Ada Byron- World's first computer programmer

Albert Einstein coined the phrase “combinatory play”, denote his thinking process. It is kind of thought process where seemingly unconnected things are connected and something new is created by cross-pollinating those with questions and insights. This is the process of combining and recombining ideas, images and various thoughts into millions of different combinations. It is a magnificent tool for creative thinking.

Ada Byron

The invention of printing press is splendid example of the application of combinatory play. Johannes Gutenberg did it by fusing elements winemaking, metallurgy, and labor economics. All these are seemingly unconnected.

Here is a woman who brilliant use of combinatory plays and earned the envious title of “The World’s First Computer Programmer.” Countess August Ada King Lovelace Byron is her name. She is popularly known as Ada Byron or simply Ada. This indomitable genius had a rare gift. She inherited good things from her romantic father and “mathematical” mother, though a broken home product.

Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815 in London. Eleven months prior to her birth, her mother Annabella Milbanke married Lord Byron, a worldwide celebrity, well known romantic poet and a man of playboy type personality. Annabella was lady from a respected wealthy family with considerable taste and exceptional inclination towards mathematics Soon they realized that they were as different as chalk and cheese. Just five weeks after Ada’s birth Annabella served notice for separation and marriage broke. Byron, who called Annabella, “Princess of Parallelograms”, is affectionate reverence, left England for good. He died in Greece at the age of 36. Ada was eight years old. The poor girl never met her father after her parents parted ways.

Annabella made concerted efforts to erase any influence of her father (especially poetic inclination) from Ada. She constantly tried to nurture an interest in the child in mathematics and the sciences. She carefully tutored her in that direction. The mother with a missionary zeal for delinking her daughter from the arts, immersed her in science and mathematics from age four. At 12, Ada was fascinated by Mechanical Engineering and wrote a book titled “Flyology” wherein she illustrated her vision of constructing a flying apparatus. The term aeroplane was not coined at that time. This child prodigy developed both the talents from her parents. She grew into a “poet mathematician”. This combination of talents kindled her imagination as well as affinity to numbers. She called her love of this combination “Poetical Science”. Annabella started introducing Ada to the well known scientists and mathematician of her era. She also took the girl to industrial houses and manufacturing units. It was the time of Industrial Revolution. The advances made in steam engine, mechanical loom, telegraph, transportation etc. provided enough for advancing scientific knowledge.

During one such visit, Ada was fascinated by a mechanical loom. She became curious on how did the loom know which pattern to weave? That was the amazing part. The design was created with a pattern of holes punched into heavy paper cards. Chains of cards fed into the loom, giving it set of instructions. To change the design, you only had to change the cards. Ada was amazed. It was brilliant idea. Her fertile mind whispered to her “This is not just for weaving cloth alone”. Indeed, this thought was the seed of the world’s first computer programme.

When she was seventeen years old, Ada attended legendary Charles Babbage’s equally legendary salons. There, while performing dancing, reading and intellectual games, Babbage showed a dramatic demonstration of his Difference Engine, a beast of calculating machine he was building. Ada was instantly captivated by its poetical possibilities, far beyond what machine’s own inventor had envisioned. Young Miss Byron, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of invention.

Difference Machine

Issacson, her biographer say’s “Ada’s love of both poetry and math primed her to see beauty in a computing machine. She was of the era of romantic science, which was characterized by a lyrical enthusiasm for invention and discovery.” Enchanted by the prospect of the “poetical science”, Ada convinced Charles Babbage to be her mentor.

Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people. She realized that math was a beautiful language that depicts the harmonies of the entire universe and can be poetic at times. She always remained her father’s daughter, with a poetic sensibility that enables her to view an equation as a brushstroke that painted an aspect of nature’s physical splendor. This ability to apply imagination to science characterized the Industrial Revolution, for which Ada was to become a patron saint. She told Babbage, to grasp the connection between poetry and analysis of machine in such ways that transcended her father’s talents. She wrote:

“I do not believe that may father was (or ever could have been) such a poet as I shall be and Analyst; for with me the two go together indissolubly”

But Ada’s most important contribution came from her role as both a vocal champion of Babbage’s idea at a time when society brushed it aside as ludicrous, and as an amplifier of Babbage’s imagination. Isaacson writes: “Ada fully appreciated the concept of general-purpose machine. She visualized that it could potentially process not only numbers but any symbolic notations, including musical and artistic ones.”

On July 8, 1835, she married William Kin, 8th Baron King, and, when he was created and earl in 1838, she became countess of Lovelace. Fortunately, her husband was not averse to Ada’s academic and intellectual pursuits. He only supported her.

Analytical Engine

In 1843 on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, She outlined four essential concepts that would shape the birth of modern computing a century later. First, she envisioned a general-purpose machine capable not only of performing pre-programmed tasks but also of being reprogrammed to execute a practically unlimited range of operations- in other words, as Isaacson observers, she envisioned the modern computer.
 

Her second concept would become a cornerstone of the digital age- the idea that such a machine could handle far more than mathematical calculation; that it could be capable of processing musical and artistic notation. Ada realized that the digits on the cogs could represent things other than mathematical quantities. Thus she made a giant conceptual leap from machines that were mere calculators to ones that we now call computers”.

Her third innovation was a step-by-step outline of “the working of what we now call a computer program or algorithm.” But it was her fourth one, that was and still remains most momentous- the question of whether machines can think independently. Ada wrote:

“ The analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths”.

century later, Alan Touring developed it further and made significant contribution in this area.

Ada died of uterine cancer in 1852, when she was thirty-six- The same age as Lord Byron. She had requested that she be buried in that country grave, alongside her father whom she never knew but whose poetical sensibility profoundly shaped her own genius or “poetical science”.

Ada remains one of the few female pioneers of the “computer age” and, as yet, the only women to be honored with a programming language bearing her name- ADA, A Pascal-based programming language developed in a US Department of Defense sponsored project in the 1970’s. Still the US defense establishment use Ada language for some of their computer operations.