Ada Lovelace is the first person to write a computer program. She wrote it in the 1840s, 130 years before the first personal computer was ever put on sale.
Ada was born in 1815 to poet Lord Byron and mathematician Lady Byron. The infamous poet abandoned her and her mother only one month after birth. Afraid her daughter would inherit her father’s volatility, Ada’s mother raised her with a near-obsessive focus on mathematics and science. Ada’s upbringing, though unusual, meant that by the time she was a young woman, she was already considered a mathematical genius.
Then Ada needed a mentor but found many were skeptical of women in mathematics. But she persisted and eventually began working with world-renowned mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. The two would focus their work on Babbage’s conceived analytical engine — an early kind of calculator. When it came time for the two to publish their work, Ada opted to write the paper support notes — a task made more difficult since the best library in the area didn’t allow women. But she didn’t let that stop her, and when she completed the notes, they would come as a surprise — not only was it three times longer than the paper itself, but buried within them, Ada did what cabbage couldn’t — she took his analytical engine and figured out how to make it work. Babbage may have designed the machine, but Ada wrote its language. And today, that language is regarded as the first computer language in the world. But somehow more incredible still, while everyone was convinced the machine could only be a calculator, Ada saw something more — she saw what it could do. She predicted a machine like this could create graphics, aid in scientific research, and even compose music. And she made all these predictions nearly 200 years ago. Ada’s life is a testament to the fact that not only can women be the catalyst to science and technology, but that they always have been.
