Ada Lovelace and the Thinking Machine

Ada Lovelace was born in England in 1815, a time when few women were encouraged to study mathematics. Her mother, however, made sure she received serious lessons in numbers and logic, hoping that careful study would give her a steady mind.

As a young woman, Ada met an inventor named Charles Babbage, who had designed a complex machine he called the Analytical Engine. The machine was never fully built in his lifetime, but its plans described a device that could follow a series of instructions to carry out calculations.

Ada was asked to translate an article about the engine from French. She did far more than translate it. She added long notes of her own, and in those notes she described how the machine could be given step-by-step instructions to solve a particular problem. Many historians consider this one of the earliest examples of a computer program.

Ada also saw something that Babbage himself did not fully stress. She suggested that such a machine might one day handle more than numbers. If symbols could stand for other things, she reasoned, the engine might work with music or other ideas. In a world where the machine was only a set of drawings on paper, this was a remarkable leap of imagination, since no working computer existed for her to study or test. She died young, at thirty-six, but her vision reached far beyond her own century, and today she is honored as a pioneer of computing.