Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And you probably
Speaker 1: know by this point how much Sarah and I love
Speaker 1: talking about interesting women in history, and our subject today
Speaker 1: is one of those. A bunch of people had suggested
Speaker 1: her when we were talking about doing a podcast on innovators,
Speaker 1: and that's because she was the world's very first computer programmer,
Speaker 1: Ada Lovely. That sounds like it might be a little dull,
Speaker 1: but we promised she's a really interesting character and maybe
Speaker 1: her nickname of sorts will help convince you of that,
Speaker 1: and that is the Enchantress of Numbers. So let's get
Speaker 1: a little bit into who she is. She started off
Speaker 1: with rather auspicious beginnings if you're thinking just in terms
Speaker 1: of fame. She's the daughter of Annabella Millbank Byron and
Speaker 1: Lord Byron, the world famous poet. Her parents, if you
Speaker 1: know anything about it, if you've listened to our podcast,
Speaker 1: and Byron they have a very unfortunate marriage, and they
Speaker 1: actually split up only a few months after her birth,
Speaker 1: and it was an awful, scandalous separation. She made all
Speaker 1: sorts of accusations after he left, and he put himself
Speaker 1: self imposed exile for the rest of his life. He
Speaker 1: never met his daughter, so it was just Aida and
Speaker 1: Lady Byron for her formative years, and Lady Byron was
Speaker 1: a tough customer. She was Annabella styles herself as an
Speaker 1: intellectual and immoral person and an amateur mathematician, and this
Speaker 1: just doesn't go with Lord Byron's personality at all. He
Speaker 1: calls her the Princess of parallelograms, which, as cool as
Speaker 1: it sounds, is not a compliment coming from him. Oh no,
Speaker 1: he was very condescending about that kind of thing, despite
Speaker 1: the alliteration. Yeah. So her personality plus his really bad
Speaker 1: habits and a kind of crazy behavior during their marriage
Speaker 1: lead to their separation. So Lady Byron is absolutely terrified
Speaker 1: that her daughter, little Aida, is going to turn out
Speaker 1: to be like her father, the very scandalous Laura Byron.
Speaker 1: So she makes up her mind that may be the
Speaker 1: best way to get around this is to make sure
Speaker 1: that Aida doesn't do anything with poetry, which might seem strange,
Speaker 1: but she settled out in that as the trait of
Speaker 1: Byron's that was most likely to lead his daughter into
Speaker 1: I don't know her fidy and she's thrilled the byronic
Speaker 1: hero out of Aida starting with poetry. So instead Aida
Speaker 1: is going to learn math and music. And when Lady
Speaker 1: Byron finds out that Ada likes her geography lessons more
Speaker 1: than math, she not only gets rid of the geography lesson,
Speaker 1: she gets rid of the tutor. She's really serious about this,
Speaker 1: and she's a very strict lady. She punished her in
Speaker 1: ways that some of us are probably familiar with but
Speaker 1: aren't particularly nice, like solitary confinement. She made her lie
Speaker 1: motionless and demanded that she read apologies like I, Aida
Speaker 1: have not done the notes for very well, but I'll
Speaker 1: try to do it better tomorrow. So sad, isn't it
Speaker 1: It is? Then it actually shows an aptitude from math.
Speaker 1: She's very good at it. And she gets sick for
Speaker 1: a long time in her childhood and measle she's partially paralyzed.
Speaker 1: She ends up recovering, but during this time she does
Speaker 1: not let her study laps, and you have to put
Speaker 1: her in context. At the time, no one was particularly
Speaker 1: excited about women getting engaged in higher intellectual pursuits because
Speaker 1: you know their poor frail brains. What would happen. They
Speaker 1: might just overheat. But at the time she is introduced
Speaker 1: to Mary Somerville, who was interested in the same things
Speaker 1: she is, and she's later called the Queen of nineteenth
Speaker 1: century science, so that puts little context around how important
Speaker 1: Mary Somerville was to the age. She really encouraged Ada's
Speaker 1: mathematical studies, but also kind of helped her humanized technology,
Speaker 1: which ends up being what Ada is so known for
Speaker 1: for understanding technology and all of its potential. And I
Speaker 1: love a quote a let from a letter that Ada
Speaker 1: wrote to Mary Somerville. I got a bunch of great
Speaker 1: quotes from an article by Paul at Walker Campbell where
Speaker 1: she says, my dear Mrs Somerville, I'm afraid that when
Speaker 1: a machine, or a lecture or anything of the kind
Speaker 1: comes in my way, I have no regard for time,
Speaker 1: space or any other ordinary obstacles. I think you must
Speaker 1: be fond enough of these things to sympathize with my
Speaker 1: eagerness about them. She was really excited about learning, which
Speaker 1: is always refreshing at anyone else. In eighteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: at one of Mrs Somerville's dinners, Ada hears about one
Speaker 1: Charles Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine called the
Speaker 1: analytical engine, and she's so interested in this, and she
Speaker 1: writes him a b jillion letters. As I put in
Speaker 1: my notes, they start up a very voluminous correspondence, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about them a little more later, because this
Speaker 1: is how Ada makes her name for herself. But first,
Speaker 1: like a year after getting this intellectual passion of her life,
Speaker 1: she meets and marys William King, the eighth Baron King,
Speaker 1: who has made an earl a few years later, making
Speaker 1: Ada the Countess of Lovelace, and they have three children, Byron, Annabella,
Speaker 1: and Ralph Gordon. But it is Lady Byron running this show,
Speaker 1: and she runs a tight ship. And this is kind
Speaker 1: of sad too. It seems like Aida married in part
Speaker 1: to escape her domineering mother, but her husband makes like
Speaker 1: best friends with her, so then she's got two people
Speaker 1: to deal with. But even with a husband and three
Speaker 1: children under the age of eight, Aida is still really
Speaker 1: interested in her education. She starts studying math with Augustus
Speaker 1: de Morgan, who is later a highly regarded logician, and
Speaker 1: she makes some friends in the scientific field, Sir David Brewster,
Speaker 1: who invented the kaleidoscope, Charles Wheatstone, who invented an early telegraph,
Speaker 1: Michael Faraday who discovered the electro magnetic field, and someone
Speaker 1: Sarah and I are acquainted with through our English major,
Speaker 1: Charles Dickens. So she's got this illustrious group of of
Speaker 1: friends much like her her father had. Interestingly enough, um,
Speaker 1: but at this point we need to go back in
Speaker 1: time a little bit and tell you it's more about
Speaker 1: Babbage and the history of computing before we can fully
Speaker 1: appreciate what Aida did. And since we're not Jonathan and
Speaker 1: Chris on tech stuff, we can't give you the real
Speaker 1: techy version of this. We'll give you the historical the
Speaker 1: historical side. You might think of computing as just part
Speaker 1: of the modern era, but the history goes back further
Speaker 1: than World War Two a lot further. UM. I read
Speaker 1: a really good Scientific American article on computing that suggested, uh,
Speaker 1: the age of computing sprang from when people abandoned working
Speaker 1: numbers UM as a human pursuit. So basically decided that
Speaker 1: there could be something more than arithmetic in your head
Speaker 1: or scrawled on the paper, UM, something you could do
Speaker 1: with the machine and it could take less time and
Speaker 1: fewer people, and um, calculations that would be impossible or
Speaker 1: would take forever would be easy to do. So now
Speaker 1: we're gonna throw you a curveball and give you a name.
Speaker 1: You probably weren't expecting the history of computing. Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah,
Speaker 1: way back in sev ninety Napoleon decided to switch the
Speaker 1: Republic to the metrics system. And we still haven't done. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we need Napoleon's hairdressers here. So he commissions a set
Speaker 1: of mathematical tables, dozens and dozens of workers. They are
Speaker 1: the hairdressers I just mentioned out of work because when
Speaker 1: you don't have big aristocratic hair does anymore, you don't
Speaker 1: need lots of hair dressers. So all of these people
Speaker 1: are slaving away over setting up these mathematical tables and
Speaker 1: filling in what is called the tablea do cadestra. It
Speaker 1: takes ten years of just straight arithmetic. It's not particularly hard,
Speaker 1: but it's time comes, time consuming grunt work. Um. And
Speaker 1: by the time the table is ready to be published,
Speaker 1: there's no money, and so it sits in the Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences for decades until eighteen nineteen, when a young
Speaker 1: Charles Babbage comes along and finds it. And Babbage is
Speaker 1: an accomplished mathematician. He's founded the Analytical Society to introduce
Speaker 1: European mathematical developments to England, and he's helped create the
Speaker 1: first reliable actuarial tables along with some other stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He later goes on to invent a type of spedometer
Speaker 1: and helps establish the modern postal system in England. So
Speaker 1: this is a real renaissance man. And he's fascinated by
Speaker 1: these tables and decides that he's going to replicate Napoleon's
Speaker 1: project but with machinery and proposes the construction of the
Speaker 1: calculating engine in eighteen twenty two, and he secures government
Speaker 1: funding for it. And by eighteen thirty two still sounds
Speaker 1: like a long time, doesn't it. By eighteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: he's made a functioning model, which he's calling the difference Engine,
Speaker 1: and uh, on a side note, kind of, he publishes
Speaker 1: a book that makes him the world's leading industrial economist.
Speaker 1: For a time, he's a busy man. I remember learning
Speaker 1: about this and Dr Richard Minky's class on Victorian information systems.
Speaker 1: The difference engine is really cool. But a year later,
Speaker 1: he abandons the difference engine and comes up with this
Speaker 1: proposal for the analytical engine, because the difference engine could
Speaker 1: only do one task, and that was making these tables.
Speaker 1: But instead the analytical engine could do any kind of
Speaker 1: math calculations. So we're broadening our dreams here. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it would have a processor in memory, user operated input ability.
Speaker 1: I liked the list that you had for for its functions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this is pretty much a not a direct quote,
Speaker 1: but there were five parts, the input, the output, to control,
Speaker 1: the mill, on the store. So the control was a
Speaker 1: system of punch cards which each had programs and was
Speaker 1: technology that was actually already available with the Jacard Loom,
Speaker 1: something you don't really think about connected to a computing
Speaker 1: but there you go. And then there was the mill,
Speaker 1: which was kind of like a CPU, and that's the
Speaker 1: place where the functions that you program on these cards
Speaker 1: would be done. And then the store was a lot
Speaker 1: like what we would think of as the memory, and
Speaker 1: that's where you would keep the results of the functions
Speaker 1: of the programs that you had done. So abandoning the
Speaker 1: difference engine, though that the table making machine was kind
Speaker 1: of an unpopular idea because he had gotten a working model,
Speaker 1: but he still had a lot to do on it,
Speaker 1: and the government wouldn't give him additional funding to make
Speaker 1: this new analytical engine idea which he holds a grudge about,
Speaker 1: but he still works on it. He writes a lot,
Speaker 1: he draws it, draws a lot of plans, and he
Speaker 1: ends up reporting on his new plan and the new
Speaker 1: engine in autumn of eighteen forty one. And when he
Speaker 1: gives this presentation in Turinn, an Italian scientist named Louis
Speaker 1: Menabria sees it, and then in eighteen forty two writes
Speaker 1: a summary of what he's seen, and then also writes
Speaker 1: a paper about the ideas that Babbage had put forth.
Speaker 1: But he writes his paper on Francais. And this is
Speaker 1: when Ada Lovelace comes back into the picture. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: Ada gets ahold of this paper and decides to translate it,
Speaker 1: and she shows it to Babbage, who suggests that she
Speaker 1: add her own gloss to it. Basically, she writes some
Speaker 1: notes and what she thinks of it, And her notes
Speaker 1: end up being three times longer than the original paper, right,
Speaker 1: And they were published in a very prestigious journal. Taylor's
Speaker 1: Scientific Memoirs under the initials a a l for Augusta
Speaker 1: Ada Lovelace. But what she did was see all of
Speaker 1: the possibilities in this machine that Babbage didn't. He kept
Speaker 1: thinking of it it's just something that would do calculations.
Speaker 1: He was the engineer, and he saw the machine and
Speaker 1: what he needed to do to make it happen, and
Speaker 1: he didn't see the future and all the potential that
Speaker 1: this function would have. And she conceived of it as
Speaker 1: what we think of as a computer and was saying
Speaker 1: things like, you could make music with us, you could
Speaker 1: make graphics with us. She had she had the big picture,
Speaker 1: not that it would come about for a long time,
Speaker 1: but she saw things there that he couldn't. And it's
Speaker 1: funny because a lot of the articles I was reading
Speaker 1: about it, how some sexist language in there about how
Speaker 1: it was ada Is intuition that led her to see
Speaker 1: these things. And I'm going to go ahead and say
Speaker 1: it was not her intertrain. Perhaps it was her amazing
Speaker 1: intelligence and stuff. She also suggested writing a plan for
Speaker 1: how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers um And this
Speaker 1: is why she's regarded by some people as the first
Speaker 1: computer programmer. And she this is sort of the most
Speaker 1: famous quote from her notes, but she wrote, the analytical
Speaker 1: engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jackard loom weaves
Speaker 1: flowers and leaves and uh ada. Even though forced by
Speaker 1: her mother to never study poetry and focus on math,
Speaker 1: she does use these very metaphorical descriptions for numbers and
Speaker 1: math and scientific concepts. She's definitely got the poet in her.
Speaker 1: She just applies it to to something different. But Aida
Speaker 1: and Babbage have a bit of a falling out before
Speaker 1: these notes are even published. It's right before she's supposed
Speaker 1: to publish them, and he wants her to add a
Speaker 1: preface about the grudge we earlier mentioned about criticizing the
Speaker 1: British government for not giving him the money he wanted
Speaker 1: to finish this project, and she refuses, this isn't the
Speaker 1: sort of thing she wants, and well, no, and not
Speaker 1: the kind of thing she wants, you know. On what
Speaker 1: will be the greatest achievement of her life forever, this
Speaker 1: grudge of Babbage is and he's really ticked off, threatens
Speaker 1: to make sure her notes aren't published, and then later,
Speaker 1: I think, trying to make up for it, she offers
Speaker 1: to raise money for him to help build the engine,
Speaker 1: and he wouldn't even let her so going to go
Speaker 1: ahead and say someone didn't play well with others well
Speaker 1: in Kitty and I were talking earlier about how he
Speaker 1: might have started to get uncomfortable with this close working
Speaker 1: relationship with a very famous woman who's the daughter of
Speaker 1: a very famous and very notorious man. Nearly everything I
Speaker 1: read about the two was clear to note right from
Speaker 1: the start that their relationship was not romantic. It was
Speaker 1: strictly professional. And I just thought that was a little
Speaker 1: odd that that even had to be mentioned. And I
Speaker 1: wondered how much of that has to do with Byron's
Speaker 1: reputation right and who she is and what she comes from.
Speaker 1: And I wonder also if he was a bit jealous
Speaker 1: because this was a triumph for her, and Babbage never
Speaker 1: ends up getting these engines built in his lifetime things
Speaker 1: he still doesn't get the money that he needs to
Speaker 1: do this. But after this, Aida is even more committed
Speaker 1: to her cause. She describes herself as more than ever
Speaker 1: now the bride of science, and she wants to go
Speaker 1: on and do even greater things. But this seems to
Speaker 1: be where she peeked, and after that her life goes
Speaker 1: a little bit into decline, and some of the sources
Speaker 1: I read one seemed to suggest that maybe it was
Speaker 1: because of her falling out with Babbage and she didn't
Speaker 1: have anyone to talk to about her exciting math and
Speaker 1: scientific pursuits. Her other friends weren't all that interested, or
Speaker 1: she didn't have anyone she could really collaborate but it
Speaker 1: in and collaborate with, and he her husband, is not
Speaker 1: much of a presence in her life at this point.
Speaker 1: He's away a lot on business and um, yeah, she
Speaker 1: seems rather alone, but she has some ideas. She wants
Speaker 1: to get into medical science, but nothing seems to come
Speaker 1: to fruition. And she also starts to get ill and
Speaker 1: says that's making it harder for her to concentrate on
Speaker 1: her studies, and she gets flirty and a little bit scandalous,
Speaker 1: much like her father, Lord Byron. Her husband ends up
Speaker 1: burning I think at least a hundred of her letters,
Speaker 1: and they aren't getting along, so she's in trouble for something,
Speaker 1: and much like the byronic hero who her mother so
Speaker 1: desperately tried to prevent her from becoming um, she just
Speaker 1: goes downhill in her health and starts drinking and doing
Speaker 1: opium which was fairly common in the Victorian age. Um
Speaker 1: she even starts gambling, trying to apply her math ability
Speaker 1: to race horses, and it didn't completely backfired. She ends
Speaker 1: up in so much debt again like her father Lord Byron,
Speaker 1: were coming full circle here, and she also realizes how
Speaker 1: much her mother has lied to her over the years
Speaker 1: and manipulated her when it comes to her father and
Speaker 1: they have a big fight, and that's pretty much the
Speaker 1: end of their relationship, or to the end of their
Speaker 1: good relationship. Her mother will find her way back in
Speaker 1: as you'll see in a minute. She develops cancer and Annabella,
Speaker 1: her mother, really dominates the sick room. She chooses who
Speaker 1: can come and visit and hides the opium, which um
Speaker 1: Ada is using by this point as a pain killer,
Speaker 1: hoping that Ada will suffer so much that she'll repent,
Speaker 1: But instead she just suffers a lot and keeps hemorrhaging.
Speaker 1: She's in terrible pain, and I'm sure the bizarre medical
Speaker 1: quackery of the time didn't help her condition at all.
Speaker 1: Blood letting not so great for cancer. So she dies
Speaker 1: at thirty seven and is buried next to her father,
Speaker 1: and Ada is a little bit obscure after her death. Um,
Speaker 1: but Alan Turing, who developed a method to break the
Speaker 1: Enigma code during World War Two, used a bunch of
Speaker 1: her notes in his work after the war on computing
Speaker 1: and artificial intelligence. Yeah, and the U. S. Department of
Speaker 1: Defense ends up naming a software language ADA after her
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine. Um, And I like this note
Speaker 1: to in A machine was built to Babbage's specifications, the
Speaker 1: analytical engine, and it was accurate to thirty one digits.
Speaker 1: And this machine that Babbage thought of and that Ada
Speaker 1: so cleverly described, is the beginning of early digital computing,
Speaker 1: something that just sort of goes into what a lot
Speaker 1: of computer scientists call a dark age for years, and
Speaker 1: it's eclipse by mechanical analog devices until World War Two,
Speaker 1: when um, the power of digital sort of front comes
Speaker 1: back to the forefront. So these two were were progressive.
Speaker 1: I'd love to see a picture of that machine, because
Speaker 1: I hope it looks all steampunk cool. I'm gonna look
Speaker 1: that up when we got there's there's a picture of
Speaker 1: his earlier engine, and it does not look like anything special.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a big box with still be
Speaker 1: racing to the Googles to see. But Sarah and I
Speaker 1: were talking earlier about celebrity kids and how they either
Speaker 1: tend to follow in their parents footsteps or go in
Speaker 1: the complete I think it's we think it's a good
Speaker 1: idea to go in a different direction because if your
Speaker 1: parents are are famous musicians or something, and then maybe
Speaker 1: you it's a natural choice to want to be a
Speaker 1: musician too. But a lot of times they have a
Speaker 1: hard time living up to to the standard that they're
Speaker 1: famous parents has set. Uh. So Ada really makes the
Speaker 1: name for herself by doing something completely different, or so
Speaker 1: it seems. But the funny thing is that Byron was
Speaker 1: really interested in science when he was at Cambridge, especially
Speaker 1: in telescopes. He was a man of varied interests anyways,
Speaker 1: and Ada had written a letter to her mother and
Speaker 1: her thirties where she said, if you can't give me poetry,
Speaker 1: can't you give me poetical science, which again you got
Speaker 1: the poetry and the science coming together, just like her father.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about where computers go
Speaker 1: from the Victorian age, check out our tech channel at
Speaker 1: w ww dot how stuff works dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Let us know what you think, Send
Speaker 1: an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: and be sure to check out this stuff you Missed
Speaker 1: in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com home page