Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was
born Ada Byron on December 10th 1815 and is
known today simply as Ada Lovelace.
She is celebrated as the world's first computer
programmer, the first person to marry the
mathematical computational capabilities of
machines with the poetic potentialities of
symbolic logic.
This novel combination was in no small part
a function of Ada's unusual upbringing.
She was the daughter of a reserved but mathematically
gifted mother and the only legitimate child
of the great romantic poet and notorious playboy
Lord Byron.
But Ada never actually met her father; her
parents separated when she was only five years
old and Lord Byron died in Greece when he
was 36 and Ada was eight.
Her mother decided to raise Ada all by herself
and made a great effort to eradicate any trace
of her father's ill influence, which meant
removing all poetry from the little girl's
life because she believed that poetry was
the root of the Lord Byron's vice.
So instead she immersed little Ada in math
and science from the age of four.
And by the time Ada was 12 she had grown fascinated
with mechanical engineering.
And at the age of 12 she wrote a book titled
Flyology, in which she illustrated with her
very own diagrams her plan to build a flying
apparatus.
But even so she felt that the poetic part
of her was being repressed by her mother's
insistence on science and one day famously
quipped, and this is how teenage girls rebelled
in the 1800s, she told her mother that she
was going to pursue poetical science.
Ada Lovelace struck up a friendship with the
brilliant but eccentric Charles Babbage, who
at the time was working on strange inventions
that one day would have him celebrated as
the father of the computer.
Their collaboration was an extraordinary union
of software and hardware.
Lovelace brought the poetical science and
Babbage the mechanical engineering for the
machine.
In 1843 she translated a scientific paper
by an Italian military engineer adding to
it seven footnotes.
Together they measured 65 pages or two and
a half times the length of the original paper.
In one of those footnotes Lovelace wrote what
is considered the first complete computer
program, which made it the world's first paper
on computer science and made Lovelace the
world's first computer programmer.
She was 27 years old.
