Hello lovely people,
Welcome to the first entry of 2020 entry my ‘historical figures’ playlist. If you’re
just joining us and you enjoy learning about queer or disabled people of the past who did
amazing things then subscribe! Today we’re going to be talking about Ada Lovelace, an
English mathematician and writer, the first to recognise that computers had applications
beyond pure calculation and is thus sometimes called the woman who wrote the first algorithm.
She lived a tempestuous but sadly short life with many exciting twists that we’ll be
discussing today!
Whilst not necessarily classed as ‘disabled’ Ada struggled with chronic illness throughout
her life and managed to achieve many wonderful things despite dealing with a body that occasionally
paralysed
- which is something my body does because I have Hereditary Neuropathy with liability
to Pressure Palsies, so… I relate.
Today’s video is sponsored by Skillshare,
- it’s my first sponsored historical profile, yay!
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The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron was born in England on the 10 December 1815 to Anne Isabella Noel
Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and George Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, more commonly
known as ‘Lord Byron the poet and terrible father’
- Okay, I added the second bit. But you’ll see!
Ada’s mother, Anne Isabella, commonly nicknamed ‘Annabella’, was a highly educated and
strictly religious woman. As a child her extreme intelligence had been cultivated by her parents
who hired as her tutor a former Cambridge University professor. Her education thus proceeded
much like that of a Cambridge student; with studies involving classical literature, philosophy,
science and mathematics.
In fact Lord Byron nicknamed her his "princess of parallelograms".
- Right, side note. You may find it confusing that Lord Byron is called ‘Lord’ Byron
despite being a Baron. Well, yes, the British peerage is confusing but to break it down:
There are five ranks of peer in the UK:
And yes, they still exist.
- In descending order: Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount and Baron. Lord is a generic term
that is used to denote members of the peerage and most often used by Barons who are rarely
addressed by their formal title. The correct way of addressing Byron would be ‘The Lord
Byron’ but no one actually says ‘The’ because that’s unwieldy. Marguesses, Earls
and Viscounts are are also commonly addressed as ‘Lord’ but Dukes aren’t because they
use the style of ‘The Duke of…’ (Cambridge for example). Formally you would address them
as ‘Your Grace’ rather than ‘My Lord’. Because religion.
And that’s a story for another time.
Annabella was a cold, stiff, religious woman and an unlikely match for the amoral and agnostic
poet Lord Byron. She met him socially in 1812 because he had began a relationship with her
cousin’s wife.
Red flag.
Byron’s popularity was soaring following his many literary successes but he was deeply
in debt because he refused to make money from his work as he believed business was not appropriate
for a gentleman and seemed to prefer extreme financial distress.
[crickets sfx]
Red flag.
She also suspected that Byron was having an affair with his half sister.
Do I need to say it?
Red flag!
He proposed in October 1812 through her aunt and in response Annabella wrote a scathing
summary of his character and refused him, telling her mother "He is a very bad, very
good man". However, plagued with an obsession for her modesty and intellect, Byron proposed
again in September 1814.
Annabella decided that, aware of Byron’s rage, philandering, drinking and money troubles,
it was her Christian duty to support him and improve his behaviour.
[crickets sfx]
- What a great basis for a marriage (!)
If only she’d had better friends who could point out that was a stupid idea…
During the summer of 1815, he began to unleash his anger and hostility on his wife. His moods
were dark, he drank heavily and began an affair with an actress. Annabella, now pregnant,
became extremely distressed and wrote to Byron’s half sister, Augusta Leigh,
(the afford mentioned half-sister)
who traveled to
the Byron’s home to assist and upon arrival became the new subject of Lord Byron’s wrath.
On the 10th of December Annabella gave birth to Ada but this only seemed to increase Byron’s
despair.
He had written in letters that he expected his child to be a "glorious boy" and was highly
disappointed when she turned out to be a girl. He named her Augusta Ada Byron after the half-sister
he was clearly far too fond of, who had the year before given birth to a child that the
family were pretty sure was Byron’s.
So that’s… great.
On 16 January 1816, Lord Byron commanded that Lady Byron left for her parents' home and
took five-week-old Ada with her. It was to be the last time Ada ever saw her father.
He left England four months later and officially separated from his wife. Although British
law at the time granted full custody of children to the father in cases of separation, Lord
Byron made no attempt to claim his parental rights and died of disease in the Greek War
of Independence, fighting the Ottoman Empire, when Ada was eight years old.
Lady Byron remained incredibly bitter and continued throughout her life to make allegations
about her husband's immoral behaviour. Which we probably can’t judge her for, to be fair,
but it likely wasn’t good for her own mental health.
In an attempt to prevent Ada from developing her father’s perceived insanity, Lady Byron
promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic, steering her away from anything judged
to be ‘frivolous’. Ada was not even allowed to see a portrait of her father until her
20th birthday.
As you can perhaps already imagine, Ada did not have a close relationship with her mother
although due to societal attitudes of the time, which favoured the father in separations,
Lady Byron had to present herself as a loving mother. In reality Ada was instead left in
the care of her maternal grandmother Judith, who did actually dote
on her. In order to prove her ‘good mothering’ Lady Byron wrote anxious letters to her mother
concerning her daughter’s welfare-
- with a cover saying to show them to people cause yeah...
She did have an unfortunate habit of referring to her daughter as ‘it’ though. Which…
isn’t exactly on the list of prime mothering. Neither is her letter stating: "I talk to
it for your satisfaction, not my own, and shall be very glad when you have it under
your own."
Thanks mom!
As a teenager Ada was fiercely watched by close friends of her mother for any sign of
moral deviation.
Beginning in early childhood Ada struggled with bouts of illness and from the age of
eight experienced headaches that obscured her vision-
- which I also relate to a lot, having lost the vision in my left eye from a migraine.
[sigh] ah, relatable historical figures(!)
In June 1829, at the age of 14, she was paralysed during a bout of measles and was subjected
to bed rest for nearly a year-
- like I was!
It took her two years to be able to walk again with the help of crutches, during which time
she used a wheelchair.
- [relatable nodding face]
She used this recovery time to develop her mathematical and technological skills. As
a 12-year-old as decided she wanted to fly and went about the project methodically and
passionately, constructing wings from different materials and in different sizes. She examined
the anatomy of birds to determine the right proportion between the wings and the body
and wrote a book with illustrative plates called Flyology because yes, that’s just
the kind of incredible child she was.
Her upbringing was certainly unusual for an aristocratic girl in the 1800s. Mathematics
and science were not standard fare for women at the time but she had inherited her mother’s
extreme intelligence and her father’s imaginative prowess. Lady Byron believed that only rigorous
study could prevent Ada from developing her father’s mental illness (not how that works).
Yet she also believed that forcing her daughter to lie completely still for long periods of
time whilst awake would develop her self-control.
Unsurprisingly Lady Byron did not win any parenting awards.
Fortunately Ada had a natural aptitude for numbers and language. She was taught by the
social reformer William Frend and the Scottish astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville,
who was one of the first women to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society.
Around the age of 17 Ada met the famous mathematician
and inventor Charles Babbage through Somerville.
Babbage clearly saw something great in Ada and became her mentor. She was fascinated
with Babbage’s ideas and inventions. Known now as ‘the father of the computer’, Babbage
was at that time inventing the difference engine, a machine that performed mathematical
calculations, and showed it to Ada before it was finished.
In her work Ada often questioned assumptions by integrating poetry and science. While studying
differential calculus, she wrote to her tutor Augustus De Morgan:
“I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected
and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight,
is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I
am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one
shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar.”
She believed that both intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical
and scientific concepts and valued metaphysics, the brand of philosophy that examines the
fundamental nature of reality, as much as mathematics.
She described her approach as
‘poetical science’.
On being presented at court at the age of seventeen she became immensely popular, thanks
to both her rather infamous parentage but also her brilliant mind. She danced at many
balls, becoming a regular at Court and was described as being dainty and charming.
At the age of 20, in July 1835 she married William, 8th Baron King and became Lady King.
He supported his wife’s academia and they shared a love of horses, going on to have
three children… I mean if the most British thing you’ve ever heard of: love of horses.
And they went on have 3 children together: Byron, Anne Isabella (called Annabella) and
Ralph Gordon. And yes, all three of them were pretty much named after Ada’s parents. She
apparently was pretty strong willed!
Immediately after the birth of Annabella in 1837, Ada
once again became very ill with a bout of cholera. She was already battling with asthma
and digestive problems and look months to shake the illness, during which time doctors
gave her painkillers like laudanum and opium and reportedly she experienced mood swings
and hallucinations…
- Probably because she was high.
Ada was a descendant of the Barons Lovelace, a title that had gone extinct, and thus when
her husband was made an Earl in 1838 they chose to take up the mantle ‘Earl of Lovelace
and Viscount Ockham’, making Ada ‘Countess of Lovelace’.
- Yes, the British aristocracy is confusing. Should I make an explainer video about it?
Would that be helpful for future historical videos?
Ada was asked to translate an article on Babbage’s analytical engine by Italian engineer Luigi
Federico Menabrea... ahh names
for a Swiss journal. She not only translated the complex scientific
language into English (just casually brilliant) but added her own thoughts and ideas on the
machine. Her notes, which she named ‘Notes’, (gotta love an economical girl) ended up being
three times longer than the original piece and was published in 1843 in an English science
journal. Within them Ada describes how codes could be created for the device to handle
letters and symbols along with numbers. She also theorized a method for the engine to
repeat a series of instructions, a process known as looping that computer programs use
today.
Within ‘Notes’ is what many historians consider to be the first computer program—ie,
an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Yet others refute this, pointing
out that Babbage's personal notes from previous years contain the building blocks of Ada’s
ideas. Either way Ada brought a fresh perspective: a vision for the capability of computers to
go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself,
focused only on those specific capabilities.
So basically Ada was very cool.
Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G and Note G contained not only the first
published algorithm specifically tailored for implementation on a computer but also
Ada’s dismissal of artificial intelligence. She wrote that “The Analytical Engine has
no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it
to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical
relations or truths.” Her objection has gone on to be the subject of much debate,
including in Alan Turing’s paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and yes, I will
indeed be doing a historical profile on Alan Turing at some point…
Ada cared deeply for a number of different academic projects in a range of scientific
fields, including phrenology, a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on
the skull to predict mental traits, and mesmerism.
Her interest in the brain was part of a long-running
pre-occupation, inherited from her mother, about her 'potential' madness. In 1844 she
wanted to begin a mathematical model for understanding how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves
to feelings ("a calculus of the nervous system") but this was never completed.
Her interest in mathematics didn’t always work out so well though: She created a large
gambling syndicate and made an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for
betting but ended up thousands of pounds in debt instead! (and her husband wasn’t pleased).
She also had a relaxed approach to friendships with men that led to numerous rumours of affairs…
but in fairness, it wasn’t hard for Victorian women to overstep lines!
And again, she wasn’t as bad as her dad… if that’s a defence. In 1841 Lady Byron
confessed to Ada and her cousin Elizabeth Medora Leigh that Lord Byron had fathered
them both-
- and boy did Elizabeth lead a life! She lived in a menage-a-trois with her older sister
and her husband, had a baby by him, escaped a convent, had another baby by him, ran away
to France with him, decided to become a nun, had another baby, had an affair with a French
naval officer who abandoned her, married his servant, had another baby, and eventually
died of small-pox.
So Lord Byron really did have some very adventurous genes!
Ada died at 36, the exact same age at which her father had died, on 27 November 1852,
from uterine cancer but more immediately from the bloodletting from her doctors. Which is
never a good idea! She was buried, at her request, next to the father she never got
a chance to know at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
Was Ada the world’s first computer programmer? Whether she was or not she was certainly the
only person at the time to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable
of expressing entities other than quantities. And that makes her truly special.
Her mindset of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine
that examined how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.
And could there possibly be a better moment to remind you to click the link in the description
for your first two months of Skillshare for free??? Collaborative learning through technology
will make us all smarter.
Thank you so much for watching, I hope you’ve enjoyed the video. Please do let me know in
the comments who you would like me to do a profile on next and subscribe if you haven’t
already!
See you in my next video
[lively music]