First Computer Programmer Was Woman

In 1843, a young Englishwoman was given a modest job. An Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea had written a French article about a remarkable machine, and someone was needed to translate it into English. The translator did her job — and then kept going. Attached to the end of her translation she added a set of her own notes, labelled A, B, C, D, E, F and G. The notes were three times longer than the article itself.

Her name was Ada Lovelace, and buried inside those notes — especially the last one — sits a carefully worked-out set of instructions for calculating a sequence of numbers on a machine that had never been built. Computer historians regard that example as the first computer program ever published. It was written not for a computer of wires and screens, but for an engine of brass gears that existed only in drawings. To understand how that happened, you have to start with the strange childhood that prepared her for it.

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Augusta Ada Byron was born in London on 10 December 1815, the only legitimate child of the famous poet Lord Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke Byron. The marriage collapsed almost immediately — it lasted little more than a year, and Byron left England for good when his daughter was only a few weeks old. Ada never met her father. He died when she was eight.

Annabella was determined that her daughter would not grow up with what she saw as the poet’s dangerous, restless temperament. So she filled Ada’s education with the opposite of poetry: music, French, and above all mathematics. It worked better than she could have guessed. The girl had a genuine gift for numbers, and her mother encouraged tutors — including the noted scientific writer Mary Somerville and, later, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan — who stretched that gift further. Ada married William King in 1835, and when he became Earl of Lovelace in 1838, she became the Countess of Lovelace, the name history remembers.

What strikes me, reading about her education, is that the plan was meant to cage her imagination — and instead it gave her imagination a set of tools. She grew up calling her own approach “poetical science,” and it was exactly that mixture of number and wonder that let her see what others missed.

How did she meet Charles Babbage and his engines?

In 1833, when Ada was seventeen, Mary Somerville introduced her to the mathematician Charles Babbage. Babbage had designed a calculating machine called the Difference Engine, and Ada was captivated by a small prototype of it. The two became lifelong friends, and Babbage soon drew her into his far more ambitious second idea: the Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine was not just a bigger calculator. As Babbage planned it, the machine would store numbers in a memory, work on them in a separate processing section, follow instructions fed in on punched cards, and even adjust its own path depending on results — ideas that sit at the heart of every modern computer. There was one crushing problem. The Engine was never finished. Only a small piece of it was ever built, and the full machine remained a vision on paper for the rest of both their lives. Everything Ada would write about it, she wrote about a computer that nobody could touch.

What happened when she translated Menabrea’s article?

In 1840, Babbage travelled to Turin in Italy to give the only public lecture he ever delivered on the Analytical Engine. The young Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea listened and wrote up an account of the machine in French, published in 1842. Back in England, Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone suggested that Ada translate the article into English. Babbage agreed — and suggested she add notes of her own to explain the machine more fully.

She worked on it through 1843, and the result appeared in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs in August of that year, signed only with her initials, “A.A.L.” The translation was faithful. The notes were something else entirely: three times longer than the article they were attached to, they explored what the Engine could mean far more boldly than Menabrea — or even Babbage — had done in print. She was twenty-seven years old, explaining a computer that did not exist, to a world that had never seen one.

What did the early notes, A to F, actually say?

The first notes do quiet but important groundwork. Ada carefully separated the Analytical Engine from Babbage’s earlier Difference Engine, explaining that the new machine was a different kind of thing altogether — not a tool for one fixed calculation, but a machine that could follow changing instructions from its punched cards. She pointed out that a card, or a set of cards, could be used again and again within a single problem, so the machine could repeat steps — an idea programmers today would recognise as looping.

Then, in the early notes, she made the leap that made her famous among historians of computing. She argued that the Engine need not work on numbers alone. If other things — sounds, for example — could be expressed through the same kinds of relations the machine handled, then the machine could work on them too. Britannica sums it up simply: she speculated that the Analytical Engine could perform operations on “other things besides number,” such as musical notes, and she suggested it might one day compose elaborate pieces of music. She was describing, in the 1840s, the idea that a computer is a machine for symbols and patterns — not merely a fast abacus. That is the insight behind every photo editor, music app and video game running today.

What is in Note G, the famous one?

The final note is the showpiece. In Note G, Lovelace set out to demonstrate the Engine’s power with the most demanding example she could choose: calculating the Bernoulli numbers, a special sequence of numbers used in mathematics, which her tutor De Morgan had helped her study. Rather than work out one number by hand, she laid out a complete method by which the machine itself could produce them — using each earlier result to build the next one, step after numbered step, in a detailed table of operations.

The table is written in a language of variables and operations that the Engine would follow one instruction at a time, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is, in plain terms, an algorithm: a recipe of exact steps, designed for a machine, published in 1843. That is why computer historians call it the first published computer program, and Ada Lovelace the first computer programmer. The program was never run — the Engine was never built to run it — but the instructions were complete enough that modern researchers have translated them into today’s programming languages and tested them. Fittingly for the first program in history, they found it even contains a small error, a division written the wrong way round in one step. Programmers have been hunting bugs ever since.

Did she really write it? The honest debate

A fair telling has to admit that historians argue about this, and the argument is worth hearing rather than hiding. Charles Babbage, in his 1864 memoir, described how the notes were made. He wrote that the two of them discussed the examples together, that the choice of illustrations was entirely hers, and that she did the algebraic working-out herself — except for the Bernoulli numbers, where he had offered to do the heavy mathematics to save her the trouble. Even there, he recorded, she sent his work back to him for correction, having caught a serious mistake he had made in it.

Historian Allan G. Bromley later pointed out another fact: Babbage himself had prepared several dozen sample programs for the Engine between 1837 and 1840, years before Ada’s notes. Those programs were simpler, and crucially, they were never published. So the honest summary looks like this. Babbage designed the machine and sketched programs in private. Ada, working with him, produced the first program the world could actually read, surrounded by notes whose vision of computing’s future went further than his own published words. Whether you call her the sole author or the brilliant interpreter, the name attached to the first published program in history is hers.

How did her short life end, and how is she remembered?

Ada Lovelace died on 27 November 1852, of the illness contemporary accounts called uterine cancer. She was 36 years old — exactly the age her father, Lord Byron, had been when he died, a father she had never once met.

Her notes were largely forgotten for a century, then republished in 1953 and recognised for what they were: a description of a computer and its software, written a hundred years before electronic computers arrived. The United States Department of Defense later created a programming language for its systems and named it, in her honour, Ada. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980 — her birthday — and its military standard number, MIL-STD-1815, was chosen to echo 1815, the year she was born. Every year, on the second Tuesday in October, Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the contributions of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Not bad for a translator who decided her assignment was too small.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Ada Lovelace called the first computer programmer?

Because in 1843 she published Note G alongside her translation of Menabrea’s article — a complete, step-by-step method for Babbage’s Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It is regarded as the first algorithm published specifically for a machine, making it the first published computer program.

Did the Analytical Engine ever actually run her program?

No. The Analytical Engine was never completed — only a small portion was ever built — so her program was never tested in her lifetime. Modern researchers have since translated it into current programming languages and run it that way.

What are Bernoulli numbers, in simple words?

They are a special sequence of numbers that appear in several areas of mathematics. Lovelace deliberately chose a complicated method for calculating them because she wanted to show off the full power of the machine.

Was all of the mathematics in Note G hers alone?

Historians debate this. Babbage wrote that he supplied the formulas for the Bernoulli calculation, while she turned them into the step-by-step table — and caught a serious error in his work. He also confirmed the selection of examples was entirely hers. His own earlier sample programs were never published.

Why is there a programming language named Ada?

The United States Department of Defense named its language Ada in her honour. Its reference manual was approved on 10 December 1980, her birthday, and its standard number, MIL-STD-1815, matches her birth year of 1815.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer”: https://www.britannica.com/story/ada-lovelace-the-first-computer-programmer
• Wikipedia, “Note G”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_G
• Wikipedia, “Ada Lovelace”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace