Lovelace, Ada King

Date of Birth/death: Dec. 10, 1815- Nov. 27, 1852

Profession: Children of prominent persons; Mathematicians; Children; Relatives of prominent persons; Scientists

When Charles Babbage introduced his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine in the mid-19th century, not many people cared. Augusta Ada King, also known as Lady Lovelace, was one of the few people able to perceive the potential of Babbage's inventions to spawn a technological revolution. The only legitimate child of the British Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lady Lovelace became Babbage's adviser, collaborator, and confidante, supporting his work financially, intellectually, and emotionally. Her notes on Babbage's Difference Engine and his proposed (but never completed) Analytical Engine are the clearest glimpses we have into the concepts behind these machines, which were important precursors to modern computers. Although her work in programming is a matter of some dispute, she is known to have collaborated with Babbage on early programs for the Difference Engine, placing her among the first--if not the first--computer programmers. Her life was plagued by drug and gambling addictions and was cut short by cancer at the age of 36. Had she lived, she may have helped Babbage to initiate the computer age a full century early.

Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815 in the English town of Piccadilly, in the county of Middlesex (now part of London). Her mother was Anna Isabella Millbanke, and her father was George Gordon Noel Byron, better known by his aristocratic title, Lord Byron. Her parents, who had been married a year at the time of her birth, were ill-matched. Byron was a well-known poet, a major figure of the Romantic Movement in English literature. He was a highly passionate and somewhat eccentric man. In contrast, Anna Millbanke was conservative and puritanical. When it was revealed that Byron had been having an affair with his married half-sister, Augusta Leigh, Millbanke left Byron and took their five-week-old daughter with her. Young Augusta's name was changed to Ada in order to avoid association with her aunt, for whom she had been named. Lord Byron fled the scandal. He never saw his daughter again, but several of his letters show his affection for her and his deep regret at missing her childhood. She is mentioned fondly in several of his poems, including "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." At the time of his death, in 1824 at the age of 36, Ada was only eight years old.

Anna Millbanke felt disgraced by her husband's scandalous affair and sought to detach young Ada from any connection to her father. Concerned that the outspoken child would turn out as nonconformist as Lord Byron himself, she attempted to curb her. Ada was administered a daily dose of a laudanum-laced tincture, which produced a "calming" effect. It also produced an addiction, which would be joined by other addictions later in her life.

Ada's mother was an accomplished mathematician (whimsically known in some circles as "the Princess of Parallelograms"), and she encouraged Ada when she began to display an aptitude for math as a child. She was educated at home by governesses and tutors specially selected by her mother. (Once Ada tried to elope with one of them.) At 15 she was introduced by her mother to the renowned Scottish mathematician Mary Fairfax Somerville. The two attended geography lectures together at the University of London in 1830. Afterwards, they kept up a correspondence regarding matters of mathematics.
As an adolescent Ada lost her ability to walk for approximately three years due to a vague illness, which some believe to have been psychosomatic in nature. During those years she excelled in her studies, learning all she could of mathematics as well as becoming an adept linguist and musician. In addition to her personal mathematical study, she was aided by the prominent mathematician Augustus de Morgan, who was also a mentor to the brilliant logician George Boole.

Ada was a member of the Bluestockings, a loosely knit group of women who engaged in intellectual pursuits in private settings. They would often invite men of learning to their meetings or visit museums and the homes of prominent scientists. It was at one of these gatherings--at a dinner party in the home of Mary Somerville, in June 1833--that Ada first met the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, who invited her and her mother to his studio for a demonstration of his calculating machine, a prototype of the Difference Engine.

Two weeks later Ada, her mother, and several other women, including Mary Somerville, went to see Babbage's invention. The large wood-and-brass machine could calculate all forms of arithmetic operations. It had toothed gears and wheels and was run by a series of manually operated cranks. Babbage also spoke of another, more advanced machine that he was planning called the Analytical Engine, which would receive input in the form of punched cards, store this information in a kind of "memory" section, and output results through a printing-press attachment.

Fascinated by the Difference Engine prototype, and even more so by Babbage's plans for the Analytical Engine, Ada was the only one in the group to fully grasp the ramifications of what he had created. "While the rest of the party [merely] gazed at this beautiful instrument," the wife of Augustus de Morgan, also present, wrote, as quoted by Howard Rheingold in Tools for Thought (1985), "Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its workings and saw the great beauty of the invention." Babbage was impressed with her understanding of his work, and a friendship between the two began that would continue for the rest of Ada's life.

In 1835 Ada Byron met Lord William King through Mary Somerville. Later that year, at the age of 19, she married him. They moved to the country and eventually had a daughter and two sons. The first child, Byron Noel, was born in 1836, and the second, Anne Isabella, in 1837. The following year, King gained the title of earl of Lovelace, making Ada the countess of Lovelace, or Lady Lovelace, as she was more commonly known. She bore her final child, Ralph Gordon, in 1839. Her marriage to King was basically a happy one; King supported his wife in all her intellectual endeavors.

Lovelace and Babbage began corresponding by mail in 1836. Lovelace supported and defended Babbage's often maligned work throughout their association, and once wrote to him, "I am working very hard for you, like the Devil in fact (which perhaps I am.)," as quoted by Betty Toole in Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers (1992). Much of the mathematical work she was doing at this time was recorded in a notebook which frequently passed back and forth between her and Babbage. (The book is now lost.)
In 1840 Babbage delivered a lecture on his computing engines at the University of Turin, in Italy. The Italian mathematician (and future prime minister of Italy) Luigi Menabrea wrote a paper in 1842 detailing the Difference and Analytical Engines as they had been presented by Babbage at the lecture. Lovelace decided in 1843 to translate the paper from French to English. When Babbage read the translation, he suggested that she add some notes of her own. The result was that Lovelace's notes were three times longer than Menabrea's paper, and far more significant. It is this work for which she is most known. These notes were the first complete description of Charles Babbage's invention.

Describing the functions and purpose of the Difference Engine, the notes explain Babbage's work more thoroughly than even Babbage himself had done. Lovelace outlined the basic concepts of computer programming and described the essential elements required for any programming language, including the coding of various symbols into numerical data. She stressed that the Analytical Engine would be capable of being programmed and explained how it would solve problems considered impossible at the time. Referring to the punched cards that derived from the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard's automatic loom, Lovelace remarked in her notes, "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," as quoted on the Lady Lovelace Web site offered through Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her notes included descriptions of how computers would be able to analyze and organize data, and she predicted the general-purpose computer of the next century. She even mentioned the possibility of using computers to produce graphics and music. While she described the engine's capacity to store information, she also refuted the possibility of artificial intelligence, emphasizing that a computer cannot reason for itself and can only do that which it has been instructed to do.

Although their relationship was decidedly amicable, some friction developed between Lovelace and Babbage during the final revisions of her notes. The Countess began to lose patience with the eccentric inventor, particularly because of his carelessness and impracticality. She felt that his general abrasiveness of personality prevented Babbage from being fully trusted and supported by potential backers. Babbage closely oversaw most of Lady Lovelace's work on the notes, which led to further conflicts of interest. "I am much annoyed at your having altered my Note," she wrote to him on one occasion, as quoted on the Ada Home Web site. "You know I am always willing to make any required alterations myself, but that I cannot endure another person to meddle with my sentences." Once the paper was published (under the title "Observations on Mr. Babbage's Analytical Engine"), their friendship resumed its playful, even flirtatious tone, with Babbage in his letters often referring to his young associate as "the Enchantress of Numbers." Because of the social constraints against women publishing, Lovelace signed her manuscript with only her initials, A. A. L.

Lovelace's contribution to programming is a matter of some dispute. Some sources cite her as the first programmer, because of her suggestions to Babbage and her proposed mathematical instructions for the theoretical Analytical Engine. Other sources claim that she was more of an assistant to Babbage, reworking programs that Babbage had already written. In either case, she was a crucial part of the development process in this extremely early stage of computer programming. Some of the programming methods she helped develop include subroutines, loops, and jumps, all of which would be rediscovered by pioneering 20th-century programmers, such as Stanley Gill. It is also believed that Lovelace prophetically favored the use of the binary system for digital computing instead of the decimal system. Lovelace's awareness of the fantastic possibilities inherent in computer technology is demonstrated in a letter to Babbage in which she famously mused, "No one knows what power lies yet undeveloped in that wiry system of mine."
Throughout their relationship, the Countess of Lovelace helped stabilize the tempestuous Babbage. She encouraged him to continue his work despite his periodical lack of motivation. She coaxed him to develop ideas for his Analytical Engine by discussing the subject with him in depth. "[She] seems to understand it better than I do, and is far, far better at explaining it," he once commented, as quoted by Rheingold. Lovelace also funded Babbage's project to a certain degree, particularly after the British government ceased to do so.

By the age of 29, after giving birth to three children and working diligently on her programming theories for several years, Lady Lovelace began to decline physically and mentally. She began to suffer from respiratory and digestive ailments, for which doctors of the time often prescribed hazardous combinations of brandy, wine, beer, opium, and morphine. Soon she became addicted to these substances, in addition to the laudanum she had been taking since childhood, and she began experiencing delusional visions. She thought that her mind was directly in touch with the mind of God, and she developed personality disorders which led her to believe that she could understand the universe and was God's prophet. In a letter from this period, she wrote, as quoted on the Pioneers Web site (www.kerryr.net/pioneers), "That brain of mine is something more than mortal, as time will show."

Eventually, Lovelace was able to overcome her addictions through sheer willpower, but another all-consuming compulsion soon overtook her. Lovelace had always had an affinity for gambling, but following her recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, it developed into an obsession. She often sent her servants, or even Babbage, to place her bets, because it was unacceptable for a woman to do so. Together with Babbage, who was deeply in debt and desperate for funding, she attempted to use the Difference Engine to calculate formulas for betting on horses. Rheingold referred to their scheme as "a curious mixture of vice, high intellectual adventure, and bizarre entrepreneurship." The result was disaster. While Babbage narrowly escaped bankruptcy, Ada had to pawn her husband's family jewels to pay off her debts. It is not clear how much her husband knew of her betting scheme, but he and Babbage worked frantically to fend off her creditors and salvage what they could of her reputation. Squabbling led to estrangement between Ada and her mother and strained the previously tranquil Lovelace marriage.

It is believed that in her final years, free from the influence of her mother, Lady Lovelace was able to embrace the memory of the father she had never known and come to terms with her identity as his daughter. On November 27, 1852 she died of uterine cancer. She was 36, the same age that her father had been when he died. Although she had never known her father, she requested to be buried next to him in the Byron family crypt, in Nottinghamshire. She had intended to leave an inheritance to Babbage to aid him in completing his engines, but her mother prevented this wish from being carried out.
The work of Lady Lovelace remained in obscurity until the middle of the 20th century, when the field of computer science began to take shape. Today, there is a computer language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense called ADA, in her honor. Without Ada's support and assistance, Babbage was never able to complete the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine, and her concepts were not put into practice for almost 100 years. —B. S.

Suggested Reading: Babbage Pages Web site; Biographies of Women Mathematicians Web site; Rheingold, Howard. Tools for Thought, 1985; Toole, Betty. Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, 1992

Biography from Current Biography Electronic; Leaders of the Information Age (2003) Updated 2003 Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.