Ada Lovelace: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Women in History)

by Hourly History

Early on in her studies, for example, Ada began to contemplate the math behind the prismatic light seen to shine through a rainbow. Musing on this subject in the spring of 1834, Ada wrote to her math tutor with the following intriguing statement, “I cannot make out one thing at all—why a rainbow always appears to the spectator to be an arc of a circle. Why is it a curve at all, and why a circle rather than any other curve?”

Babbage was working on a steam-powered, combustible computer engine. This was a long time away from silicon computer chips, but it was certainly a start. By the time that Babbage met Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s benefactors were weary of all the delays and had effectively cut off funding. Nevertheless, the second that Ada laid eyes on the steam-powered clicking and clacking contraption that whirred and buzzed as it attempted simple calculations, she immediately recognized the possibilities that were being demonstrated before her.

Babbage had returned to England from an important conference with other colleagues in the Italian city of Turin. During his visit, an Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea produced a transcription of Babbage’s words during a lecture about his newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine, which was based upon his previous Difference Engine. This transcript then went on to be officially printed for the masses in an academic journal called the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October of 1842. Shortly after this milestone, Charles Wheatstone, a mutual friend of Babbage and Ada, tasked Ada with translating the transcribed lecture into English. Ada took her time with this assignment, diligently working on the translation for nearly an entire year. Along with raw translation, she also added meticulous notes that ended up being much longer and more consequential than the original text. Her notes were so extensive that they resulted in several categories of information labeled from A through G. It was in Note G that we find Ada describing an actual algorithm for the processing of Bernoulli numbers, a special sequence of rational numbers, using the Analytical Engine. With these monumental efforts on the part of Ada Lovelace, the ones and zeroes of the computer age had essentially been born, and her work is widely recognized as the world’s first computer program.

In late December of 1841, for example, she had already solemnly declared, “But if you knew one half the harum-scarum extraordinary things I do, you would certainly incline to the idea that I have a spell of some sort about me. I am positive that no She-Creature of my years could possibly attempt many of my everyday performances, with any impunity.”

Ada was one of the first to understand and describe a computer and software, and she developed an easily understood metaphor for the punch cards needed to program the analytical engine. She described the punch cards of the engine weaving algebraical patterns in much the same way that a cloth loom would weave flowers and leaves as part of the design of various pieces of fabric. Since mechanical looms were all the rage in the textile mills of the 1800s, this was an example that was easily understood by most who heard it.

Yet it was Ada’s vision of what this theoretical Analytical Engine would become in the future that was truly remarkable. To her, it was obvious that the machine would not only be able to calculate numbers—more importantly, those numbers could represent other things than quantity, making the transition from simple calculation to computation. Ada recognized the capabilities and implications of the computing machine over one hundred years before these ideas would come to life.

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the fair white wings of imagination, hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.” —Ada Lovelace

She described to her mother a strange scene of herself as a kind of conductor of droves and droves of numbers. As she put it, she was “marching in irresistible power to the sound of music. Is not this very mysterious?” This was a wild flight of fancy from Ada in the face of a very dreadful and serious condition.

As stoic as Ada initially was in dealing with her illness, in her last few days, the pain of the cancerous growths had become too painful to ignore. Now, even the pain killers that she had been given could not shield her from the onslaught of pain that repeatedly stabbed her in the stomach. She would often scream, writhe, and double over in pain during the worst of these episodes. Things had become so bad, in fact, that her family made her bedroom into what could essentially be termed a padded cell by covering the floors and walls with mattresses lest she was to fall and further hurt herself during the painful spasms that she endured.