Genius daughter of a genius
History fans have voted for the top 20 most influential women who changed the world – and placed Lord Byron’s daughter Ada near the top of the list. ANDY SMART looks at her contribution
SHE has an international day named in her honour, her portrait hangs at No 10 Downing Street … and now Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace has been voted as the fourth most influential woman in history.
She was polled by BBC History magazine readers just behind scientist Marie Curie, civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, and suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
Popular history remembers her as the assistant of Charles Babbage, pioneer of the computer, but that does not appear to be entirely accurate and certainly not the full story.
Ada Lovelace was born Ada Gordon in 1815, the only child of the brief and stormy marriage of the poet Lord Byron, and his mathematics-loving wife Annabella Milbanke.
It is said that Byron’s first words to his infant daughter were: “Oh! What an implement of torture have I acquired in you!”
Less than one month after she was born, Lord Byron informed her mother that he would continue his current affair and soon after asked her to leave with the child. Lord Byron never saw his daughter again.
Fearing that Ada would inherit her father’s volatile ‘poetic’ temperament, her mother raised her under a strict regimen of science, logic, and mathematics.
From childhood Ada was fascinated by machines – designing fanciful boats and steam flying machines, and pored over the diagrams of the new inventions of the Industrial Revolution that filled the scientific magazines of the time.
At the age of 19 she was married to an aristocrat, William King; when King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838 his wife became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
She had an aristocratic lifestyle, and was a courtier to William IV. But she was also at the centre of rumours of extra-marital affairs and had a harrowing experience with gambling that left her with huge debts.
In 1833, Lovelace’s mentor, the scientist Mary Somerville, introduced her to mathematics professor Charles Babbage, already renowned for his plans for gigantic clockwork calculating machines.
Babbage and Lovelace became close and lifelong friends.
Babbage described her as ‘that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it’, and on an another occasion, as ‘The Enchantress of Numbers’.
Lovelace, who once described herself as a ‘bride of science’, was deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for a tremendously complicated device he called the Analytical Engine.
In 1842 Lovelace translated into English a short article by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea describing the Analytical Engine, in order for it to be published in this country.
Babbage asked her to expand the article, “as she understood the machine so well.”
She produced notes on the engine which are recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.
Because of this, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.
Babbage spoke highly of her mathematical powers, and of her peculiar capability – higher he said than of anyone he knew -- to prepare the descriptions connected with his calculating machine.
But Ada also saw beyond Babbage’s belief that his machines could only calculate numbers.
She envisioned that any content, including sounds (and music), text, and pictures, could be turned into a digital form and manipulated by machine.
Ada Lovelace, a mother of three, died of cancer a few years after the publication of Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator; a century later they inspired Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.
She was only 36, the same age as her father when he died in Greece in 1824. Although she was living in London at the time, she had requested to be buried alongside her father at St Mary Magdalene Church in Hucknall. There is a memorial dedicated to her in the Market Place in Hucknall.
It took nearly 100 years after her death for Ada to be recognized for her contributions to computing.
Her notes on Babbage’s analytical engine were republished in 1953.
In 1979, the programming language ‘Ada’ was developed for use in military defence in the United States. Today, the program is still used in the aviation, healthcare, transportation, financial, infrastructure, and space industries.