Ada Lovelace, 1815 - 1852

Augusta Ada Byron was born 10 December 1815 the daughter of the illustrious poet, Lord Byron, and Annabella Millbanke. A month after Ada was born Lady Byron asked for a separation from Lord Byron, and she was awarded custody of Ada. Lady Byron, worried that Ada might grow up to be a poet like her father, had Ada tutored in mathematics and music.

Life would change for Ada, only 18, when she heard a lecture by Charles Babbage (1791-1871), who had recently invented the idea for the Difference Engine, an automatic mechanical calculator. The following year (1835) Ada married William King, the future Lord Lovelace. Babbage worked on plans for this new engine and reported on the developments at a seminar in Turin, Italy in the fall of 1841. An Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French about the development. In 1843 Ada 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. In her fascinating 1843 article, Lady Lovelace's perceptive comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose music, and to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct.

When inspired, Ada could be very focused and a mathematical taskmaster. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. 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.

Her social life included the likes of Sir David Brewster (a physicist noted for his work on polarized light), Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens, and Michael Faraday. Her interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She wed William King in 1835 and they had three children.

Though her life was short (like her father, she died in 1852 at the age of 36, of cancer), Ada's work foreshadowed by more than a century what most of us think of as modern day computing. Babbage referred to her as 'Enchantress of Numbers.'