Augusta Ada Byron was the only
legitimate child of Lord Byron; she was born on December 10th 1815,
but Byron and her mother separated a month after Ada was born and she had no
contact with her father, who died when she was nine years old. Her mother, Anne
Isabella Milbanke, feared that her daughter would inherit her father’s
waywardness and she had her rigorously tutored in a bid to extirpate any latent
moral turpitude. The young Ada showed a precocious talent for mathematics and
she was encouraged in her studies of the subject.
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| Young Ada |
Her mother showed little
interest in her upbringing, farming her out to her doting mother, but she made
sure to write enough ‘concerned’ letters regarding the child’s welfare to
dispel public suspicions (she urged the grandmother to keep these, as proof if
it were ever needed, even though she referred to Ada as ‘it’ on occasion).
Concerns that the Byron blood might be strong in Ada were confirmed when the
seventeen year old tried to elope with her private tutor, whose relatives recognised
her and informed her mother.
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| Ada Lovelace |
In 1835, she married William King, the 8th
Baron King, who, in 1838, became the Earl of Lovelace, providing her with the name by which she is
most usually known – Ada Lovelace. In the 1840s she enjoyed a relaxed
relationship with a number of men, which led to rumours of various affairs,
including one with John Crosse, the son of electrical pioneer Andrew Crosse, to
whom she bequeathed the personal mementoes left to her by her father. She also
entered into a gambling syndicate with several male colleagues, hoping to
exploit a mathematical model that would ensure success in large bets – this
failed badly, leaving her many thousands of pounds in debt, which her irate
husband was forced to settle.
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| Charles Babbage |
Lovelace was acquainted with Charles Babbage, the
eccentric inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines, which are commonly
held to be the precursors of the modern computer. In 1842, Babbage gave a
seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine, which was
written up by Luigi Menabrea (then an engineering student, later Prime Minister
of Italy), in French and was published in the Bibliothèque Universelle de
Genève. Babbage asked Lovelace to translate this into English and to add
notes, which she spent close to a year doing. It is these notes that have led
some to claim that Lovelace wrote the first ‘computer program’, as the table in
Note G is an algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers using the
Analytical Engine, although other have pointed out that Babbage supplied the notes
which he had written several years before and all Lovelace did was to spot a
‘bug’ in the table. Nevertheless, the position of the world’s first computer
programmer is currently filled by Ada, The Right Honourable the Countess of
Lovelace, (The computer language ‘Ada’, created for the United States
Department of Defence {I’m sorry, my American friends, it’s a noun not a
verb…}, is named after her).
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| The Difference Engine |
Regardless of her contribution, she was the
first to realise that the Analytical Engine was capable of being programmed,
rather than simply being a huge number-cruncher, and for that alone she
deserves to be recognised on the lamentably far too-short list of female
contributors to the history of science (there are simply not enough role-models
for future women scientists as it is, although, happily, things are
starting to change).
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| Lady Ada Lovelace |
In 1852, Lovelace was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and
as the illness progressed she fell further and further under the influence of
her mother, who curtailed who could, and who could not, make visits – her
friends and confidants were all excluded. She underwent a religious conversion,
and on August 30th she whispered a confession to her husband, who
left the bedside and never returned (was it an admission of infidelity,
perhaps?). She died on November 27th 1852, aged thirty-six.
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