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Ada, Countess Lovelace: Algorithm for Charles Babbage: The Analytical Engine 1843.
A daughter of the poet Lord Byron, born the same year (1815) as the influential photographic pioneer, Julia Margaret Cameron, and tutored by educational pioneer Mary Somerville and mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan, Ada was to establish an early reputation as an innovative mathematician. She met the computer pioneer Charles Babbage in 1833 and followed his work on the Difference Engine (a mechanical calculator, 1833), and on the ambitious Analytical Engine (a programmable analogue computer, designed from 1837, unfinished), gaining a deep understanding of the engineering of the Engine, and the relationship between its mechanical operations, initial settings and potential of the instructions that the Engine could ‘read’ from punch-card inputs. She has been called the first programmer, but what is absolutely certain is that she took mathematical formulae suggested by Babbage (who had written shorthand sketch algorithms c1837) and from these, prepared a tabular algorithm (centre, above) for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. This is the first computer program, though as Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never completed it was never run through the machine.
What is intriguing about Ada Lovelace is her poetical appreciation of the possibilities she glimpsed for the Analytical Engine: “[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” The contemporary writer Walter Isaacson describes: ““When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage’s engine used punched cards to make calculations.”
Babbage had borrowed the idea of punch-cards from Joseph Marie Jacquard, whose textile loom of 1801 used large cards punched with holes to control the mechanised weaving of complex patterns. Furthermore these cards could be strung together to create different patterns or parts of patterns on every row in the fabric. Developing the Analytical Engine, Babbage and Lovelace realised the idea of a ‘stored’ program .