Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
and I love history. And if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
George Gordon Byron was one of the most famous poets in history, and better known as Lord Byron,
he was a leader in the Romanticism movement of the late 18th and early 19th century,
famous for works like Don Juan, and the poem, She Walks in Beauty. But it is perhaps indicative
of the Romanticists rejection of Western traditions like rationalism, moral absolutes,
and agreed-upon social values, that Lord Byron was as well known in his lifetime for his excesses as
his poetry. Things like numerous love affairs with both men, and women, many of whom were married,
or running up huge gambling debts, or an obsession with drink, and drugs. But it was this unruly
streak that ironically had a surprising impact on the most rational of professions, computer
programming. It all has to do with a remarkable, but underappreciated mathematician, and involves
some of the most famous people of the Victorian era. It is history that deserves to be remembered.
George Gordon Byron was born in 1788. If he was going to grow up to be a psychopath,
he came upon it honestly. His mother, Catherine Gordon, was given to bouts of melancholy,
and mood swings, and was described as a woman without judgment, or self-command. His father,
an abusive profligate drunkard, was a British Army officer who went by the name, Mad Jack,
and who abandoned his wife and son after spending all her money, dying likely of an overdose of
opium when Byron was just three years old. He inherited his title, Baron Byron of Rochdale,
at the age of 10 upon the death of his great-uncle, but the estate had little
value. In 1811, he published the narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, to wide acclaim that
made him famous overnight. It was then, trying to escape from growing debts, and rumours about
his sexual escapades, that he married Annabel Milbanke, a beautiful, remarkably intelligent,
and religious heiress who apparently married Lord Byron in the hopes that she could set him on a
straight moral path; in that she failed. Owing to his infidelity, and erratic behavior, they
separated just a month after the birth of their daughter, Lord Byron's only legitimate child,
Augusta, affectionately called Ada. After their separation, Byron left England, never to return.
Ada never met her father, they had no relationship, but he affected her in a unique
way. Afraid that Ada would inherit her father's insanity, Lady Byron saw to it that Ada received
tutoring in mathematics, and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies; including
tutoring by the famous mathematician, Augustus De Morgan. In an era when women were certainly not
widely encouraged to participate in intellectual pursuits, she became a mathematician. She married
a baron in 1835 who was eventually made the Earl of Lovelace, making her the Countess of Lovelace;
they had three children. High society in London in the 19th century was full of people pursuing
science, and mathematics. Included in her circle, Ada made friends, and corresponded
with some of the finest scientific minds of the era, Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone,
Sir David Brewster, as well as author Charles Dickens. But the connection that would most
impact her future was with mathematician, and mechanical engineer, Charles Babbage.
Born in 1791, Charles Babbage was a gifted mathematician with a vision for applying
mathematical principles to modern problems. He had his hands in many projects, and ideas from
insurance actuarial tables, to notably impacting industry through an analysis of division of labor.
But Babbage's most famous contribution came from an interest in improving mathematical tables,
critical for navigation, science, and engineering. Computed by hand, the tables were subject
to error. “Such math could be more accurately done,” he argued, “by a computational machine”,
which he called the Difference Engine, in which he later refined in a second model that he called,
the Analytical Engine. A Difference Engine is an automatic mechanical calculator used
to tabulate polynomial functions; in short it is a hand-cranked mechanical computer.
Having met Babbage through a friend, Aba Lovelace became fascinated with his machine. Her largest
contribution came in 1843. Babbage had given a lecture on his Analytical Engine, and in Turin
Italy, an Italian engineer had transcribed the lecture, and published it in French. Realizing
the lecture could help to spur interest in the project, Babbage's supporter, Charles Wheatstone,
commissioned Ava to translate the article into English, and to add notes. The notes ended up
being longer than the paper, and offered a clear understanding of the operation, and potential of
the machine. In the notes, she included a clear description of how Babbage's invention could be
used to compute so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers which occur
frequently in number theory. The implication was enormous, her description is considered the
first published algorithm, ever specifically tailored for implementation, on a computer.
If Charles Babbage had invented the first mechanical computer,
Ada Lovelace had written the first computer program. Perhaps even more importantly,
she saw something that even Babbage did not. She realized that Babbage's machine could calculate
beyond numbers, and could theoretically solve problems of any complexity. For example she
theorized, if the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony,
and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression, and adaptations, the engine might
compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity, or extent. Thus,
she anticipated the implications of modern computing, 100 years before they were realized.
There is some controversy about whether she was actually the originator of the first
computer program, or whether she merely derived the idea from Babbage's previous
work. But her supporters note that Babbage never produced anything as sophisticated,
or as clean as Ada’s computation of the Bernoulli numbers. But the point is largely moot,
Babbage's machine was never completed in his time, and her program was never used.
But those who study the field of the history of the computer, acknowledge that she seems to
have been the first to conceive of the use of the computer, beyond numerical calculations.
Truly a visionary idea, that earns her a unique, and often forgotten place in history.
Although she wrote her program long before anybody conceived of computer languages,
when in the 1970s, the United States Department of Defense decided to create a computer programming
language to supersede the more than 450 computer programming languages that the DoD had been using,
they named it after her. Called Ada, it is an international standard still in use today.
Despite her mother's efforts to protect her from her father's insanity, she emulated him
in some important ways. For example, like her father Lord Byron, she was addicted to gambling,
and even wrote mathematical models that were supposed to help you be successful at gambling;
they failed. Like her father she died deeply in debt at the age of 36, ironically the same
age at which her father died, in November of 1852 of uterine cancer. Charles Dickens
himself read to her from one of his novels on her deathbed. To her mother's consternation,
she was buried at her request, next to her father in the family tomb in Nottinghamshire.
Her prophetic predictions about the potential of personal computers were largely lost,
until they were found and republished in 1953, and it was there, on the verge of the personal
computing revolution, that a voice from the past led us into a bold new future. All because her
mother did not want her to be a poet, like her dad. But they both dealt in words that changed
the world. As a stanza from his poem Don Juan says, “Words are things, and a drop of ink,
dropped like dew on a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this episode of my series, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please
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