Ada Lovelace (for schools)
571
So Who Is She?
Ada Lovelace created the world’s first computer program for Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’, a machine that was unfortunately never built.
Ada’s writings remained however providing the first descriptions of the computers of the future and many of their potential uses.
Ada Lovelace’s legacy was such an unusual achievement for her time that she is only recently receiving the recognition she deserves.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, now known simply as Ada Lovelace, was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella Millbanke. Lord Byron was the world’s foremost romantic poet and the first ‘modern celebrity’ with rockstar like public appeal. His scandals, exile and subsequent death cast a long shadow of young Ada’s life.
from Sydney padua's comic strip "Lovelace & Babbage"
Ada’s mother, an otherwise unusually well educated noblewoman was at great pains to counteract the ‘madness of creativity’ by instructing Ada in logic, maths and science.
A young lady of the 19th century was expected to learn fashionable accomplishments, music, singing, dancing, drawing, painting, speaking French and needlework. Upper class girls would generally expect to marry or live with family all their lives. Most were educated at home or at boarding school.
Women could not vote or go to university and when married could not own property. Teaching or being a governess was the only respectable job for a poor upper class girl, however women teachers were paid a great deal less than men.
Working class girls were increasingly able to go to school for a few years with their brothers but would start working as young as ten or twelve as domestic servants, seamstresses, laundresses or factory workers – if they were lucky!
By the time Charles Babbage met Ada Lovelace, the project was stalled and only a small working section existed. Undaunted Babbage continued to refine his ideas and planned a new machine, The Analytical Engine, which went far beyond the Difference Engine in scope. This machine would be able to store results and perform actions upon its own calculations. This was the first computer and it was never actually built.
The government could see the benefit in industrial calculators. Babbage could see the benefit in a mathematical machine, but it was Ada Lovelace who created the first programs and predicted many of the future uses of a computing machine.
so what went wrong?
If things had been just slightly different, we may have had the computer revolution a full century earlier. Babbage was not very diplomatic and refused to finish the Difference Engine that the government had funded because his new idea was so much better. Needless to say he couldn’t get another grant and he had exhausted all of his own funds on his inventions.
Ada was becoming a little bit unstable too, although it probably wasn’t her ‘bad blood’ finally coming out but the increasing amounts of laudanum, opium and brandy that she was prescribed by her doctors to counteract the increasing pain from the cancer she suffered.
Babbage and Ada used their combined mathematical genius to come up with formulas for beating the odds on horse races. Unfortunately, they failed to win and narrowly escaped being completely ruined, bankrupt and exiled from society, just like Ada’s father, Lord Byron.
i prefer sydney padua's version
but back in the real world
or read more from
the fabulous Sydney Padua
who wrote the comic
"Lovelace & Babbage"
over at 2Dgoggles.com
prezi by Andra Keay
Jacquard Loom for weaving
invented in 1801
write your own book? NO
Some of the correspondence between Ada and Babbage suggests that she may also have inspired Babbage’s plans to use punch cards to program the Analytical Engine.
The Jacquard looms of the early Industrial Revolution used punch cards, cards with a series of holes punched in them, to trigger the raising and lowering of the hooks holding threads on the loom.
This enabled complex designs to be woven more quickly by machine looms than could be done by people. Right up to the 1970s, computers used punch cards to store and run their programs.
The Difference Engine
Ada corresponded with Babbage on both his difference engine and his analytical engine. In 1842, she translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on the analytical engine. Babbage suggested she add her own notes and by the time she finished her notes were 3 times longer than the original memoir.
Her ‘notes’ included an algorithm (a design or plan) for using the analytical engine to produce Bernoulli numbers (relating to the sums and cubes of positive integers!). What she had done was write the world’s first computer program. Although the computer was never built, Ada's program has been tested and worked.
Ada Lovelace
"Enchantress
of Numbers"
References
write someone else's? OK
By this time, Charles Babbage had only a single working section of the first mechanical calculator, “The Difference Engine” which nonetheless astounded people with the size and accuracy of its calculations.
The 19th Century was a triumphant period for engineering, travel and trade. Steam engines slowly replaced animals as a source of motive power. Iron ships began to compete with sail, railway networks rapidly expanded, and the electric telegraph began to revolutionize communications.
punch cards
findingada.com
suw.org.uk
sydneypadua.com
2Dgoggles.com
Bernoulli's Manuscript
revolutionised textile production
(still used in places)
www.computerhistory.org
www.sciencemuseum.org.uk
www.fourmilab.ch/babbage
www.steamcircus.info
plus.maths.org
wikipedia.org
Ada continued to lead a ‘respectable’ upper class life, marrying William King, the Earl of Lovelace, attending the Royal Court, dancing, gambling (which was quite respectable as long as you could pay your debts) and having children. Her health had never been good and she would be ill for months at a time.
prezi by
Andra Keay
portrait of Ada Lovelace
made of wood and brass
also
ei.cs.vt.edu
www.csc.liv.ac.uk
www.gap-system.org
www.hwwilson.com
www.engadget.com
www.absoluteastronomy.com
www.meccano.us
pan2fla.blogspot.com
powered by steam
a meccano replica of a section of the analytical engine
calculated by hand
letters from Ada Lovelace to Babbage
Ada and Babbage continually exchanged a mathematical book of notes but it has never been found. Babbage wondered why she did not write her own book about the Analytical Engine as ‘she understands it better than I do!’ But women of the time did not publish scientific papers.
Ada settled for adding notes to her translation, but within them, she described many of the future functions of computers and their applications, like designing graphics and music creation. She also foreshadowed the importance of the role of software developer.
Even Babbage thought Ada’s speculations were too extreme, but time has proven her correct. Both Babbage’s design and Ada Lovelace’s programs worked.
Everyone relied on printed numerical tables for their calculations. These tables were written and checked by hand by people who were called ‘computers’ and people are notoriously fallible. Errors in the tables could spell disaster. Ships at sea used tables for navigation, engineers and architects used tables to build everything!
Babbage and his friend Herschel, the astronomer, famously remarked in 1821 “If only these tables were writ with steam!” on finding so many errors in the latest book.
Contrast that with Ada Lovelace’s education in the early 1800s! From a very young age, Ada was taught mathematics and music by the best tutors available. By her teens, Ada had outreached them and the famous mathematician, Augustus De Morgan, was persuaded to teach her. De Morgan is another major figure in computer science. He created a set of laws for the series of 1s and 0s that computers use.
the first industrial revolution
built by tim robinson 2006
The London Science Museum
has a working Difference Engine
and nathan Myrhvold
has one on exhibit in usa
at the Computer history museum
(and andrew carol built one out of lego!)
At the age of 18, Ada was introduced to Charles Babbage, in the salons of Mary Somerville, renowned upper class researcher and science writer, whose friends included Michael Faraday, one of the pioneers of electricity. This meeting was the start of a long friendship, frequently conducted in writing, as was common at the time.
Even the most advanced computer today breaks everything down to 1s and 0s, which is called binary notation. De Morgan wrote that Ada would become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” He was right, however it’s taken the rest of the world 150 years to understand the importance of an unfinished machine and the notes Ada Lovelace wrote describing its operation.
The Industrial Revolution was the age of steam and gas. The use of electricity was still in the early experimental stages. Machinery was made of brass cogs and moving pistons turned by cranks or steam. From vast ship and railway engines to miniature clockworks and watches, the range of engineering was astonishing.
extra reading
From the middle of the 19th century, girls’ education began to be taken more seriously. More schools were opened that aimed to give girls a good academic education like boys. Girls also began to go to college, in America girls began to enroll from about 1870, and by 1880 they made up a third of the student population. By 1890, colleges for girls had become so popular that the Ladies Home Journal ran a subscription-selling contest, the prize was a scholarship to Vasser.
Opportunities for employment also began to expand for women from the middle of the 19th century. Nursing became a respectable occupation for women due to the reforms of Florence Nightingale. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from a US medical school in 1850, and during the later part of the century the number of women doctors gradually increased.
More women began to be employed in government jobs, by 1900 about a third of government jobs in America were done by women. The invention of the typewriter led to more women being employed in offices, since it was found that women made better typists than men. By 1900, three quarters of the typists and stenographers in the USA were women. The telephone industry employed girls as switchboard operators, since they were found to be more civil to the callers than men were. Women made inroads into library work, they were described by the library association as 'the best of listeners'.
The new department stores employed a great many women as sales clerks, 142,000 had been hired by the end of the century. It was hard work and long hours for very poor pay but ask your great grandmother what the most prestigious and desired job was in her day! My grandmother was very proud of being a millinery shop assistant in her day, selling fashionable hats and accessories.
portrait of Charles Babbage
1 computer = $$$$$$
mills, mines & transportation
all powered by steam
or build
your own
from science museums madrid & UK
click ahead
The increased productivity resulting from the use of powered production machinery was just as significant as the steam engines that drove it. Edward Baines noted that:
'A very good hand weaver, 25 or 30 years of age, will weave two pieces of... shirting per week, each 24 yards long... In 1833, a steam-loom weaver, from 15 to 20 years of age, assisted by a girl about 12 years of age, attending to four looms, can weave eighteen similar pieces a week.'
working model
of Babbage's
difference engine
out of lego
CODING
find out about
the women of bletchley park
more production meant less work
(unless you were a young factory worker)
The British Government funded Babbage’s project to build a steam powered calculating machine complete with printer, “The Difference Engine”. The project went for 17 years and the first engine would have weighed 15 tons with 25,000 working parts. It cost British tax payers the equivalent of 27 brand new railway engines.
or 27 railway engines
in which
just like the students at
Newtown Public School
Australia who made badges
for Ada Lovelace Day 2010!
Jean Bartik was one of the
first ENIAC programmers and instrumental in the conversion to stored programs.
who operated the colossus
in World War 2
DECODING
Grace Hopper is known as the originator of the first truly high level programming language, namely COBOL.
to celebrate women in technology
DO SOMETHING!
Blog about
a woman in
technology
who inspires
March 24
“As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science.”
—Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Charles Babbage
Ada’s health deteriorated and she died in 1852, aged 36 ‘from cancer and bloodletting’.
Babbage lived until 1871, continually saying that if only his engine were built, the world would understand how important it was.
PARTY like GEEKS
findingada
website by
TechnoPhobia
was started in 2009
by British broadcaster and activist
Suw Charman-Anderson