Information Pioneers Ada Lovelace

Published: July 2, 2010, 7 a.m.

London, 1833. Ada Lovelace, the 19-year-old daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Millbank is introduced to an eccentric genius, Charles Babbage. Babbage shows her a prototype of a calculating machine he has invented called a Difference Engine. The two minds connect immediately, and Ada continues to work with Babbage until in 1844 he shows her his plans for another machine, the Analytical Engine. This machine uses hole-punched cards as programmes which tell it how to calculate the problems presented to it. In this moment, Ada sees a future that would not come into being for another 100 years. She saw that if the Analytical Engine could be programmed to calculate, it could pretty much be programmed to do anything. And thus, she gave us the blueprints for computer programming as we know it.