Transcription
In 1843, an exceptional woman with an extraordinary brain created something remarkable. The first computer program. This was long before computers were even thought of, let alone invented.
But she didn't stop there. Her next imaginatively pushed her thinking 200 years into the future, far from the age of mechanical machines and steam into a digital world.
But she faced two major problems because her ideas stretched far beyond the horizon of everyday understanding. Nobody else could grasp them. And she was a woman, which in Victorian Britain made an intellectual life almost impossible. Women were forbidden from going to university and their ideas just weren't taken seriously.
For years she had no idea that she was the daughter of one of the greatest British poets, Lord Byron. She was Ada. And one night at the age of 17, by chance her exceptional talent was spotted by an exceptional man. It was a meeting that changed the course of her life and led to her writing a program for a machine that only existed in her mind.
Charles Babbage was obsessed with automating calculations and was working on a steam-powered calculator called the Difference Engine. Most Victorians couldn't comprehend that such a machine was possible. But when Babbage demonstrated part of it at one of his weekly social gatherings, Ada instantly grasped its significance and the two became lifelong friends.
And then in 1843, she made one of the biggest creative and intellectual leaps of the century. Babbage had given a lecture in Italy about his new Analytical Engine, a calculating machine far more powerful than the Difference Engine. The lecture had been transcribed into French. And when Ada received a copy, she set about translating it into English. And then, encouraged by Babbage, she added her own notes to the translation.
In these notes, she revealed the brilliance of her mind and an understanding far greater than Babbage's. Her notes were three times longer than the original translation. And lurking in note G was evidence of her genius: the first computer program.
The program uses loops, variables, and recursion, which are all essential elements in any computer program today. But the real leap of imagination was that she could see the machine being used for more than calculating numbers. She realized that this was a general-purpose machine which could manipulate symbols. Anything could be digitized. She saw the huge potential of this machine and understood it as we do today with its applications in music, graphics, and AI.
Although she dismissed that idea, the machine was never made. Babbage refused a business partnership with Ada. She turned to gambling, perhaps to try to fund the machine herself, but that failed. Her health deteriorated, and she died aged just 36. Her final request was to be laid to rest next to her father, who died at the same age.
She lay forgotten for a century and then, slowly, starting with Turing, her profound insights were recognized.