Who Was Ada Byron King, Lady Lovelace?

Ada Byron King, Lady Lovelace, was one of the most picturesque characters in computer history. Augusta Ada Byron was born December 10, 1815, the daughter of the illustrious poet, Lord Byron. Five weeks after Ada was born Lady Byron asked for a separation from Lord Byron and was awarded sole custody of Ada who she brought up to be a mathematician and scientist. Lady Byron was terrified that Ada might end up being a poet like her father. Despite Lady Byron's guiding, Ada did not sublimate her poetical inclinations. She hoped to be 'an analyst and a metaphysician'. In her 30's she wrote her mother 'if you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science?'. Her understanding of mathematics was laced with imagination, and described in metaphors.

Her first love was geography, but this was soon replaced with a new passion, mathematics. She started corresponding with mathematicians about problems and ideas as her studies progressed. At the age of 17 Ada was introduced to Mary Fairfax Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and a remarkable woman who translated LaPlace's works into English and whose texts were used at Cambridge. Though Mrs. Somerville encouraged Ada in her mathematical studies, she also attempted to put mathematics and technology into an appropriate human context.

When Ada was 18 years old, at a party at Mrs. Somerville's,   in November, 1834, Ada met Charles Babbage and heard his ideas for a new calculating engine, the Analytical Engine. He conjectured that a calculating engine could not only foresee but could act on that foresight. Ada was touched by the 'universality of his ideas', but hardly anyone else was. Babbage invited her to visit the studio where he kept his invention and two weeks later, accompanied by her mother, she did. She was fascinated by Babbage's invention and began corresponding with Babbage regularly, learning as much as she could about his invention and ideas. Ada and Babbage would remain friends and collaborators for the rest of her life.

In 1835, Ada married William King and three years later became the Countess of Lovelace when her husband was created first Earl of Lovelace. Her husband was supportive of her mathematical studies and encouraged her to continue to correspond with Charles Babbage and others. In a time when women were viewed as beings too frail for serious thought, Ada pursued her studies with vigor. While women were not allowed to attend University or private clubs where much of the scientific research and discussion took place, they were allowed to attend public lectures and many began to take a greater interest in academic learning. Ada attended several lectures, usually accompanied by her mother or Mary Somerville, and did not let the attitudes of her time dissuade her from exploring her passion for mathematics. Babbage was sympathetic to women's interest in science, and in particular Ada's. He was impressed with her energy and eagerness to learn, and encouraged her to pursue her mathematical interests.

Babbage worked on plans for his new engine and reported on the developments at a seminar in Turin, Italy in the autumn of 1841. An Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French about the development. Ada, in 1843, married to the Earl of Lovelace and the mother of three children under the age of eight, translated Menabrea's article. When she showed Babbage her translation he suggested that she add her own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original article. Letters between Babbage and Ada flew back and forth filled with fact and fantasy. In her article, published in 1843, Lady Lovelace's prescient comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct.

Unlike the Difference Engine which had actually been constructed, the Analytical Engine existed only in Babbage's mind and on paper. The development of his engines had taken Babbage many years and the government support he had relied upon was running out. No one in the government really understood his ideas for the Analytical Engine or how it was significantly different from the Difference Engine. Eventually the projected cost to support the research became too great and thus the Analytical Engine was never actually constructed.

Ada, however, was one of few people who understood the Analytical Engine intimately and she became an outspoken advocate of Babbage's invention. Babbage would eventually owe to Ada the best interpretation and description of the Analytical Engine. He was frustrated by trying to explain the principle of the machine to people with inadequate mathematical knowledge and the descriptions he gave of its use were difficult to follow. Ada's description of the Analytical Engine, the set of instructions she wrote for it, and her speculations of its possible uses were published in 1843 in a collection of notes in Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs series. It is for this accomplishment that she is now remembered by the scientific community. While Ada's explanation of the Analytical Engine came too late for Babbage and any hope he may have had to construct it, her 'Notes' were the first concrete description of Babbage's invention.

Ada's description of the Analytical Engine began with a mathematical description of the Difference Engine and how it differed from the Analytical Engine. Unlike the Difference Engine, which required a human programmer to set the initial values to enter data that had been computed and set into columns, the Analytical Engine used 'operation cards' to perform arithmetic on numerical data as well as to respond to symbols representing data. Ada described how the Analytical Engine was capable of computing with general information and stressed its ability to be programmed - that is, to act on general instructions supplied on the operation cards.

The design of the Analytical Engine was adapted from the punched-card principle used in the Jacquard weaving looms. In the looms, punched cards allowed threads to be woven in certain patterns, a task which traditionally had been done by hand. One set of cards determined the operations for the adding and multiplying states in the engine, while another set of cards distributed the operations according to a particular function, providing the engine with data and receiving results. Ada described the details of the Engine: how the engine could achieve iteration by making cards revolve backwards instead of forwards, and how sets of cards could be accessed any number of times, which would provide the functionality of a subroutine or do-loop.

Ada understood the potential power of a computing machine such as envisioned by Babbage - one that had internal memory, could make choices and repeat instructions - and she foresaw its application in mathematical computation, artificial intelligence and even computer music. She was one of few at the time who saw the advantages of abstraction and speculation; she saw beyond what was obviously useful about the Analytical Engine to its contribution to advancing science.

She emphasized the versatility of the Analytical Engine by providing numerous examples such as demonstrations of how it would compute trigonometric functions containing variables, examples of how the engine would do difficult problems without error and, most notably, her detailed example of how the engine would compute the Bernoulli numbers. This last example is what sets Ada apart as the 'first computer programmer' - it is in fact a program that illustrates how a function would be computed by the engine without having first been computed by hand. This plan, is now regarded as the first 'computer program'. A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named 'Ada' in her honor in 1979.

Ada was also able to see into the future of the Analytical Engine. She speculated that the Engine would be able to solve many problems then considered impossible because of limited resources. She believed the machine would prove indispensable to the future of science and would perhaps be used in the discovery of new problems, and even for what where then considered less interesting problems, such as the generation of prime numbers.

In the Victorian age few women were able to study science or contribute with the development of their own ideas. Ada was a woman working in a man's field but despite this she pursued her passion for mathematics. She understood the importance of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and glimpsed the future of computing in her ideas for programming the engine and in her speculations of its possible uses. Ada was the first woman intimately involved with computer science, even though there was no 'computer science' at the time.

After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses and her social life, in addition to Charles Babbage, included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. Her interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's 'The Difference Engine', shown writing letters to Babbage in the series 'The Machine that Changed the World' and her letters and writings have been gathered in 'Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer'. Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36 on November 27, 1852), she anticipated most of what we think is brand-new computing.

Ada Byron King was a woman ahead of her time. For the next hundred years after her death she would be known as the daughter of Lord Byron, the poet. Only in this century would she become known as 'the first computer programmer'.