I feel the need to write a short little post about one of my favorite historical nerds, the intriguing Lady Lovelace, in case this site has any visitors who do not know about her.

Ada Lovelace 1838

Ada Lovelace

I have a bit of an infatuation with Victorian era technology and science, and Charles Babbage’s analytical engine is high on the list of my favorite things from that time. Even though it was never actually built, Babbage designed a very impressive mechanical general purpose computer a century before any other general purpose computer was conceived.

Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and poet, wrote the very first program for that theoretical machine and is therefore widely recognized as the world’s first computer programmer. That alone makes her a very special favorite of mine.

She was even more impressive though. She became enamored with the analytical engine in a time where very few understood Babbage’s design or the potential of it. She also predicted that such a machine could be used for other things than mathematical calculations, such as producing music and graphic. We now know that she was very much right in that, but at that time not even Babbage himself seemed to be able to foresee such applications.

Charles Babbage called her “The Enchantress of Numbers” and I feel that is a marvelous title that she justly deserves. Unfortunately she died just 36 years old, but the memory of this enchantress lives on. And hopefully she continues to inspire women into careers and interests that are different than what is expected of them.

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