage
chose an extremely complicated series of calculations
called the numbers of Bernoulli.
And then Ada showed, step-by-tiny-step, how
they could be coded for the machine.
Finally, after nine months of meticulous work,
Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by
Charles Babbage was published.
Ada’s “Notes by the Translator” were
almost three times as long as the original
article – and far more important.
Yet she wasn’t credited by name, only the
initials A.A.L.
She was afraid her work wouldn’t be taken
seriously if people knew it was written by
a woman.
Ada didn’t care.
The girl who had once dreamed of flying, who
longed to do something important with her
mind, had soared at last.
She had looked into the future and imagined
a computer age that wouldn’t arrive for
another hundred years.
And in demonstrating how to code the numbers
of Bernoulli, Ada Lovelace had written the
first computer program ever published.
The End.
