Augusta Ada Lovelace feared she had inherited her father’s madness.
She was named after her dad’s half-sister with whom he had an affair!
When Ada’s mother, Annabella Milbanke,
suspected her husband was involved in an incestuous relationship,
she rejected her daughter’s first name and, henceforth, called her by her middle name.
Ada’s father was the great British poet Lord Byron.
He was as famous for his playboy life as he was for his poetry.
He had numerous affairs, including with Lady Caroline Lamb, who described him as:
'Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”.
And he was.
Five weeks after the birth of Ada, Lady Byron left Lord Byron.
Lord Byron wrote about seeing his daughter for the
last time in his famous poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, And then we parted,
Ada never saw her father again.
When she was eight, he caught a terrible cold,
which worsened after he allowed his doctors to purge his blood even though he was against it.
Shortly after, Lord Byron died.
His final words were said to be: “Oh, my poor dear child! - my dear Ada! My God,
could I have seen her! Give her my blessing.”
There was a portrait of Lord Byron at Ada’s home, but her mother kept
it hidden behind a green curtain, and Ada never saw it until she was 20 years old.
Apparently, it was to protect it from smoke rather than because of Byron’s reputation.
But Lady Byron wanted to make sure Ada didn’t turn out like her father.
So, she decided to have Ada rigorously tutored in mathematics,
thinking it would be the best antidote to her rebelliousness.
That was unusual for a woman in the 19th century. Then again,
Ada’s mother had herself been tutored in math by a former professor of Cambridge University.
Despite Lady Byron’s efforts to ensure Ada didn’t follow the same wayward path as her father,
Ada ended up having an affair as a teen with one of her tutors and
then tried to run away from home to be with him.
Lord Byron never wanted his daughter to turn out like him.
He once wrote a letter to his half-sister Augusta to see if she could find out what Ada was like.
Byron wrote: “I hope the Gods have made her anything save poetical - it
is enough to have one such fool in the family.”
Ada loved poetry. But she also loved math.
She felt it was the only language that can
“adequately express the great facts of the natural world…”
And it is “the instrument through which the weak mind
of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works.”
After the scandalous affair with her tutor,
she decided to get her act together and declared to her new tutor:
“I must cease to think of living for pleasure or self-gratification. I
find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a
scientific nature now seems to keep my imagination from running wild…”
It was the perfect time to immerse herself in science and technology.
Ada was born in 1815, at the height of the industrial revolution in Britain.
She was fascinated by the factories popping up in Central England.
This was in contrast to her father, who defended the British textile
workers who felt threatened by the new technology and destroyed the machinery.
Ada was particularly impressed by an automated machine that wove patterns on fabric.
The Jacquard Loom used punched cards to create designs.
The design is translated into a pattern of holes punched into cards.
The cards direct the pattern of the weave,
automating the creation of complex designs. This transformed textile manufacturing.
In the future, punch cards would also control a sequence of operations in early computers.
One of Britain’s few noted female mathematicians took Ada under her
wing. Mary Somerville became a friend, teacher, and mentor.
Somerville introduced her to Charles Babbage, an esteemed
English mathematician who had an interest in machines that could perform human tasks.
Ada grew fascinated by Babbage’s idea to build an “Analytical Engine”, a mechanical
computer that would use a series of gears and wheels to perform mathematical calculations.
In Babbage’s mind, it could perform any kind of calculation
based on the programming instructions given to it.
This was more advanced than his Difference Engine, which was like a big basic mechanical
calculator that could only perform a specific kind of calculation, while
the analytical engine was designed to perform a wider range of mathematical calculations.
In the way that the punch cards directed the loom to weave designs on fabric,
punch cards would program the computing machine.
Lovelace made the connection between the two, writing this beautiful description: “...the
Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
Poetry flowed through her veins, as it did through her father’s.
She was comfortable in both worlds, the arts and the sciences,
which allowed her to see the beauty in the mechanics of a computing machine.
Ada published a description of Babbage’s analytical
engine in a British science journal in 1843. This was partly a translation of a French work,
though her own additional notes ended up being twice as long as the original!
She gave step-by-step instructions on how the machine could calculate a sequence
of Bernoulli numbers, which are mathematical constants used in many areas of mathematics.
This is considered to be the first published algorithm,
which is why she’s often referred to as the world’s first computer programmer.
Babbage saw his Analytical Engine as primarily a machine that crunched numbers. However,
Ada felt it could be so much more.
She saw it as a general-purpose machine that could
process anything that could be written using symbols.
She believed it could create poetry and make music, writing: “the engine might
compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity.”
She imagined the world’s first computer 100 years before the first ones were built in World War two.
There was one other interesting concept in her scientific paper.
She raised the idea of whether machines could think.
Ada believed they could not.
She felt a machine could perform operations as instructed, but “has
no pretensions whatever to originate anything.”
British mathematician Alan Turing refuted this a century later. He was
famous for cracking the Nazi machine that encrypted top-secret messages.
Turing’s 1950 paper had a section dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection”.
He wrote: “A better variant of the objection says that a machine
can never ‘take us by surprise’. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
He believed that a machine might be able to learn and, therefore, be able to generate new thoughts.
His famous test proposed that a computer can be said to be intelligent if it can
convince a person that it’s having a conversation with another human being.
But even if a machine could successfully mimic human thinking, his critics argued it would
not really be conscious. A machine would lack comprehension or awareness of what it was saying.
This is still the most debated topic in cognitive science.
AI does not currently possess the consciousness or awareness that humans do, or…at least,
that’s what ChatGPT told me when I asked it!
If only Ada could have seen what computers are now capable of.
When I uploaded the only known photograph of her into the AI tool DALL-E, it generated new images.
Ada wanted to enter into a formal business relationship with Babbage
with the aim of building the Analytical Engine.
She offered to use her connections and persuasive penmanship to gain
funding for his engine IF she could control the business decisions.
She believed Babbage would for sure take the deal,
writing to her mother: “..that he will probably yield…”
Unfortunately for her, Babbage did NOT yield.
Unfortunately for him, he never got the funding he needed to build his machine.
And he died broke.
Ada Lovelace’s life would spiral downhill.
She struggled with ill health for years, and her health deteriorated further after
she completed her scientific paper, which was the only paper she ever published.
She took opiates to treat her pain and became addicted, which led to mood swings and delusions.
She also became addicted to gambling…and lost thousands of pounds betting on the
wrong horse in a race and had to pawn some of her family’s jewels.
Epsom Derby - double-check if she had an affair with a gambling partner as well
Her finances dwindled despite the fact she had married the socially prominent William King,
who inherited the noble title Earl of Lovelace, making her Countess of Lovelace.
She had three children and named her first son Byron, after the father she never knew.
It’s widely believed that Lord Byron also fathered a child with his own half-sister.
This didn’t come as a shock to Ada, who wrote to her mother: “I am not in the least astonished.”
But she didn’t blame her father and instead called his half-sister “inherently wicked.”
She was fascinated by her father and believed she had inherited his genius, which she vowed to use
“to bring out great truths and principles. I think he has bequeathed this task to me.”
Sadly, her life was cut short.
She suffered from uterine cancer and died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36.
At her request, she was buried in a small English town next to her father, who died at the same age.
In 1991, Science Museum London built Babbage’s Difference Engine from his original drawings.
As for the analytical engine, partial sections were built,
which Ada had the opportunity to see herself.
However, there are no plans to recreate it in full.
Ada Lovelace is celebrated as a computer pioneer.
The U.S. Defense Department even named a programming language after her.
Long before anyone else, Ada Lovelace realized
the true potential of computers and paved the path for our digital age.
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