Ada Lovelace: coding’s first visionary

I was a young graduate working at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill when I first encountered Ada Lovelace. Dollis Hill sounds rather quaint now, but in the early 1950s it was a hotbed of new technology. The first computers had been developed there during the Second World War for the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and we were exploring new applications for these remarkable machines as well as smarter ways to build and use them. The work we were doing was at the very cutting edge.

Yet here was someone — and a woman at that — who had anticipated what we were about and had helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for it over a century earlier. I was astonished at her grasp, so long ago, of the concepts of computing — concepts whose potential we were still only just starting to explore ourselves. I was smitten, and I have remained smitten ever since.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace

In the course of a long career I have done all I could to honour her memory and promote her name and her achievements. As president of BCS I had a photograph of her framed and hung in our headquarters: in another example of cutting edge technology, it is a famous daguerreotype of her looking rather severe which dates from 1843 at the very dawn of photography. I have also spoken about her publicly, in particular at a conference at Oxford University organised to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth. She is one of my heroes.

In 2009 others had the splendid idea of establishing an Ada Lovelace Day as a way to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women in STEM. It falls on the second Tuesday of October, which in 2025 is the 14th.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a pioneering mathematician best known for her work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. This was a mechanical hand powered calculator using a method called Finite Differences that allowed it to calculate polynomial functions using only additions, avoiding multiplication and division. Due to financial and engineering problems it was never completed. But it led the way to its successor, the Analytical Machine, which strongly influenced future computers.

The life of a visionary

Ada Lovelacewas born in London, the only legitimate child of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ romantic poet Lord Byron — the original Regency hero in boots and tight pants. He left the family almost immediately after her birth.

In 1835, she married William King who was later elevated to the Earldom of Lovelace, making Ada his Countess.

A precocious child (she conceptualised a flying machine when only 12), she developed a deep intellectual curiosity and made lifelong friends with her tutors Mary Somerville and Augustus De Morgan, as well as Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone and Charles Babbage. She had been blown away by the work of the polymath Babbage (1790-1871), and they became penpals and collaborators

Ada was special; mother of three children, confident, daring, ahead of her time, a hit in polite society, but also promiscuous and a compulsive gambler. She had a somewhat toxic relationship with her mother, who educated her with an emphasis on science; that was to avoid her going the profligate way of her father, but Ada retained a fascination with poetry, describing her approach to mathematics as ‘poetic science’. She referred to herself as an ‘analyst and metaphysician’ exploring the intersection of science and human thought.

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Ada’s finest hour came in 1843 when she translated the work of the Italian mathematician Menabrea (1809-1896). She annotated his work on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, adding voluminous notes of her own — notes that contributed significantly to early programming concepts. Her most powerful insight was that Babbage’s Analytical Engine could manipulate symbols rather than just perform arithmetic. It introduced concepts such as conditional branching and loops (fundamental to programming languages). And, if it could deal with graphics, perhaps it could even be programmed to compose music? 
 
Ada also developed the first published algorithm designed to compute Bernoulli numbers — effectively a program — demonstrating that a computer could follow a sequence of instructions. Her work showed that computers could be used for creative and analytic tasks, not merely mathematical computations.  

Ada died young, at 36, of uterine cancer, more painfully than necessary because her mother withheld painkillers in an effort to convert (or revert) Ada to Christianity. She made a deathbed confession to her husband as to her infidelities. Another of her good friends, Charles Dickens, reputedly read his Dombey and Son to her in her final days. At her request she was buried alongside the father she never met. 

The legacy of Ada Lovelace

Born in the wrong era and overshadowed by Babbage, she never became well known, whereas today she would be an iconic celebrity along with Bill Gates and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It has taken over a century for her achievements to be properly celebrated, but today she has become a poster girl for women’s contribution to technology.

I honour Ada’s excellence in mathematics and science, which were in her day (as still often now) thought to be the prerogative of men. I salute her as an icon — a powerful symbol of women working in technology, and the star of the Women’s Gallery in the National Museum of Computing. A bronze sculpture of her can be seen on the façade (illustrating the progress made by science) of 9 Millbank in Westminster.  There is also a blue plaque located at 12 St James’ Square commemorating the nine years she lived there. And BCS has its Ada Lovelace Medal, which recognises people who have made exceptional contributions to either the understanding of computing or to computing education. In 1980, the US Department of Defense developed an early programming language designed for reliability and efficiency which they called Ada in her honour.

Her work on Babbage’s engines means that Ada, Countess of Lovelace, will always be revered as coding’s first visionary.