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In 1843, a woman published a long set of notes about a machine that did not exist yet, and in them she wrote what many historians consider the first computer program. Her name was Ada Lovelace, and she was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Yet her world was not one of poetry: it was one of numbers.
Ada had been encouraged to study mathematics from an early age. Her mother, who feared that she might inherit her father's wild temperament, made sure that she received an unusually rigorous scientific education for a girl of her time. As a young woman, she met Charles Babbage, an inventor who was designing a machine called the Analytical Engine, a mechanical calculator of unprecedented ambition. It was never completed, but its plans anticipated many ideas of modern computers.
In 1842, an Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea published an article in French describing Babbage's machine. Ada was asked to translate it into English. She did much more than that. Over nine months, she added her own notes, which grew so long that they were about three times the length of the original article. They were published in 1843 under her initials, A.A.L.
The most famous of these is Note G. In it, Ada described, step by step, how the machine could calculate a sequence of numbers known as the Bernoulli numbers. The instructions were laid out in a table that resembled a program, and she even noticed a mistake in the calculation that Babbage had prepared. Historians consider it the first published computer algorithm.
But the real power of her notes lay in an idea. Most people in her time thought of machines as tools for calculation. Ada suggested that the engine might work with more than numbers, and that it could follow rules to manipulate anything that could be expressed in symbols. It was a vision of what computers would become more than a century later.
The Analytical Engine was never built in her lifetime, and her notes remained largely unnoticed for decades. Today, however, she is remembered as one of the first people to imagine what a computer could do. Every time a program runs on a screen, there is a small echo of a woman who wrote instructions for a machine that nobody had yet built.
