Ada Lovelace

English mathematician

• Born: December 10, 1815
• Birthplace: Piccadilly Terrace, Middlesex (now in London), England
• Died: November 27, 1852
• Place of death: London, England

During an age when women rarely were acknowledged for their scientific and technological pursuits, the countess of Lovelace wrote a paper describing the methodology for programming a forerunner of modern computers and is consequently credited as the first computer programmer.

Early Life

The countess of Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron. She was the only legitimate child of her father, the famed poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Her mother was the former Anna Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. A pair more mismatched than her parents would be difficult to imagine: Her mother was straitlaced and pious, and her father was profligate and unrestrained. Beset with scandal and gossip regarding Byron’s unconventional lifestyle, the marriage was seemingly doomed to failure. Within a few months of Ada’s birth, the couple formally separated, and Byron embarked on a self-imposed exile to the Continent, never to return to England. Ada was left in the care of her mother.

Annabella raised Ada with some assistance from her own parents, Sir Ralph and Lady Judith Milbanke Noel. She feared that her child might develop what she judged as the weaknesses of her departed husband—a free-ranging imagination, self-indulgent emotions, and uncurbed passions—and determined to rear the child in a manner designed to prevent the recurrence of such a disaster. Her corrective measures included hiring tutors whose instructions were to teach Ada only mathematics and sciences; they were never to mention her father or to provide any instruction in poetry. Ada was thus shielded from any information regarding her famous poet-father. Even her questions to her mother seeking information about her father were met with rebuke.

Ada grew up in virtual isolation until 1833, when she turned eighteen. In accordance with English aristocratic custom, she made her formal entrance into society through her presentation at the Royal Court of King William IV and Queen Adelaide in St. James’s Palace. She also participated in a number of parties and balls that made up the “London season.” These new developments constituted a life-changing experience for the long-sheltered Ada. She met many famous people, among them some who knew her father and others who were curious to know what the daughter of the famed poet was like. She also met many who were building reputations in new fields of science as the nineteenth century made the transition from romanticism with its emphasis on feeling and emotion to realism that celebrated rationality and embraced the new technological and scientific advances precipitated by the Industrial Revolution.

Ada’s concentrated schooling in mathematics became her key to unlocking the doors of many intellectually gifted scientists then living in London. In the round of parties that she attended in 1833, she met Charles Babbage , who was gaining notice for his “difference engine,” a theoretical machine for calculating number sequences. In 1834, she met Mary Somerville, a celebrated mathematician and scientist then visiting in London. In 1841, she met Charles Wheatstone, who was doing pioneering work with the electric telegraph.

Life’s Work

Annabella’s direction of Ada’s education in mathematics had unanticipated, but fortuitous, results. Although her motive was to steer Ada away from the usual education for girls of the day and especially from the corrosive effects of the imagination, she did not plan to turn her daughter into a scientist, which would have been an unsuitable pursuit for a woman of rank. However, Annabella reveled in the attention Ada was receiving and her own chance to share the spotlight with her daughter. When Babbage invited Ada to see his work on the difference engine, Annabella quickly arranged for their visit. When they first attended one of Babbage’s regular gatherings in the summer of 1833, Ada’s response to a demonstration of what he termed his “mechanical universe” was dramatic. She determined to intensify her study of mathematics so that she could help Babbage in his work, and she wrote to him to pledge her support.

Meanwhile, Ada had the good fortune to develop a friendship with Mary Somerville, a frequent visitor at Babbage’s socials and the wife of Dr. William Somerville, a physician at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Mary Somerville’s fame rested in large part on her translating the work of the French mathematician and astronomer the Marquis de Laplace, as The Mechanism of the Heavens (1831). She also supplemented his text with diagrams and drawings to clarify the difficult concepts of the solar system. She had already attained the designation as London’s “Queen of Science” and generously took on the role of mentor to the young Ada, welcoming her into her Chelsea home and into a rich family life that was unknown to Ada.

Somerville’s son from an earlier marriage, Woronzow Grieg, also became Ada’s valued friend and eventually her lawyer. During the spring of 1835, Ada met one of Grieg’s former classmates from Trinity College at Cambridge, Lord William King. Following a brief courtship, she married him. A member of the landed aristocracy, King had large holdings in Somerset and Surrey on which he employed progressive ideas in farming and land use. In 1838, in recognition of his achievements, he was made the earl of Lovelace and Ada became the countess of Lovelace.

Ada afterward divided her time between the Lovelaces’ palatial home in Somerset and their London home in St. James’s Square. At that time, London offered numerous galleries and science exhibition sites that allowed the public to view the latest technological marvels. Ada routinely made the rounds of these exciting offerings, always with the unspoken hope that she would encounter something or someone to provide direction to the professional life for which she longed.

An opportunity for Ada to distinguish herself came quite by chance from her old friend Charles Babbage, who had moved beyond his difference engine to a more complex device that he called the analytical engine, a more advanced and powerful number cruncher than his earlier machine. Disappointed that the British government had offered little support for his project, Babbage accepted an invitation from a group of philosophers meeting in Turin, Italy, in October, 1842, to make a presentation on his analytical engine, an account of which Luigi Menebrea then published in French.

It happened that at that moment, Ada’s friend Charles Wheatstone, whose electric telegraph machine Ada had admired, was engaged to recommend scientific articles in foreign journals for publishing in a new British journal, Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs. He instantly thought of Ada to translate Menebrea’s article, and thus Ada found her niche in the world of science. When she showed her translation to Babbage in the spring of 1843, he urged her to add explanatory notes because she understood the workings of his invention better than anyone else. Despite suffering from poor health and doubts about her adequacy for the task, Ada complied and produced detailed notes that turned out to be longer than the original article. Her efforts met with resounding success.

Just as Ada had achieved the possibility of a satisfying profession, however, her health failed. Always highly strung and sickly since childhood, she increasingly experienced debilitating attacks of a nervous disorder, which her physicians treated with sedatives and opiates that rendered her unable to function. Added to this condition, she developed uterine cancer, for which no remedy was then available. She died in London on November 27, 1852. At her request, her body was buried at Hucknall Torkard in Nottingham, in the vault next to her father.

Significance

In an age when women were not encouraged to delve deeply into the sciences, Ada Byron Lovelace excelled in mathematics. Scholars disagree on the question of whether she should be considered the first computer programmer. However, the notes she provided for Babbage’s analytical machine show that she herself provided the step-by-step instructions necessary to make his machine carry out its computations. In recognition of her contributions to computer science, the U.S. Department of Defense named one of its computer programming languages Ada in her honor during the 1980’s.

Bibliography

Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Post-Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A comprehensive overview of the place of science in nineteenth century society and a description of the interactions of the prominent figures.

Morrow, Charlene, and Teri Perl, eds. Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Concise, alphabetically arranged entries on the lives, works, and bibliographies of Lovelace, Somerville, and many other women scientists.

Shearer, Barbara S., and Benjamin Shearer. Notable Women in the Physical Sciences. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. An overview of Lovelace’s life and achievements that includes a useful bibliography.

Swade, Doron. The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. A readable account of the invention of the nineteenth century forerunner of the modern computer; includes a chapter on Ada Lovelace’s contribution.

Toole, Betty Alexandra. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age. Rev. ed. Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998. A useful study that provides a chronological collection of some of Ada’s correspondence interspersed with biographical commentary.

Winston, Brian. Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge, 1998. Offers a perspective on Charles Wheatstone’s contribution to science.

Woolley, Benjamin. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter. London: McGraw-Hill, 1999. A thorough discussion of Ada’s role in the scientific revolution of her day and an overview of the achievements of science in her time.