Hi! Can you see me?
Can you hear me? Good!
Can you imagine that?
You're on your computer, smartphone or tablet
watching a video made with an elaborate editing software on a computer.
Can you imagine every piece of technology put in place for you to be able to watch us?
Computers... We take them for granted,
thanking Steven Jobs or Alan Turing.
But did you know an English Lady from the 19st century
did a lot to allow you to watch us today?
This Lady, who appeared in the second part of the episode "Spyfall",
is Augusta Ada Byron King, countess of Lovelace.
Ada Lovelace: the first programmer
Born in 1815, Ada Gordon is the daughter of
the poet Lord Byron and the maths lover Annabella Milbanke.
At a young age, Ada starts to be obsessed about
her fanciful, alcoholic and violent father she will never meet.
As her mother fears she could follow her father’s steps,
she gives her a strict and rigorous education and prestigious teachers,
with an accent on maths and science.
It’s badly seen by the high society.
Young girls shan’t think that hard! It could exhaust them!
No luck for Ada, she has an wavering health
and her chronic pains will convince people their doubts were justified.
In 1835, Ada marries William King, who will soon become Lord of Lovelace,
therefore she obtains the title Lady Ada Byron King of Lovelace,
Ada Lovelace for short.
But before marrying him, Ada was already on the scientific stage.
In 1833, when she was 17,
her guardian Mary Sommerville introduces her to Charles Babbage,
a well known mathematician currently working on the difference engine,
a giant and complex calculator equiped with a printer.
Ada is fascinated by this engine
and a true friendship appears between the two scientists.
For ten years, they exchange letters
and Ada pays visit to Babbage to observe the evolutions of the engine.
He tells her the engine is a foretaste for a new one: the analytical engine.
Babbage was inspired by a Jacquard loom machine,
based on punched cards guiding hooks to weave complex design.
A punched card is pushed on a series of rods attached to hooks.
If the rod goes through a hole, the hook stays still.
If the rod pushes the card, the hook moves.
The analytical engine works on the idea.
The punched cards give the engine its instructions.
When a cog goes through a hole, it doesn’t move.
If the cog hits the card, it starts to move and activate a series of complex gears.
This engine is therefore way more powerful than the difference engine.
But Ada doesn't have time to put in this fascinating engine.
She is brought back to the life of a woman of her time:
to take care of her house and to have children.
She will have three from 1836 to 1839
and all will be high risk pregnancies.
But the pregnancies aren’t the cause of this, they say!
It’s the maths! She works too much!
What will do her good is another pregnancy!
Other times, other customs…
In 1839, she gets back to the maths with new teachers
but she stays close to Babbage.
In 1842, a physician friend, Charles Wheatstone,
ask Lovelace to translate an article in French
talking about Babbage’s analytical engine
and wrote by the italien mathematician Federico Luigi Menabrea.
When Ada gives her translation to Babbage, he is impressed:
She annotated Menabrea’s work, adding many details,
some of which Babbage never thought of.
With his advices, Lovelace deals with her notes in depth
and triples the size of Menabrea’s article.
She details how the engine works, the punched cards, the cogs’ place, the added tools…
She figures out the creative, musical, poetic and pictorial possibilities of the engine:
For her, the machine can reproduce what humans can do,
as long as humans give it the right program to do so.
She also adds the key piece to the future of computers:
the first algorithm to be executed by a machine;
what we call nowadays a “computer program”.
We’ll have to wait for the 1930’s, 100 years later, for another discovery that huge in this field!
It could have been faster if a major problem didn’t stop Lovelace and Babbage: money.
The British government refuses to give funds for the analytical engine.
Babbage has only build a small part,
as the finale engine is supposed to be the size of a small steam train.
To acquire funds, Ada gets interest in horse racing,
trying to establish a winning algorithm,
wasting her money and ending covered in debt.
This money issue is added to her so-called “degenerated” way of life.
She smokes, she swears, she is aggressive and manipulative, she cheats of her husband…
Ada isn’t well seen in her society.
Her capricious health issues are treated with laudanum,
an opium preparation to which she is completely addicted.
Ada Lovelace was 36 when she died of womb cancer.
Her tragic story is about a talented woman ahead her time and crushed by it.
As she wished for, she was buried near her father she never knew, died at 36 too.
Imagine a world where the analytical engine would have been founded, built and used.
Image a world developing computers 100 years earlier.
But Babbage and Lovelace’s work took decades to be used again.
Even today, some doesn’t consider Lovelace as an important figure,
even if she was the first ever programmer.
Incidentally, every programmer knows her, even if they haven’t hear about her,
as computer science world is full of hommages to this too often forgotten pioneer.
One of CNRS supercalculators is named Ada.
On Windows 95's certificates of authenticity, Microsoft printed an holographic portrait of Lovelace.
And in 1979, the American department of justice created a programming language
that had been used by millions of programmers around the world.
Its name: ADA.
I hope you learned a lot about this amazing and visionary woman,
whose life was fascinating and tragic.
Be curious, learn more about inventions, ideas, people who changed the world!
I see you soon to talk about another great figure seen in Spyfall: Noor Inayat Khan.
Bye!
