I visited Greenfield Village last weekend – an outdoor historical museum in the Detroit area—and was amazed by the intricate Jacquard Loom, invented around 1800. It’s a weaving loom with a continuous loop of 622 punch cards that directed the intricate pattern to be woven into the cloth; the cards could be rearranged to create various designs. This invention spurred Charles Baggage to think about automating math computations, all done by hand at the time. He created the Analytical Engine in 1837—the first mechanical computer – and Ada Lovelace created an algorithm for it to compute numbers, making her the first computer programmer.
She was the only legitimate daughter of poet Lord Byron, though she never knew him.
She was passionate about math and a wiz at it, and she was educated in the study from a young age – quite uncommon at the time. As a teenager, she designed a flying machine and steam engine.
At less than 20 years of age, she translated a Babbage lecture, adding her own ideas that were three times longer than the original material, including the algorithm. Unlike Babbage who only saw computers useful for numeric calculations, Lovelace foresaw and detailed the computer’s use with all kind of content and for multiple uses.
One can’t help but wonder if the computer age would’ve started a hundred years earlier if she had lived longer.
*Biography In Context; Science In Context; General One File; Top 101 Women of STEM; The Britannica Guide to the 100 Most Influential Scientists.