November 11, 2009 • 20 mins
The first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace. Learn how the daughter of Lord Byron -- one of the most famous poets in the Western world -- moved out of her father's shadow and became a herald of the electronic age in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And you probably
know by this point how much Sarah and I love
talking about interesting women in history, and our subject today
(00:23):
is one of those. A bunch of people had suggested
her when we were talking about doing a podcast on innovators,
and that's because she was the world's very first computer programmer,
Ada Lovely. That sounds like it might be a little dull,
but we promised she's a really interesting character and maybe
her nickname of sorts will help convince you of that,
and that is the Enchantress of Numbers. So let's get
(00:46):
a little bit into who she is. She started off
with rather auspicious beginnings if you're thinking just in terms
of fame. She's the daughter of Annabella Millbank Byron and
Lord Byron, the world famous poet. Her parents, if you
know anything about it, if you've listened to our podcast,
and Byron they have a very unfortunate marriage, and they
(01:08):
actually split up only a few months after her birth,
and it was an awful, scandalous separation. She made all
sorts of accusations after he left, and he put himself
self imposed exile for the rest of his life. He
never met his daughter, so it was just Aida and
Lady Byron for her formative years, and Lady Byron was
a tough customer. She was Annabella styles herself as an
(01:31):
intellectual and immoral person and an amateur mathematician, and this
just doesn't go with Lord Byron's personality at all. He
calls her the Princess of parallelograms, which, as cool as
it sounds, is not a compliment coming from him. Oh no,
he was very condescending about that kind of thing, despite
the alliteration. Yeah. So her personality plus his really bad
(01:53):
habits and a kind of crazy behavior during their marriage
lead to their separation. So Lady Byron is absolutely terrified
that her daughter, little Aida, is going to turn out
to be like her father, the very scandalous Laura Byron.
So she makes up her mind that may be the
best way to get around this is to make sure
(02:14):
that Aida doesn't do anything with poetry, which might seem strange,
but she settled out in that as the trait of
Byron's that was most likely to lead his daughter into
I don't know her fidy and she's thrilled the byronic
hero out of Aida starting with poetry. So instead Aida
is going to learn math and music. And when Lady
(02:34):
Byron finds out that Ada likes her geography lessons more
than math, she not only gets rid of the geography lesson,
she gets rid of the tutor. She's really serious about this,
and she's a very strict lady. She punished her in
ways that some of us are probably familiar with but
aren't particularly nice, like solitary confinement. She made her lie
motionless and demanded that she read apologies like I, Aida
(02:58):
have not done the notes for very well, but I'll
try to do it better tomorrow. So sad, isn't it
It is? Then it actually shows an aptitude from math.
She's very good at it. And she gets sick for
a long time in her childhood and measle she's partially paralyzed.
She ends up recovering, but during this time she does
not let her study laps, and you have to put
(03:19):
her in context. At the time, no one was particularly
excited about women getting engaged in higher intellectual pursuits because
you know their poor frail brains. What would happen. They
might just overheat. But at the time she is introduced
to Mary Somerville, who was interested in the same things
she is, and she's later called the Queen of nineteenth
century science, so that puts little context around how important
(03:42):
Mary Somerville was to the age. She really encouraged Ada's
mathematical studies, but also kind of helped her humanized technology,
which ends up being what Ada is so known for
for understanding technology and all of its potential. And I
love a quote a let from a letter that Ada
wrote to Mary Somerville. I got a bunch of great
(04:03):
quotes from an article by Paul at Walker Campbell where
she says, my dear Mrs Somerville, I'm afraid that when
a machine, or a lecture or anything of the kind
comes in my way, I have no regard for time,
space or any other ordinary obstacles. I think you must
be fond enough of these things to sympathize with my
eagerness about them. She was really excited about learning, which
is always refreshing at anyone else. In eighteen thirty four,
(04:27):
at one of Mrs Somerville's dinners, Ada hears about one
Charles Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine called the
analytical engine, and she's so interested in this, and she
writes him a b jillion letters. As I put in
my notes, they start up a very voluminous correspondence, and
we'll talk about them a little more later, because this
(04:48):
is how Ada makes her name for herself. But first,
like a year after getting this intellectual passion of her life,
she meets and marys William King, the eighth Baron King,
who has made an earl a few years later, making
Ada the Countess of Lovelace, and they have three children, Byron, Annabella,
and Ralph Gordon. But it is Lady Byron running this show,
(05:11):
and she runs a tight ship. And this is kind
of sad too. It seems like Aida married in part
to escape her domineering mother, but her husband makes like
best friends with her, so then she's got two people
to deal with. But even with a husband and three
children under the age of eight, Aida is still really
(05:33):
interested in her education. She starts studying math with Augustus
de Morgan, who is later a highly regarded logician, and
she makes some friends in the scientific field, Sir David Brewster,
who invented the kaleidoscope, Charles Wheatstone, who invented an early telegraph,
Michael Faraday who discovered the electro magnetic field, and someone
Sarah and I are acquainted with through our English major,
(05:55):
Charles Dickens. So she's got this illustrious group of of
friends much like her her father had. Interestingly enough, um,
but at this point we need to go back in
time a little bit and tell you it's more about
Babbage and the history of computing before we can fully
appreciate what Aida did. And since we're not Jonathan and
(06:18):
Chris on tech stuff, we can't give you the real
techy version of this. We'll give you the historical the
historical side. You might think of computing as just part
of the modern era, but the history goes back further
than World War Two a lot further. UM. I read
a really good Scientific American article on computing that suggested, uh,
(06:39):
the age of computing sprang from when people abandoned working
numbers UM as a human pursuit. So basically decided that
there could be something more than arithmetic in your head
or scrawled on the paper, UM, something you could do
with the machine and it could take less time and
fewer people, and um, calculations that would be impossible or
(07:04):
would take forever would be easy to do. So now
we're gonna throw you a curveball and give you a name.
You probably weren't expecting the history of computing. Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah,
way back in sev ninety Napoleon decided to switch the
Republic to the metrics system. And we still haven't done. Yeah, yeah,
we need Napoleon's hairdressers here. So he commissions a set
(07:27):
of mathematical tables, dozens and dozens of workers. They are
the hairdressers I just mentioned out of work because when
you don't have big aristocratic hair does anymore, you don't
need lots of hair dressers. So all of these people
are slaving away over setting up these mathematical tables and
filling in what is called the tablea do cadestra. It
(07:51):
takes ten years of just straight arithmetic. It's not particularly hard,
but it's time comes, time consuming grunt work. Um. And
by the time the table is ready to be published,
there's no money, and so it sits in the Academy
of Sciences for decades until eighteen nineteen, when a young
(08:13):
Charles Babbage comes along and finds it. And Babbage is
an accomplished mathematician. He's founded the Analytical Society to introduce
European mathematical developments to England, and he's helped create the
first reliable actuarial tables along with some other stuff. Yeah.
He later goes on to invent a type of spedometer
and helps establish the modern postal system in England. So
(08:36):
this is a real renaissance man. And he's fascinated by
these tables and decides that he's going to replicate Napoleon's
project but with machinery and proposes the construction of the
calculating engine in eighteen twenty two, and he secures government
funding for it. And by eighteen thirty two still sounds
(08:58):
like a long time, doesn't it. By eighteen thirty two,
he's made a functioning model, which he's calling the difference Engine,
and uh, on a side note, kind of, he publishes
a book that makes him the world's leading industrial economist.
For a time, he's a busy man. I remember learning
about this and Dr Richard Minky's class on Victorian information systems.
(09:20):
The difference engine is really cool. But a year later,
he abandons the difference engine and comes up with this
proposal for the analytical engine, because the difference engine could
only do one task, and that was making these tables.
But instead the analytical engine could do any kind of
math calculations. So we're broadening our dreams here. Yeah, and
it would have a processor in memory, user operated input ability.
(09:43):
I liked the list that you had for for its functions. Yeah,
it's this is pretty much a not a direct quote,
but there were five parts, the input, the output, to control,
the mill, on the store. So the control was a
system of punch cards which each had programs and was
technology that was actually already available with the Jacard Loom,
(10:04):
something you don't really think about connected to a computing
but there you go. And then there was the mill,
which was kind of like a CPU, and that's the
place where the functions that you program on these cards
would be done. And then the store was a lot
like what we would think of as the memory, and
that's where you would keep the results of the functions
(10:25):
of the programs that you had done. So abandoning the
difference engine, though that the table making machine was kind
of an unpopular idea because he had gotten a working model,
but he still had a lot to do on it,
and the government wouldn't give him additional funding to make
this new analytical engine idea which he holds a grudge about,
(10:50):
but he still works on it. He writes a lot,
he draws it, draws a lot of plans, and he
ends up reporting on his new plan and the new
engine in autumn of eighteen forty one. And when he
gives this presentation in Turinn, an Italian scientist named Louis
Menabria sees it, and then in eighteen forty two writes
(11:13):
a summary of what he's seen, and then also writes
a paper about the ideas that Babbage had put forth.
But he writes his paper on Francais. And this is
when Ada Lovelace comes back into the picture. Yeah, so
Ada gets ahold of this paper and decides to translate it,
and she shows it to Babbage, who suggests that she
(11:34):
add her own gloss to it. Basically, she writes some
notes and what she thinks of it, And her notes
end up being three times longer than the original paper, right,
And they were published in a very prestigious journal. Taylor's
Scientific Memoirs under the initials a a l for Augusta
Ada Lovelace. But what she did was see all of
(11:56):
the possibilities in this machine that Babbage didn't. He kept
thinking of it it's just something that would do calculations.
He was the engineer, and he saw the machine and
what he needed to do to make it happen, and
he didn't see the future and all the potential that
this function would have. And she conceived of it as
(12:17):
what we think of as a computer and was saying
things like, you could make music with us, you could
make graphics with us. She had she had the big picture,
not that it would come about for a long time,
but she saw things there that he couldn't. And it's
funny because a lot of the articles I was reading
about it, how some sexist language in there about how
it was ada Is intuition that led her to see
(12:37):
these things. And I'm going to go ahead and say
it was not her intertrain. Perhaps it was her amazing
intelligence and stuff. She also suggested writing a plan for
how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers um And this
is why she's regarded by some people as the first
computer programmer. And she this is sort of the most
(12:58):
famous quote from her notes, but she wrote, the analytical
engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jackard loom weaves
flowers and leaves and uh ada. Even though forced by
her mother to never study poetry and focus on math,
she does use these very metaphorical descriptions for numbers and
(13:22):
math and scientific concepts. She's definitely got the poet in her.
She just applies it to to something different. But Aida
and Babbage have a bit of a falling out before
these notes are even published. It's right before she's supposed
to publish them, and he wants her to add a
preface about the grudge we earlier mentioned about criticizing the
(13:42):
British government for not giving him the money he wanted
to finish this project, and she refuses, this isn't the
sort of thing she wants, and well, no, and not
the kind of thing she wants, you know. On what
will be the greatest achievement of her life forever, this
grudge of Babbage is and he's really ticked off, threatens
to make sure her notes aren't published, and then later,
(14:03):
I think, trying to make up for it, she offers
to raise money for him to help build the engine,
and he wouldn't even let her so going to go
ahead and say someone didn't play well with others well
in Kitty and I were talking earlier about how he
might have started to get uncomfortable with this close working
relationship with a very famous woman who's the daughter of
(14:25):
a very famous and very notorious man. Nearly everything I
read about the two was clear to note right from
the start that their relationship was not romantic. It was
strictly professional. And I just thought that was a little
odd that that even had to be mentioned. And I
wondered how much of that has to do with Byron's
reputation right and who she is and what she comes from.
(14:47):
And I wonder also if he was a bit jealous
because this was a triumph for her, and Babbage never
ends up getting these engines built in his lifetime things
he still doesn't get the money that he needs to
do this. But after this, Aida is even more committed
to her cause. She describes herself as more than ever
now the bride of science, and she wants to go
(15:09):
on and do even greater things. But this seems to
be where she peeked, and after that her life goes
a little bit into decline, and some of the sources
I read one seemed to suggest that maybe it was
because of her falling out with Babbage and she didn't
have anyone to talk to about her exciting math and
scientific pursuits. Her other friends weren't all that interested, or
(15:33):
she didn't have anyone she could really collaborate but it
in and collaborate with, and he her husband, is not
much of a presence in her life at this point.
He's away a lot on business and um, yeah, she
seems rather alone, but she has some ideas. She wants
to get into medical science, but nothing seems to come
(15:53):
to fruition. And she also starts to get ill and
says that's making it harder for her to concentrate on
her studies, and she gets flirty and a little bit scandalous,
much like her father, Lord Byron. Her husband ends up
burning I think at least a hundred of her letters,
and they aren't getting along, so she's in trouble for something,
(16:13):
and much like the byronic hero who her mother so
desperately tried to prevent her from becoming um, she just
goes downhill in her health and starts drinking and doing
opium which was fairly common in the Victorian age. Um
she even starts gambling, trying to apply her math ability
(16:37):
to race horses, and it didn't completely backfired. She ends
up in so much debt again like her father Lord Byron,
were coming full circle here, and she also realizes how
much her mother has lied to her over the years
and manipulated her when it comes to her father and
they have a big fight, and that's pretty much the
(16:59):
end of their relationship, or to the end of their
good relationship. Her mother will find her way back in
as you'll see in a minute. She develops cancer and Annabella,
her mother, really dominates the sick room. She chooses who
can come and visit and hides the opium, which um
Ada is using by this point as a pain killer,
(17:21):
hoping that Ada will suffer so much that she'll repent,
But instead she just suffers a lot and keeps hemorrhaging.
She's in terrible pain, and I'm sure the bizarre medical
quackery of the time didn't help her condition at all.
Blood letting not so great for cancer. So she dies
at thirty seven and is buried next to her father,
(17:44):
and Ada is a little bit obscure after her death. Um,
but Alan Turing, who developed a method to break the
Enigma code during World War Two, used a bunch of
her notes in his work after the war on computing
and artificial intelligence. Yeah, and the U. S. Department of
Defense ends up naming a software language ADA after her
in nineteen seventy nine. Um, And I like this note
(18:07):
to in A machine was built to Babbage's specifications, the
analytical engine, and it was accurate to thirty one digits.
And this machine that Babbage thought of and that Ada
so cleverly described, is the beginning of early digital computing,
something that just sort of goes into what a lot
(18:29):
of computer scientists call a dark age for years, and
it's eclipse by mechanical analog devices until World War Two,
when um, the power of digital sort of front comes
back to the forefront. So these two were were progressive.
I'd love to see a picture of that machine, because
I hope it looks all steampunk cool. I'm gonna look
that up when we got there's there's a picture of
(18:50):
his earlier engine, and it does not look like anything special.
It's kind of like a big box with still be
racing to the Googles to see. But Sarah and I
were talking earlier about celebrity kids and how they either
tend to follow in their parents footsteps or go in
the complete I think it's we think it's a good
idea to go in a different direction because if your
(19:12):
parents are are famous musicians or something, and then maybe
you it's a natural choice to want to be a
musician too. But a lot of times they have a
hard time living up to to the standard that they're
famous parents has set. Uh. So Ada really makes the
name for herself by doing something completely different, or so
it seems. But the funny thing is that Byron was
(19:35):
really interested in science when he was at Cambridge, especially
in telescopes. He was a man of varied interests anyways,
and Ada had written a letter to her mother and
her thirties where she said, if you can't give me poetry,
can't you give me poetical science, which again you got
the poetry and the science coming together, just like her father.
If you want to learn more about where computers go
(19:56):
from the Victorian age, check out our tech channel at
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(20:17):
com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And you probably
know by this point how much Sarah and I love
talking about interesting women in history, and our subject today
(00:23):
is one of those. A bunch of people had suggested
her when we were talking about doing a podcast on innovators,
and that's because she was the world's very first computer programmer,
Ada Lovely. That sounds like it might be a little dull,
but we promised she's a really interesting character and maybe
her nickname of sorts will help convince you of that,
and that is the Enchantress of Numbers. So let's get
(00:46):
a little bit into who she is. She started off
with rather auspicious beginnings if you're thinking just in terms
of fame. She's the daughter of Annabella Millbank Byron and
Lord Byron, the world famous poet. Her parents, if you
know anything about it, if you've listened to our podcast,
and Byron they have a very unfortunate marriage, and they
(01:08):
actually split up only a few months after her birth,
and it was an awful, scandalous separation. She made all
sorts of accusations after he left, and he put himself
self imposed exile for the rest of his life. He
never met his daughter, so it was just Aida and
Lady Byron for her formative years, and Lady Byron was
a tough customer. She was Annabella styles herself as an
(01:31):
intellectual and immoral person and an amateur mathematician, and this
just doesn't go with Lord Byron's personality at all. He
calls her the Princess of parallelograms, which, as cool as
it sounds, is not a compliment coming from him. Oh no,
he was very condescending about that kind of thing, despite
the alliteration. Yeah. So her personality plus his really bad
(01:53):
habits and a kind of crazy behavior during their marriage
lead to their separation. So Lady Byron is absolutely terrified
that her daughter, little Aida, is going to turn out
to be like her father, the very scandalous Laura Byron.
So she makes up her mind that may be the
best way to get around this is to make sure
(02:14):
that Aida doesn't do anything with poetry, which might seem strange,
but she settled out in that as the trait of
Byron's that was most likely to lead his daughter into
I don't know her fidy and she's thrilled the byronic
hero out of Aida starting with poetry. So instead Aida
is going to learn math and music. And when Lady
(02:34):
Byron finds out that Ada likes her geography lessons more
than math, she not only gets rid of the geography lesson,
she gets rid of the tutor. She's really serious about this,
and she's a very strict lady. She punished her in
ways that some of us are probably familiar with but
aren't particularly nice, like solitary confinement. She made her lie
motionless and demanded that she read apologies like I, Aida
(02:58):
have not done the notes for very well, but I'll
try to do it better tomorrow. So sad, isn't it
It is? Then it actually shows an aptitude from math.
She's very good at it. And she gets sick for
a long time in her childhood and measle she's partially paralyzed.
She ends up recovering, but during this time she does
not let her study laps, and you have to put
(03:19):
her in context. At the time, no one was particularly
excited about women getting engaged in higher intellectual pursuits because
you know their poor frail brains. What would happen. They
might just overheat. But at the time she is introduced
to Mary Somerville, who was interested in the same things
she is, and she's later called the Queen of nineteenth
century science, so that puts little context around how important
(03:42):
Mary Somerville was to the age. She really encouraged Ada's
mathematical studies, but also kind of helped her humanized technology,
which ends up being what Ada is so known for
for understanding technology and all of its potential. And I
love a quote a let from a letter that Ada
wrote to Mary Somerville. I got a bunch of great
(04:03):
quotes from an article by Paul at Walker Campbell where
she says, my dear Mrs Somerville, I'm afraid that when
a machine, or a lecture or anything of the kind
comes in my way, I have no regard for time,
space or any other ordinary obstacles. I think you must
be fond enough of these things to sympathize with my
eagerness about them. She was really excited about learning, which
is always refreshing at anyone else. In eighteen thirty four,
(04:27):
at one of Mrs Somerville's dinners, Ada hears about one
Charles Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine called the
analytical engine, and she's so interested in this, and she
writes him a b jillion letters. As I put in
my notes, they start up a very voluminous correspondence, and
we'll talk about them a little more later, because this
(04:48):
is how Ada makes her name for herself. But first,
like a year after getting this intellectual passion of her life,
she meets and marys William King, the eighth Baron King,
who has made an earl a few years later, making
Ada the Countess of Lovelace, and they have three children, Byron, Annabella,
and Ralph Gordon. But it is Lady Byron running this show,
(05:11):
and she runs a tight ship. And this is kind
of sad too. It seems like Aida married in part
to escape her domineering mother, but her husband makes like
best friends with her, so then she's got two people
to deal with. But even with a husband and three
children under the age of eight, Aida is still really
(05:33):
interested in her education. She starts studying math with Augustus
de Morgan, who is later a highly regarded logician, and
she makes some friends in the scientific field, Sir David Brewster,
who invented the kaleidoscope, Charles Wheatstone, who invented an early telegraph,
Michael Faraday who discovered the electro magnetic field, and someone
Sarah and I are acquainted with through our English major,
(05:55):
Charles Dickens. So she's got this illustrious group of of
friends much like her her father had. Interestingly enough, um,
but at this point we need to go back in
time a little bit and tell you it's more about
Babbage and the history of computing before we can fully
appreciate what Aida did. And since we're not Jonathan and
(06:18):
Chris on tech stuff, we can't give you the real
techy version of this. We'll give you the historical the
historical side. You might think of computing as just part
of the modern era, but the history goes back further
than World War Two a lot further. UM. I read
a really good Scientific American article on computing that suggested, uh,
(06:39):
the age of computing sprang from when people abandoned working
numbers UM as a human pursuit. So basically decided that
there could be something more than arithmetic in your head
or scrawled on the paper, UM, something you could do
with the machine and it could take less time and
fewer people, and um, calculations that would be impossible or
(07:04):
would take forever would be easy to do. So now
we're gonna throw you a curveball and give you a name.
You probably weren't expecting the history of computing. Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah,
way back in sev ninety Napoleon decided to switch the
Republic to the metrics system. And we still haven't done. Yeah, yeah,
we need Napoleon's hairdressers here. So he commissions a set
(07:27):
of mathematical tables, dozens and dozens of workers. They are
the hairdressers I just mentioned out of work because when
you don't have big aristocratic hair does anymore, you don't
need lots of hair dressers. So all of these people
are slaving away over setting up these mathematical tables and
filling in what is called the tablea do cadestra. It
(07:51):
takes ten years of just straight arithmetic. It's not particularly hard,
but it's time comes, time consuming grunt work. Um. And
by the time the table is ready to be published,
there's no money, and so it sits in the Academy
of Sciences for decades until eighteen nineteen, when a young
(08:13):
Charles Babbage comes along and finds it. And Babbage is
an accomplished mathematician. He's founded the Analytical Society to introduce
European mathematical developments to England, and he's helped create the
first reliable actuarial tables along with some other stuff. Yeah.
He later goes on to invent a type of spedometer
and helps establish the modern postal system in England. So
(08:36):
this is a real renaissance man. And he's fascinated by
these tables and decides that he's going to replicate Napoleon's
project but with machinery and proposes the construction of the
calculating engine in eighteen twenty two, and he secures government
funding for it. And by eighteen thirty two still sounds
(08:58):
like a long time, doesn't it. By eighteen thirty two,
he's made a functioning model, which he's calling the difference Engine,
and uh, on a side note, kind of, he publishes
a book that makes him the world's leading industrial economist.
For a time, he's a busy man. I remember learning
about this and Dr Richard Minky's class on Victorian information systems.
(09:20):
The difference engine is really cool. But a year later,
he abandons the difference engine and comes up with this
proposal for the analytical engine, because the difference engine could
only do one task, and that was making these tables.
But instead the analytical engine could do any kind of
math calculations. So we're broadening our dreams here. Yeah, and
it would have a processor in memory, user operated input ability.
(09:43):
I liked the list that you had for for its functions. Yeah,
it's this is pretty much a not a direct quote,
but there were five parts, the input, the output, to control,
the mill, on the store. So the control was a
system of punch cards which each had programs and was
technology that was actually already available with the Jacard Loom,
(10:04):
something you don't really think about connected to a computing
but there you go. And then there was the mill,
which was kind of like a CPU, and that's the
place where the functions that you program on these cards
would be done. And then the store was a lot
like what we would think of as the memory, and
that's where you would keep the results of the functions
(10:25):
of the programs that you had done. So abandoning the
difference engine, though that the table making machine was kind
of an unpopular idea because he had gotten a working model,
but he still had a lot to do on it,
and the government wouldn't give him additional funding to make
this new analytical engine idea which he holds a grudge about,
(10:50):
but he still works on it. He writes a lot,
he draws it, draws a lot of plans, and he
ends up reporting on his new plan and the new
engine in autumn of eighteen forty one. And when he
gives this presentation in Turinn, an Italian scientist named Louis
Menabria sees it, and then in eighteen forty two writes
(11:13):
a summary of what he's seen, and then also writes
a paper about the ideas that Babbage had put forth.
But he writes his paper on Francais. And this is
when Ada Lovelace comes back into the picture. Yeah, so
Ada gets ahold of this paper and decides to translate it,
and she shows it to Babbage, who suggests that she
(11:34):
add her own gloss to it. Basically, she writes some
notes and what she thinks of it, And her notes
end up being three times longer than the original paper, right,
And they were published in a very prestigious journal. Taylor's
Scientific Memoirs under the initials a a l for Augusta
Ada Lovelace. But what she did was see all of
(11:56):
the possibilities in this machine that Babbage didn't. He kept
thinking of it it's just something that would do calculations.
He was the engineer, and he saw the machine and
what he needed to do to make it happen, and
he didn't see the future and all the potential that
this function would have. And she conceived of it as
(12:17):
what we think of as a computer and was saying
things like, you could make music with us, you could
make graphics with us. She had she had the big picture,
not that it would come about for a long time,
but she saw things there that he couldn't. And it's
funny because a lot of the articles I was reading
about it, how some sexist language in there about how
it was ada Is intuition that led her to see
(12:37):
these things. And I'm going to go ahead and say
it was not her intertrain. Perhaps it was her amazing
intelligence and stuff. She also suggested writing a plan for
how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers um And this
is why she's regarded by some people as the first
computer programmer. And she this is sort of the most
(12:58):
famous quote from her notes, but she wrote, the analytical
engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jackard loom weaves
flowers and leaves and uh ada. Even though forced by
her mother to never study poetry and focus on math,
she does use these very metaphorical descriptions for numbers and
(13:22):
math and scientific concepts. She's definitely got the poet in her.
She just applies it to to something different. But Aida
and Babbage have a bit of a falling out before
these notes are even published. It's right before she's supposed
to publish them, and he wants her to add a
preface about the grudge we earlier mentioned about criticizing the
(13:42):
British government for not giving him the money he wanted
to finish this project, and she refuses, this isn't the
sort of thing she wants, and well, no, and not
the kind of thing she wants, you know. On what
will be the greatest achievement of her life forever, this
grudge of Babbage is and he's really ticked off, threatens
to make sure her notes aren't published, and then later,
(14:03):
I think, trying to make up for it, she offers
to raise money for him to help build the engine,
and he wouldn't even let her so going to go
ahead and say someone didn't play well with others well
in Kitty and I were talking earlier about how he
might have started to get uncomfortable with this close working
relationship with a very famous woman who's the daughter of
(14:25):
a very famous and very notorious man. Nearly everything I
read about the two was clear to note right from
the start that their relationship was not romantic. It was
strictly professional. And I just thought that was a little
odd that that even had to be mentioned. And I
wondered how much of that has to do with Byron's
reputation right and who she is and what she comes from.
(14:47):
And I wonder also if he was a bit jealous
because this was a triumph for her, and Babbage never
ends up getting these engines built in his lifetime things
he still doesn't get the money that he needs to
do this. But after this, Aida is even more committed
to her cause. She describes herself as more than ever
now the bride of science, and she wants to go
(15:09):
on and do even greater things. But this seems to
be where she peeked, and after that her life goes
a little bit into decline, and some of the sources
I read one seemed to suggest that maybe it was
because of her falling out with Babbage and she didn't
have anyone to talk to about her exciting math and
scientific pursuits. Her other friends weren't all that interested, or
(15:33):
she didn't have anyone she could really collaborate but it
in and collaborate with, and he her husband, is not
much of a presence in her life at this point.
He's away a lot on business and um, yeah, she
seems rather alone, but she has some ideas. She wants
to get into medical science, but nothing seems to come
(15:53):
to fruition. And she also starts to get ill and
says that's making it harder for her to concentrate on
her studies, and she gets flirty and a little bit scandalous,
much like her father, Lord Byron. Her husband ends up
burning I think at least a hundred of her letters,
and they aren't getting along, so she's in trouble for something,
(16:13):
and much like the byronic hero who her mother so
desperately tried to prevent her from becoming um, she just
goes downhill in her health and starts drinking and doing
opium which was fairly common in the Victorian age. Um
she even starts gambling, trying to apply her math ability
(16:37):
to race horses, and it didn't completely backfired. She ends
up in so much debt again like her father Lord Byron,
were coming full circle here, and she also realizes how
much her mother has lied to her over the years
and manipulated her when it comes to her father and
they have a big fight, and that's pretty much the
(16:59):
end of their relationship, or to the end of their
good relationship. Her mother will find her way back in
as you'll see in a minute. She develops cancer and Annabella,
her mother, really dominates the sick room. She chooses who
can come and visit and hides the opium, which um
Ada is using by this point as a pain killer,
(17:21):
hoping that Ada will suffer so much that she'll repent,
But instead she just suffers a lot and keeps hemorrhaging.
She's in terrible pain, and I'm sure the bizarre medical
quackery of the time didn't help her condition at all.
Blood letting not so great for cancer. So she dies
at thirty seven and is buried next to her father,
(17:44):
and Ada is a little bit obscure after her death. Um,
but Alan Turing, who developed a method to break the
Enigma code during World War Two, used a bunch of
her notes in his work after the war on computing
and artificial intelligence. Yeah, and the U. S. Department of
Defense ends up naming a software language ADA after her
in nineteen seventy nine. Um, And I like this note
(18:07):
to in A machine was built to Babbage's specifications, the
analytical engine, and it was accurate to thirty one digits.
And this machine that Babbage thought of and that Ada
so cleverly described, is the beginning of early digital computing,
something that just sort of goes into what a lot
(18:29):
of computer scientists call a dark age for years, and
it's eclipse by mechanical analog devices until World War Two,
when um, the power of digital sort of front comes
back to the forefront. So these two were were progressive.
I'd love to see a picture of that machine, because
I hope it looks all steampunk cool. I'm gonna look
that up when we got there's there's a picture of
(18:50):
his earlier engine, and it does not look like anything special.
It's kind of like a big box with still be
racing to the Googles to see. But Sarah and I
were talking earlier about celebrity kids and how they either
tend to follow in their parents footsteps or go in
the complete I think it's we think it's a good
idea to go in a different direction because if your
(19:12):
parents are are famous musicians or something, and then maybe
you it's a natural choice to want to be a
musician too. But a lot of times they have a
hard time living up to to the standard that they're
famous parents has set. Uh. So Ada really makes the
name for herself by doing something completely different, or so
it seems. But the funny thing is that Byron was
(19:35):
really interested in science when he was at Cambridge, especially
in telescopes. He was a man of varied interests anyways,
and Ada had written a letter to her mother and
her thirties where she said, if you can't give me poetry,
can't you give me poetical science, which again you got
the poetry and the science coming together, just like her father.
If you want to learn more about where computers go
(19:56):
from the Victorian age, check out our tech channel at
w ww dot how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff
Works dot com. Let us know what you think, Send
an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
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(20:17):
com home page
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