Ada Lovelace: Victorian Computing Visionary

The first computer programmer, rather surprisingly, was a Victorian woman by the name of Ada Lovelace. Taught science and maths in an era when women were rarely given an education, Ada was the first person to glimpse the future that we now take for granted, to understand just what computers could be capable of, even before the first was built.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of the troubled poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth, or Annabella as she called herself. After her parents' troubled marriage disintegrated, Ada was brought up mostly by her grandmother, Judith, but unlike most young ladies of the era, was tutors by some of the best minds of the era.

At 18, Ada met the inventor, mathematician and mechanical engineer, Charles Babbage, and became fascinated by a mechanical computing machine that he was working on. Called the Analytical Engine, it was designed to carry out complex computations and could be controlled using punched cards, similar to those used on a Jacquard loom.

Ada studied Charles' designs in depth and came to understand the machine well enough to write the first ever computer program. That she achieved this in 1843, without a working computer, is testament to her intelligence, skill and understanding, yet there are still those who would wish to deny her contribution to computing history.

This chapter is an excerpt from A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention, an anthology of inspiring stories about how we achieved some of the most important breakthroughs in science and technology, from the identification of the Horsehead Nebula to the creation of the computer program, from the development of in vitro fertilisation to the detection of pulsars.