Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer

Ada Lovelace was born Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815 – November 27, 1852). She was also known as Ada Lovelace and made significant contributions to mathematics and writing. Her most famous work involved Charles Babbage’s new machine called the Analytical Engine, which he thought could perform many tasks beyond just basic math calculations.

Ada Lovelace was the only child born to poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke, who were married. Her half-siblings were fathered by other women while Lady Byron was pregnant with Ada. When Ada was born, her father left his wife immediately after a month and never returned to England, where he died eight years later when she was still quite young. Lady Byron was worried about how to raise her daughter and focused on teaching Lovelace about math and logic so that she wouldn’t become like her dad, who people thought had some mental health issues. But Lovelace still really admired her father and named two of her sons after him – Byron and Gordon. When Lady Byron passed away, she asked to be buried next to her famous poet husband. Despite being sick a lot when she was little, Lovelace worked hard at school and eventually got married to William King in 1835. Years later, in 1838, King became an Earl and Ada’s title changed – she was now known as Countess of Lovelace.

At age eighteen, Lovelace showed great math skills that helped her form a lasting partnership with British mathematician Charles Babbage, often called “the father of computers”. She was especially curious about his work on the Analytical Engine. In 1833, she met him for the first time when she and her mom attended one of Charles Babbage’s gatherings with their mutual friend and private teacher Mary Somerville.

Between 1842 and 1843, Lovelace worked on an article by military engineer Luigi Menabrea about the Analytical Engine, adding seven detailed notes that she called “Notes”. These notes are significant in computer history because one of them described what many consider to be the first computer program – a set of instructions for a machine to follow. Some historians disagree and claim that Babbage’s personal notes from 1837 to 1840 actually had the first programs for the engine. Lovelace also envisioned computers as having more capabilities than just calculating numbers, which was a common focus among others, including Babbage himself. Her unique perspective on technology led her to wonder how people and society interact with machines, which is shown in her notes. The programming language Ada is named after her because of this innovative approach.

Lord Byron wanted his child to be a “glorious boy,” and he was sad when Lady Byron gave birth to a girl instead. The baby girl was named after Lord Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and he called her Ada himself. In January 1816, Lady Byron left for her parents’ house with their newborn daughter, who was only five weeks old. Lord Byron had chosen this moment carefully. Lady Byron took the baby with her because they were going to live at Lord Byron’s family home in England now. At that time, English law said that if a couple got divorced, the father usually got full custody of his child. However, Lord Byron didn’t want to take care of his daughter.

At just seven years old, Ada Byron was painted by Alfred d’Orsay in 1822 at Somerville College in Oxford. Ada had a complicated relationship with her mother, Lady Byron. She was often left to be taken care of by her grandmother, Judith Milbanke, who adored her. However, because of the societal norms back then, which favored husbands over their wives during divorce, Lady Byron couldn’t show her daughter’s true feelings openly. This meant she had to pretend to be a loving mother in front of everyone else. She even wrote worried letters to her grandmother about Ada’s well-being and kept extra copies of them just in case she needed to prove it later. In one letter, she referred to her daughter as “it,” which might seem strange today. Lady Byron was so concerned that she asked friends to keep an eye on her teenage daughter for any signs of bad behavior. She called these helpers the “Furies.” Later, when her daughter came back with false stories about her, Ada complained that they were exaggerating and making things up.

Ada Byron suffered from poor health as a child. She got headaches when she was eight years old that made it hard for her to see. In June 1829, she was so sick that she became paralyzed after catching measles. This meant she had to stay in bed for almost a year straight, which might have lasted longer than it did. By 1831, she was able to walk using crutches. Despite being very sick most of the time, Ada learned about math and technology, even when she was not feeling well.

In 1833, Ada Byron had a secret romance with one of her tutors. She attempted to run away with him after getting caught, but his family recognized her and contacted her mother. To avoid causing a public scandal, Lady Byron and her friends hid the truth from everyone. Ada never got to meet her younger half-sister, Allegra, who was born to Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont in 1815. Sadly, Allegra passed away at just five years old in 1822. On the other hand, Ada did have a connection with Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron’s sister Augusta Leigh. Despite her close relationship with Byron’s family, Elizabeth chose not to interact with Ada when they were introduced at court because she deliberately avoided her.

Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, had a close friendship with her tutor Mary Somerville in her adult years. Somerville helped introduce Ada to Charles Babbage, which sparked her interest in science. She admired Somerville greatly and they exchanged letters for many years. Other influential people in Ada’s life included scientists Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday, and writer Charles Dickens. At the age of seventeen, Ada was introduced to royal society and quickly became a popular figure at Court due to her exceptional intelligence. By 1834, she had become a regular guest at Court events and enjoyed socializing by dancing often. Many people described her as elegant and charming, but John Hobhouse, a friend of Lord Byron’s, initially found her unattractive, describing her as having “coarse skin” with some features resembling his own, particularly her mouth. This first encounter happened in February 1834 when Ada made it clear she didn’t like Hobhouse due to her mother’s influence, which also led her to dislike many of her father’s friends. However, their initial impression was quickly overturned, and they eventually became good friends.

On July 8, 1835, she married William, the eighth Baron King, making her Lady King. The couple owned three homes: one in Surrey, called Ockham Park; another in Ross-shire, Scotland, near Loch Torridon; and a home in London. For their honeymoon, they stayed at Ashley Combe, which was originally built as a hunting lodge in 1799 and had been renovated by the Baron King before their arrival. After that, it became their favorite summer spot and got even more improvements made during this time.

From 1845, the family’s main house changed to Horsley Towers. It was first built in the Tudorbethan style by Charles Barry, who also designed the Houses of Parliament. Later, the architect added new parts to make it look like Lovelace wanted.

Lady King had three children: Byron, born in 1836; Anne Isabella, also known as Annabella, who was born in 1837; and Ralph Gordon, who was born in 1839. After Annabella’s birth, Lady King fell ill for a long time and it took several months to get better. Ada was related to the Lovelace family, which had become extinct. In 1838, her husband became the Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham, making Ada the Countess of Lovelace. A few years later, in 1843-44, Ada’s mother asked William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada’s children and also act as a moral guide for Ada. He soon developed feelings for her and encouraged her to express any negative emotions he was feeling, saying that his marriage meant he would never behave badly. However, it became clear that Carpenter wanted to start an affair with Ada, so she stopped him from pursuing anything like that.

Since she was 17 years old in 1832, Ada began to show exceptional math skills and her love for math stayed with her throughout her adult life. Her mom’s worry that her husband Byron might be crazy made Ada learn math from an early age. She got private lessons on math and science from William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, who was a famous scientist in the 19th century. In the 1840s, another mathematician named Augustus De Morgan helped her with her math studies, including learning about advanced calculus topics like Bernoulli numbers, which led to creating an algorithm for Charles Babbage’s machine called the Analytical Engine. De Morgan even thought that Ada might become a very good original mathematician who could do great things in her field.

Lovelace liked to challenge common ideas by combining poetry and science. When she was studying differential calculus, she wrote to De Morgan: It can be tricky for new math students to see how different formulas can change shape in unexpected ways. I think this is one of the biggest challenges in learning math at first. It’s like those mythical creatures from stories that can transform into something completely new just by shifting their form.

The rainbow sonnet written by Lovelace in her own hand can be found at Somerville College. Lovelace thought that using your imagination and instincts was essential to making math and science work well together. She saw both as powerful ways to explore the mysteries that surround us.

Ada Lovelace’s portrait sitting at a piano, painted by Henry Phillips in 1852. Even though she was extremely ill at that time, she agreed to be painted because her father, Lord Byron, had been painted by Phillips’ dad, Thomas Phillips.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836) In June 1833, Ada Lovelace met Charles Babbage for the first time through their mutual friend Mary Somerville. Shortly after, Babbage invited Lovelace to see his new machine, the difference engine. She was intrigued by its workings and often visited Babbage with the help of her connection to Somerville. Babbage admired Lovelace’s exceptional thinking skills and called her “The Lady of Numbers”. He later wrote to her: Leave your worries behind and all the fake promises too – just find happiness in The Lady of Numbers.

The notes are significantly longer than the article itself, with Note G providing a detailed explanation for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine. It’s possible that if the Analytical Engine had ever been built, it would have run correctly – unlike the Difference Engine, which was completed in London in 2002 and is the only one of Babbage’s designs to be actually constructed. Based on this work, many people now consider Ada Lovelace as the world’s first computer programmer due to her method for calculating Bernoulli numbers. However, some experts disagree because Charles Babbage also wrote about ideas that could be considered computer programs in his earlier works.

Note G also contains Lovelace’s thoughts on artificial intelligence, where she said that the Analytical Engine couldn’t create anything new on its own. It could only do what people had already taught it to do. The engine was good at following instructions, but it didn’t have the ability to think ahead and come up with new ideas. This idea has been widely discussed and argued against by many experts, such as Alan Turing in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Most computer scientists today believe that this way of thinking is old-fashioned and that computers can develop on their own in ways that even programmers can’t predict.

Lovelace and Babbage had a small disagreement when their papers were published, which started when he tried to leave his own comments about the government’s treatment of his Engine as an unsigned introduction that could be misinterpreted as a joint statement. When Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs decided that the introduction should have Lovelace’s name on it, Babbage wrote to her asking her to take it down. This was the first time she knew he was planning to leave it unsigned, and she responded by refusing to remove the paper. Historian Benjamin Woolley thought that “Babbage’s actions suggested he really wanted Ada’s help and made her feel special because of her famous name.” Their friendship eventually recovered, and they continued to write to each other. When Lovelace was dying of cancer on August 12, 1851, she asked Babbage to be the executor of her will, although this letter wasn’t enough for him to make official decisions. A part of Worthy Manor’s grounds called Philosopher’s Walk is famous because it’s where Lovelace and Babbage supposedly discussed math problems while taking a walk together.

The first computer program and algorithm were created by Ada Lovelace from Babbage’s diagram called “Note G”. In 1840, Charles Babbage was asked to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. A young Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea transcribed Babbage’s lecture into French. The translated version was later published in a magazine in October 1842. Babbage’s friend, Charles Wheatstone, hired Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea’s paper into English. She added her own notes to the translation and worked on it for almost a year with help from Babbage. These additional notes were more detailed than Menabrea’s original text. They were then published in a magazine in September 1843 under the initials AAL.

Ada Lovelace’s notes were organized in alphabetical order from A to G. In Note G, she wrote down instructions for how the Analytical Engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers using an algorithm. This algorithm is seen as the first ever written just for a computer, making Ada Lovelace the pioneer of computer programming. Unfortunately, the engine was never finished and so her program wasn’t ever put to the test.

In 1953, almost a century after she passed away, Ada Lovelace’s notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine were made public again in an appendix to a book called Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. The engine is now considered one of the first models for computers and her notes are seen as a description of how a computer works and what software is like.

This analysis marked an important milestone in understanding how computers work and predicted what modern computing would be like 100 years ahead of time. Historian Walter Isaacson thinks Ada’s idea about using symbols to automate tasks was inspired by her observation that machines weaving patterns on looms used punchcards – a concept similar to Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer, which also relied on punched cards for calculations. This insight is considered significant by writers Betty Toole and Benjamin Woolley, as well as programmer John Graham-Cumming, who is working on Plan 28, an ambitious project aimed at building the first complete Analytical Engine.

Historian Doron Swade explained that Ada Lovelace saw something Charles Babbage couldn’t see in his engine designs. In Babbage’s world, engines were only good for numbers and calculations. However, Lovelace realized that numbers could also represent other things like words, music, or even symbols. This meant that if a machine was built to work with just numbers, it could actually be used to manipulate symbols according to rules. This fundamental shift from machines that only calculated numbers to those that worked with symbols is the key difference between calculation and computation. If we look back at history, this important change happened explicitly in Ada’s 1843 paper.

Lovelace understood that there’s a big difference between how the computer itself works, as explained in an 1834 article about the Difference Engine, and how the computer is designed to think and solve problems, which was actually the main point she was writing about. She realized that different experts might be needed for these two areas: some to focus on the physical parts of the machine and others to work on its inner workings or “brain.”

The 1834 article focuses mainly on its mechanical side, only briefly touching on the mathematical principles that are connected to it, but providing lots of details about how it works by breaking down different types of differences. M. Menabrea, on the other hand, concentrates solely on the analytical approach, assuming that a machine can do certain things without explaining how it does them, and spends most of his time describing how mathematical laws can be arranged and combined in ways that make all areas of this subject accessible to machines. It’s clear that both approaches are crucial for inventing a calculating engine because they cover different aspects of the subject… They’re closely linked, even though they have very different natures, so it might be hard to find someone who excels at both.: Note A Controversy over contribution
Some people think Lovelace was not actually the first person to write computer code.

Allan G. Bromley wrote about Difference and Analytical Engines in 1990. In his article, he found out that almost all the programs mentioned in her notes were created by Charles Babbage years earlier. The only exception was a program made specifically for her. However, she noticed an error or “bug” in it. What’s more, there is no proof that Ada ever wrote a program for the Analytical Engine herself. Her letters to Babbage also showed that she didn’t have enough knowledge to do so.

John Bruce Collier said that Ada Lovelace greatly helped spread awareness about the Analytical Engine, but he couldn’t find any proof that she came up with new ideas for its design or workings.

Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole think that Charles Babbage should be considered the first computer programmer. This is because Babbage wrote down initial programs for his Analytical Engine, even though many of these weren’t published. There were several dozen sample programs created by Babbage between 1837 and 1840, which all came before Ada Lovelace’s notes. Some people believe that Lovelace’s notes aren’t a clear plan for a computer program, but rather a reflection of her own thinking about math at the time, the goals she had for her work, and the way it fit into society.

In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Ada Lovelace’s contributions. He agrees that Charles Babbage wrote some unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine before Lovelace made her notes, but Wolfram says that “Ada’s way of figuring out Bernoulli numbers is just as smart and well-organized as anything Babbage came up with. Babbage definitely helped Ada with her work, but she was really in charge.” Wolfram then points out that Lovelace’s main achievement was to take the information Babbage sent her from his letters “and put it into a clear explanation of how the machine works – something that Babbage never managed to do himself”.