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

by Hourly History

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.