Ada Lovelace

The episode opens in March 1834 at one of Charles Babbage’s London soirées, where scientists and aristocrats mingle. Mary Somerville introduces Babbage to her 18-year-old companion, Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron. Babbage shows Ada a 12-inch metal automaton, but she is far more interested in his partially built Difference Engine. She examines its brass columns, cogs, and numbered wheels, then asks detailed questions about how it works. Babbage is delighted by her unusual enthusiasm. The narrator presents Ada, later Ada Lovelace, as a pioneer who helped imagine computing beyond calculation and arguably described the first computer program.

Dr. Corin Throsby explains that Ada’s parents were intellectual opposites: Annabella Milbank was a wealthy, charitable educational reformer and gifted mathematician, while Lord Byron was a celebrated romantic poet whose scandals and reckless spending made him notorious. They met in 1812, married in January 1815, and quickly descended into misery. Byron was cruel and abusive, suffered violent mood swings, and maintained an unusually close relationship with his half-sister Augusta, possibly fathering a child with her. Ada was born on December 10, 1815; Annabella left with the five-week-old baby, and Byron departed England in 1816, never returning.

Raised with financial security by Annabella and her extended family, Ada enjoyed books and the company of educated women, but her mother deliberately steered her away from poetry and toward mathematics so she would not resemble Byron. Annabella paid for intensive tutors and governesses, founded schools, and pursued educational reform, while Ada received an unusually strong scientific education for a girl in an era when only about 10% of Britons received formal schooling. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, leaving Ada no inheritance, Ada’s mother remained her chief intellectual influence. Annabella’s recurring illness and absences also made Ada fear for her wellbeing.

At 12, Ada became fascinated by bird flight, studying wing mechanics, dissecting animals, and planning paper wings and a book of “flyology.” Her fantasies escalated to a steam-powered flying horse. After measles at 13, she suffered nearly three years of semi-paralysis and spent much of her adolescence in bed or using crutches. When she recovered, she learned to ride, entered London society, and had an affair with her young tutor William Turner. She even went to his parents’ home intending to elope, but they sent her back. Annabella responded by redirecting her toward mathematics, while Ada’s own interests included physics, astronomy, and optics.

Mary Somerville, a pioneering mathematician and astronomer who was the first person described as a “scientist,” began tutoring Ada informally. Though women were still excluded from much scientific life—Somerville could belong to the Royal Astronomical Society but not enter its building—her social and intellectual circle connected Ada with Babbage. His Saturday gatherings admitted people with beauty, rank, or intellect, and Ada had all three. Babbage’s Difference Engine was intended to replace human “computers,” the people who calculated tables but made mistakes. Ada was captivated, corresponded with him, and toured factories with Annabella to study new technology, including French looms.

In 1835, Mary Somerville and Annabella introduced Ada to Lord William King, a wealthy, intellectually inclined man and Byron admirer. They met at a ball, became engaged within a week, and married several months later. King had an income of £8,000 a year, while Annabella gave the couple £30,000. They had three children—Byron in 1836, Annabella in 1837, and Ralph in 1839—and William became Earl Lovelace in 1838, making Ada a countess. Although the family could be affectionate, Ada was often absent, leaving the children with Annabella, nannies, or governesses. She continued studying, learning from mathematician Augustus de Morgan, and planning a working-class school.

Babbage’s next design, the Analytical Engine, was intended to be programmable rather than merely a calculator. Inspired by Jacquard looms, it would use punched cards for data and instructions, process sequences, repeat operations, make decisions, and include equivalents of memory and a central processor. After Babbage described it in Turin in 1840, Luigi Menabrea published a French article about its mathematical capabilities. Charles Wheatstone suggested that Ada translate it into English and add explanatory notes. Her notes became nearly three times the article’s length. She argued that the machine could manipulate letters and musical notes as well as numbers, potentially composing music according to rules.

Published anonymously in 1843 under the initials AAL, Ada’s notes contained a step-by-step method for generating Bernoulli numbers. The episode describes this as the first explicit algorithm tailored to run on a computer and therefore arguably the first computer program. Ada hoped the publication would launch a scientific career, and her husband, mother, tutors, and scientific contacts supported her, even while some believed intense mathematics could damage a woman’s constitution. Chronic pain, headaches, and the effects of prescribed laudanum soon limited her work, leaving the notes as her crowning achievement rather than the beginning of the larger research program she had imagined.

By the late 1840s, the Lovelaces faced financial pressure: William spent heavily on estate renovations, while Annabella kept Ada on a restrictive allowance because she feared Ada had inherited Byron’s extravagance. Ada also had an intense relationship with John Cross, to whom she gave money. At horse races, she revived an idea from her twenties: collect detailed performance data, identify statistical patterns, and beat bookmakers through mathematics. She formed a betting syndicate, possibly involving Babbage, but after initial success it collapsed in 1851 following losses at York and Epsom totaling more than £3,000—nearly half a million pounds today. Her gambling and debts were then revealed to Annabella.

Ada’s health deteriorated into hemorrhaging, severe abdominal pain, and what doctors diagnosed as uterine cancer, probably cervical cancer that had spread. She continued scientific correspondence, speculating about how raindrops refract light and perhaps anticipating the spectroscope, though the episode calls that connection speculative. She also gave the family diamonds to John Cross to pawn, twice, before Annabella retrieved them. Ada died in agony on November 27, 1852, aged 36, and was buried beside Byron at her request. Alan Turing later studied her notes and discussed her “Lady Lovelace’s objection”: a machine cannot originate beyond what humans provide. Her legacy includes Ada Lovelace Day, computing awards, and the Ada programming language.