Find it in your favorite podcast app.

---

Ada’s life was unconventional right from the very beginning. She was born in London on December 10, 1815. One month later, her mother Annabella got up early in the morning, picked up her infant daughter, and walked out, never to return again.

The man who had driven Annabella to this drastic step was the famous Lord Byron. Byron has had two cameo appearances on my show before. Once in episode 6.5 where he was a friend of Mary Shelley. He got her sister pregnant and then dumped her. Also in episode 6.6, where Harriet Beecher Stowe defended his wife, Lady Annabella Byron, from accusations of having mistreated him. Stowe said it was the other way around, and Lord Byron was having an affair with his own half-sister.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was right, by the way. Lord Byron did have an affair with his own half-sister, but that’s just part of why Lady Annabella Byron packed up and left with their infant daughter. The rest of it was his volatile temper, his constant belittling of her, and his extravagant lifestyle that left him always dodging creditors.

After Annabella left, Byron skipped the country entirely and then died young in Greece. Ada never knew him. Though she certainly knew his reputation, both the bad, which I have just given you, and also the good, such as it was. He was a celebrated poet, a romantic genius with words, a charmer when he wanted to be, famous, handsome, and rich (or at least he spent money like he was rich, even if he never paid the bills). People loved him, especially if they didn’t actually have to live with him. He was the kind of figure who is fascinating to read about in the tabloids, but you would never, ever want your daughter to marry.

Annabella was luckier than most mistreated wives. Byron had married her for her money, and her money meant that she had somewhere to go. They were never formally divorced. Lady Byron remained Lady Byron, and soon she was a widow. In many ways, that was the best possible solution for her. Byron could have claimed the baby away from Annabella. (Fathers had that right.) But he didn’t bother. Annabella got to raise Ada the way she saw fit.

Ada, a Wealthy Child

Ada certainly did not grow up poor. She had many governesses and tutors, few of whom could measure up to her mother’s strict standards. In between times, Lady Byron taught Ada herself.

Lady Byron particularly stressed mathematics and science education. This was partly because of her own interests. Lord Byron had based a female character on his wife and said that her “favorite science was the mathematical” and her “thoughts were theorems.” He did not intend this as a compliment (Hollings, 2).

The other reason for Lady Byron to stress such things with Ada was as a corrective to any characteristics Ada might have inherited from her father. Like imagination, passion, and a total lack of ability when it came to balancing a checkbook.

Fortunately, Ada liked math and science. Her childhood letters include questions she was working on, like “If 750 men are allowed 22500 rations of bread per month, how many rations will a garrison of 1200 men require?” (Essinger, 38). She also wrote her ideas and plans for a flying machine and a steam engine. Then she moved on to ideas about a planetarium. It was all interesting to her (Seymour, 159-160).

Ada also learned the required subjects for a woman of her rank: needlework, languages, dancing, horseback riding, and all the social graces. She also had to cope with more than her share of childhood diseases. At age thirteen, a severe attack of measles left her partially paralyzed. For three years she was either bedridden, or in a wheelchair, or on crutches (Seymour, 160-162).

When Ada was back on her feet, she turned out to have some of her father in her after all. At 16, she attempted to elope with one of her tutors. It was all thwarted in the end, but it showed that the teenage Ada was no longer so eager to please her mother (Seymour, 177).

Coming Out (Socially and Intellectually)

In 1833, Ada was presented at court, which meant that she was “out,” or formally eligible for matrimony. No tutors need apply. Both Ada’s parents were (or had been) well-known members of the upper upper class. Only a certain rank would do.

Coming out also meant that Ada’s social and intellectual world expanded. She was taken to lectures and dinners and private drawing rooms where the latest ideas were discussed. One of the people she met was Mary Somerville. Mary was a mathematical genius who had written a book called On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. The very word “scientist” was coined in a review of Somerville’s book. The more usual phrase was “man of science,” which obviously didn’t fit Mary Somerville very well. Mary was also a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, one of only two women to receive that honor. The other woman was the one I covered last week: Caroline Hershel, episode 16.10.

Ada was delighted to meet Mary. Mary’s daughters were equally delighted. They didn’t like math, and it was a burden off them when their mother found a surrogate child to pursue it with her.

Ada also met Mary’s friend, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a co-founder of the Royal Astronomical Society, and he had dreamed up a steam-powered analytical machine. It was to have 20,000 cogwheels and thousands of gear-shafts. Punch-cards would control it, and that part was not Babbage’s idea because such cards had already been used in the latest steam-powered weaving machines called Jacquard looms. Each thread was controlled by a hook which either raised or lowered the thread, and the hooks were controlled by the punch cards. It worked beautifully because no matter how complicated the overall pattern on the fabric was, on the thread level it was a binary system: at any given moment the thread was either raised or lowered, and on the punch card, there either was a hole for that hook or there was not.

Babbage proposed to do the same thing for calculations. His punch cards would tell the machine which mathematical operations to perform, allowing the machine as a whole to do very lengthy and complex patterns quickly, just like the Jacquard loom allowed for very lengthy and complex weaving patterns (Essinger, 115-120.

Such a machine needed a lot of resources for development. Like national government level of resources, and the UK government was on board. They gave him a lot of money. Then he needed more. The project dragged on for years and years, with both sides getting more and more frustrated. All Babbage had to show for his effort so far was grand ideas, a small demo model, and the irritation of his government. Nevertheless, Ada saw the little demo model, and she found it very exciting.

Becoming Countess Lovelace

But Babbage was possibly not as exciting as the other important person she met. His name was Lord William King. The interest was mutual, and Lady Byron approved, so the romance moved forward. Ada wrote a letter thanking William for overlooking her imprudent youth, which is presumably a reference to the attempted elopement (Seymour, 203). They were married on July 8, 1835. This meant that Ada Byron had become Ada King. In 1838, William King was elevated as the new Viscount Ockham and Earl of Lovelace, which made her the Countess Ada Lovelace (Seymour, 215).

While Ada remained interested in math and science, her life was temporarily more conventional. After marrying a wealthy man, what society expected of her was to oversee a wealthy household, socialize a lot, dress well, and produce children. That’s exactly what Ada did.

But after a few years and three children, Ada began to wish for more intellectual and academic pursuits. Mary Somerville had moved to Italy, and Ada wanted more math in her life. She already knew more math than most other aristocratic ladies, but she was well aware that her math skills would not hold up compared to those of an educated man. She had never taken a math class, for example. She had only worked under various tutors of varying ability, and most of them didn’t know higher mathematics. Little of algebra, and nothing of trigonometry or calculus.

As a woman, Ada couldn’t just go out and take a class. Places like Oxford and Cambridge didn’t accept women at all. The fact that she was married and a mother did not help. To progress any further, Ada would have to find someone willing to work with her one-on-one, in person, or by letter.

The man she found was Professor Augustus de Morgan, formerly of London University. De Morgan managed to bring Ada’s ambitions down to reality. She wanted lessons in differential calculus. He gently told her to slow down. You can’t do differential calculus if you don’t know algebra and trigonometry. Then he brought her through it, mostly by letter. Ada came to appreciate his methods very much.

She had to take breaks sometimes. Her health was never very good, and she had other interests too. She also practiced the harp for hours every day, and she corresponded with other men of science.

The First Computer Program

Meanwhile, Babbage had grown frustrated with his own government and was seeking funding for his machine in Italy. Count Luigi Menabrea attended a conference where he saw the demo model, and he wrote up the first scientific article about it for a journal based in Geneva, Switzerland. That was published in 1842. The article was in French because that was the language of science at the time. It was noticed by a London journal editor named Richard Taylor. Taylor’s journal specialized in English translations of foreign articles, and he asked a friend to recommend a good translator for Menabrea’s article. His friend made an unusual recommendation: the Countess Ada Lovelace. Taylor was probably surprised, but he agreed.

So Ada was offered the role of translator. She was ill at the time, and she had family difficulties. It turned out that her cousin, daughter of Lord Byron’s half-sister, was also her half-sister. Byron was the father. This was not exactly news to Ada, but the growing acknowledgement of the secret and consequent demands were taking a new toll on many people in the family.

Nevertheless, she accepted the translation assignment. This wasn’t a one-and-done, pop it into Google Translate kind of assignment. The language was technical, and it all had to be approved by multiple parties, including Babbage. When Ada’s translation was done and  accepted, but not yet published, Babbage suggested that she could do more than just a translation of Menabrea’s words. What if she corrected, clarified, and expanded on Menabrea’s paper?

By the time the document was finished, it ran to 66 printed pages and 41 of those pages were Ada’s appendices. It is far more her article than it is a translation of anything.

In Note A, Ada attempts to answer a question Menabrea had asked. He said “Who can foresee the consequences of such an invention?” She answered that the machine is capable of far more than mere arithmetic. “A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.” For example, Ada was well trained in music, and she knew that the principles of harmony have math at their base. She said, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music” (quoted in Seymour, 263-265).

In Note B, Ada explains in detail how the thinking machine would keep a storehouse of information, where it could store previously calculated answers and retrieve them at will. In other words, she is describing how computer memory works.

In Note C, Ada advises readers to go to the London Science Halls to see a Jacquard loom in action.

But the famous note, the one prompting her inclusion in my series on First Women, is Note G. In this one, she’s not just speculating on what the machine could do theoretically. She’s chosen a very specific mathematical problem. Mathematicians were already aware of a specific sequence of numbers called the Bernoulli numbers. The actual sequence is 1, -1/2, 1/6, 0, -1/30, 0, 1/42, 0, -1/30, 0, etc.

The relationship between these numbers is not at all easy for a non-mathematician like myself to see. But I am assured by my sources and also by my mathematician husband that these numbers are necessary if you want to make a formula that will add up sequences of still other numbers. For example, if you wanted to add 1² + 2² + 3² + 4² + 5² all the way up to 100², you could go to all the trouble of calculating each element and adding them up. Or you could write a nice simple formula to do the same thing, only you’ll need to plug the Bernoulli numbers into the formula or you won’t get the right answer. The same would be true for adding other sequences of numbers. The difficulty with your nice simple formula is that you have to know what the Bernoulli numbers are in order to use them. Sure, I rattled off the first ten for you (all thanks to the almighty Internet search for those). But what if you need the 50^th in the list? Or the 97^th? Or the 514^th? Ada didn’t have the almighty Internet to answer that question.

Ada knew how to calculate Bernoulli numbers herself, but her idea was that Babbage’s machine could calculate them for her.

Babbage’s Thinking Machine could not literally be programmed to do this because Babbage didn’t actually have a fully functional model. If it had really existed, then programming it would have mean punching out the cards to give it the correct instructions.

Since there was no existing machine, Ada did the next best thing. She explained in detail each and every step that the machine would have to do, including storing the results and retrieving those answers later. In other words, she described every line of a computer program.

She also included what programmers now would call an execution trace. This was a table which listed all the steps and the current value of every variable at every step along the way. It’s an incredibly detailed thing to write out by hand. Modern programmers don’t do it by hand. They tell the computer to spit it out as it computes.

Ada’s paper was published August 25, 1843, in a run of 250 copies. It was published with her initials only, though it wasn’t long before people knew who had written it (Seymour, 278, 294).

With a modern perspective, this paper, and especially Note G, is celebrated as the first computer program. There are people who quibble, and the grounds of the quibbling vary. Some say that describing a line of code is not the same thing as writing a line of code. Some also say that an execution trace is not the same as the actual code. Some say the Analytical Machine wasn’t really a computer, especially since it didn’t really exist. Some even say that it was mostly Babbage’s work, or that some of his earlier notes should count as programs, so Ada’s wasn’t the first. I think you can tell what I think about that by the fact that I titled this episode “Ada Lovelace: First Computer Programmer.”

Many other people agree with me. This work was monumentally ahead of its time, and that’s exactly why it didn’t feel like a magnum opus to Ada. She was proud of her work (as well she should be), but in 1843 it was all theoretical. It wouldn’t be proved monumental for another 100 years.

The Aftermath

For the moment, it felt like an interesting intellectual puzzle done well, and now it was time to move on to other things. Ada wanted to cross other scientific frontiers, and she began corresponding with other scientists on electricity and magnetism and light.

Unfortunately, she was distracted by other problems. Her health was not good. She had long periods where she was either in bed, or sent to the seaside, or otherwise incapacitated.

There were also money problems. Lord Lovelace was very proud of his brilliant wife and that was good. But he also loved a grand lifestyle, and he was hemorrhaging money. Ada’s personal allowance had never been very high, and she was hemorrhaging it too. Lady Byron was still very rich, partly because she was very good with her money and that meant she wasn’t always that eager to cover debts for her less upright relatives.

And less upright was a good word for it. Ada was Lord Byron’s daughter. People didn’t really expect her to be anything less than scandalous. Rumors of extramarital relationships always floated around her. Some of them were nothing but rumors, and that’s how she passed them off to her husband. But some of them were also true. In particular, she was lavishing money and gifts on a man named John Cross.

Then there was the gambling. Like so many others, Ada had dreams of a big payout that would resolve her financial embarrassment. But her interest was also intellectual. She was working on a mathematical model that would ensure her gambling success. This went about as well as you might expect: her financial problems got dramatically worse.

In a scene that sounds straight from an Agatha Christie novel, Ada resorted to replacing the Lovelace family diamonds with paste versions and pawning the originals. When Lady Byron found out, she sighed and paid for their retrieval. Ada pawned them again. Lady Byron redeemed them a second time, but didn’t return them to Ada (Seymour, 384-392).

“Life is so difficult,” Ada wrote in a letter in October 1851. She underlined every word (Seymour, 372).

She was diagnosed with uterine cancer, though today we would call it cervical cancer. There was no cure. It was a death sentence, and her death would involve months of agony. Lord Lovelace still loved his wife, and he chronicled her decline and his despair in detail.

Ada Lovelace died on November 27, 1852. She was 36 years old.

The Legacy

Ada would probably be surprised to know how famous she is 175 years after her death. Not many scientific authors can say that their work holds up well after that much time. She certainly would not recognize herself as the first computer programmer because none of those words meant what they mean now. A computer was a job title, meaning a person who computes. It didn’t mean a machine until the mid-20^th century. The word programmer meant an event planner.

Everything changed in the mid-20^th century. Ada’s predictions came true in ways that even she never imagined, and her paper started to look very, very good. Much better than any of her contemporaries would have guessed.

That is why she is commemorated everywhere. Colleges and universities all over the world have named buildings after her. She has statues in London, Leicester, and Dublin. There is a computer programming language called Ada. Multiple organizations offer Ada Lovelace awards, either for achievement in computing or for women in tech. There’s at least one non-profit, several Google Doodles, and many historical fiction books about her.

One further note: it’s not just the world’s first computer programmer who was a woman. When programming became important in the mid-20^th century, it was initially seen as routine and secretarial. In other words, it was a good place for women. It was only in the 70s and 80s that it became a boys’ club. That’s a story I may tell in a future series on women and careers.

For now, let’s just say that Ada Lovelace was ahead of her time, and there’s no telling what she could have done if she’d been born a century and a half later.

I have a special thanks today to Julie, who signed up as a Patreon supporter. Fabulous people like Julie help keep this show up and running. If you are able to contribute, please visit the website for a variety of possible ways.

Selected Sources

Ensmenger, Nathan. “‘Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism’: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions.” Osiris 30, no. 1 (2015): 38–65. https://doi.org/10.1086/682955.

Essinger, James. Ada’s Algorithm : How Lord Byron’s Daughter Launched the Digital Age through the Poetry of Numbers. London: Gibson Square, 2017.

Hollings, Christopher, Ursula Martin, and Adrian C Rice. Ada Lovelace : The Making of a Computer Scientist. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018.

Krysa, Joasia. “Ada Lovelace – There Never Was a Note G.” Academia.edu, January 16, 2017. https://www.academia.edu/30945704/Ada_Lovelace_There_Never_was_a_Note_G.

Lovelace, Ada. “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. By L. F. MENABREA, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers.” psychclassics.yorku.ca, 1842. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Lovelace/lovelace.htm.

Romeo, Jess. “How Computer Science Became a Boys’ Club.” JSTOR Daily, August 29, 2021. https://daily.jstor.org/how-computer-science-became-a-boys-club/.

Seymour, Miranda. In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace. Simon and Schuster, 2018.