Ada Lovelace – an enchantress of science

By Asha Gage, IET Archivist

Augusta Ada Byron was born 10 December 1815 in London, the daughter of Baron and Lady Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron and Anne Isabella Noel, née Milbanke). Following the separation of her parents as a small child, Ada was raised by her mother and educated by tutors with a strong focus on mathematics and the sciences, as her mother hoped to deter her from following in the footsteps of her poetic father.

Ada was fascinated by mechanical toys and scientific pursuits. At 17 she met the polymath Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Babbage showed Ada his first calculating engine, the Difference Engine, which aimed to automate the production of numerical tables, thereby reducing human error. The engine captured Ada’s imagination and she attended lectures regarding it, examined its plans, studied, and became part of the same social circle as Babbage. In 1835 she married William King, who was created Earl of Lovelace in 1838.

In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine, a general-purpose programmable computing engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, transcribed Babbage’s lecture into French. Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Lovelace to translate Menabrea’s paper into English. She supplemented the paper with seven explanatory notes, which described a method of using the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers.

Ada saw the graphical potential of the analytical engine and that by using a punched card system, scientific information could be seen in a new light. She was also a visionary; she had the ability to see that computers were capable of more than just calculating numbers. She drew attention in her notes to the possibility of encoding information in addition to arithmetical figures, such as music, and how to manipulate it with a machine such as the Analytical Engine.

Her translation and notes were published in September 1843.

Ada died from cancer in 1852 at the age of 37.

Ada Lovelace and The IET Archives

The IET Archives holds a collection of letters that were written from Ada Lovelace to Michael Faraday in 1844, when they began corresponding after being introduced to each other by Babbage. In these, Lovelace professes her extreme admiration of Faraday and his work, informing him of her own scientific ambitions and her plans to review his papers. In one letter she likens their friendship to that between a tortoise (Faraday) and a fairy (herself).

Charles Babbage, in praise and recognition of Lovelace’s work, wrote to Michael Faraday, referring to Lovelace as ‘that Enchantress who has thrown her magic spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it.’

As part of the IET’s commitment to inspire future engineers and encourage more women and girls into STEM subjects Ada Lovelace is celebrated with a room named in her honour in Savoy Place, London.

Ada’s Legacy

Ada died tragically young but her influence on the sciences is celebrated today. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of celebration aiming to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by encouraging people around the world to talk about the women whose work they admire.

Other resources

IET Archives Biographies: Ada Countess of Lovelace

The Story of Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer

Michael Faraday’s correspondence edited by Frank James

Ada Lovelace Day