Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (Ada Lovelace).
In 1847, at the age of just twenty-seven, Ada Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer—more than a century before the first computer was even built. This almost sounds like a myth, or the premise for a steampunk novel. A Victorian countess writing an algorithm for a machine made of gears and brass that never came to life.
But it happened.
And though her work was nearly forgotten for a hundred years, it would later be hailed as one of the most remarkable intellectual leaps in human history.
Icon and Innovator
Augusta Ada Byron was born in London in 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, the mathematically inclined Annabella Milbanke. It was a union of opposites: Byron is a leading figure of the Romantic movement while Milbanke was an educational reformer and philanthropist who established the first industrial school in England.
The marriage collapsed within weeks, and Ada never saw her father again. Lady Byron, terrified that her daughter might inherit her father’s “madness,” imposed an intense education in mathematics and logic. For a Victorian woman, this was nearly unthinkable. But it worked.
The imaginative young Ada learned to translate her creativity into mathematics, describing her method as a kind of “poetical science.” She believed that imagination was not a distraction from science, but its secret engine.
When she was seventeen, she met Charles Babbage, a brilliant mathematician and inventor working on a massive machine he called the Difference Engine. The machine, powered by steam and designed to calculate polynomial functions automatically, was a precursor to the computer. When Babbage later conceived an even more ambitious design (the Analytical Engine), Ada became his closest intellectual collaborator. Babbage called her the “Enchantress of Number.”
A Machine That Could Think
Portion of the calculating machine with a printing mechanism of the analytical engine, built by Charles Babbage, as displayed at the Science Museum in London.
Babbage was, himself, ahead of his time. His Analytical Engine was unlike anything that had come before. It had a “Mill” (what we’d now call a CPU), a “Store” (memory), and a system of punched cards to input instructions—borrowed from the Jacquard loom used in textile weaving. In concept, it contained the architecture of every modern computer. But it remained a dream on paper, too complex and expensive for Victorian industry to build.
The technology wasn’t there, and try as he might, Babbage struggled. Yet, even as the computer didn’t work, Lovelace made pioneering contributions to algorithms.
In 1842, Lovelace was asked to translate an Italian paper about the Analytical Engine by engineer Luigi Menabrea. Babbage urged her to go further—to annotate it with her own insights. What she produced over the following months became legendary. Her translation and the extensive “Notes” she added were three times the length of the original text.
Within the notes, she created the world’s first complex algorithm. Essentially, she envisioned an explicit sequence of operations for the Engine to compute the Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers that occur frequently in analysis. It was the first time anyone had written what we would now recognize as a computer program.
Lovelace’s diagram from “Note G”, the first published computer algorithm.
In it, she broke down the Bernoulli number calculation into a table of operations—essentially a flowchart describing data movement between the Engine’s “Store” and “Mill.” Her notation anticipated programming structures like loops, variables, and conditional operations. She articulated, for the first time, the difference between calculation and computation. A calculator could follow fixed instructions; a computer, she realized, could manipulate symbols in endlessly creative ways.
But Ada’s real breakthrough was conceptual, and spurred by her imagination. Babbage saw the Analytical Engine as a mathematical tool. Ada saw it as something much more: a general-purpose symbol manipulator. “The Engine,” she wrote, “might act upon other things besides number.” If the relations of sounds or letters could be expressed mathematically, the machine could compose music or generate text.
In an age of coal and gaslight, she foresaw the very idea of digital art, and having computers being used to generate all sorts of things. It’s what we have in today’s world, envisioned in Victorian times.
Unfortunately, Babbage never created the machine and Ada was unable to test her theory before she died at the age of 36 of cancer.
Lost, Forgotten, and Rediscovered
A daguerreotype (early-day photograph) of Ada Lovelace.
It was easy for her contemporaries to discard and overlook her work. After all, she created algorithms for a machine that never worked. Ada Lovelace faded into obscurity, and they might have stayed that way had it not been for the creative marketing idea of another British Pioneer.
In 1953 English scientist and educationist Bertram V. Bowden edited Faster than Thought. Bowden can be considered the first electronic computer salesman, and his book was as much a sales tool as it was an educational took. Yet, it became the first widely read English book on electronic computers. It also featured chapters on Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.
Scientists and engineers of the time were struck to find that a Victorian countess had anticipated so much of their logic. Her legend began to grow until, in 1980, the U.S. Department of Defense named a new programming language “Ada” in her honor. In September 2022, Nvidia announced the Ada Lovelace graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture.
But with fame came controversy. In the late 20th century, a handful of historians argued that her role had been exaggerated—that she was a “precocious novice,” not a true innovator. Some critics claimed that her mathematical understanding was too limited to produce the algorithm attributed to her.
That view, however, has since been overturned. A group of scholars reexamined Lovelace’s correspondence and found that critics had misdated her early letters. She wasn’t struggling with basic mathematics in 1842, as they’d claimed; those letters were written two years earlier. By the time she composed her Notes, she had developed a sophisticated grasp of calculus and symbolic reasoning.
In 2009, British technologist Suw Charman-Anderson founded Ada Lovelace Day to honor her legacy and to highlight the achievements of women in STEM. Each year, on the second Tuesday of October, events unfold across the world: lectures, exhibitions, classroom lessons, even Wikipedia “edit-a-thons” to document women scientists who have too often been erased from history.
Yet, it’s no coincidence that Lovelace’s story resonates so strongly in the age of algorithms. She lived in a world where a woman’s scientific ambition was considered a curiosity, if not a threat. Yet she imagined machines that could compose music, make art, and even challenge our conception of thought. In that sense, her struggle and her vision remain painfully relevant.
Even now, women make up less than a third of the global STEM workforce. Barriers—subtle or overt—still persist. Lovelace’s story reminds us that genius often blooms despite those barriers, not because they’ve been lifted.
Ada herself was an inspiration to many, including Michael Faraday. On June 10, 1840, Ada Lovelace sent a copy of her portrait to Michael Faraday with a note saying:
‘Dear Mr. Faraday, Mr Babbage tells me that you have expressed a wish to possess one of the engravings of me, by which I feel exceedingly flattered, & hope you will accept one that we still happen to have by us. I am sorry that there is no proof left, to which I might have put my signature. Believe me, yours very truly Augusta Ada Lovelace St James’ Square’
Faraday liked to collect images of people he met or were acquainted with so this etching was gratefully received into his collection.
In the end, Ada Lovelace’s legacy is not confined to a title like “the first programmer.” Her true gift was to see what no one else could: that imagination and logic, art and math, could merge to create a new kind of intelligence.
This article was originally published in 2015 and has undergone a thorough reediting. Additional content was also added.
Tibi is a science journalist and co-founder of ZME Science. He writes mainly about emerging tech, physics, climate, and space. In his spare time, Tibi likes to make weird music on his computer and groom felines. He has a B.Sc in mechanical engineering and an M.Sc in renewable energy systems.
