The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

What we have here is a very unusual study of two fami l iar but fascinating Victorians: Ada, Countess of Lovelace, famous in her l i fetime as Lord Byron’s daughter, but a lso a second-generation mathematical enthus iast on her mother’s s ide; and Charles Babbage, economist, engineer, and zealous scienti fic reformer. One of Babbage’s pass ions was des igning huge cogwheel-driven machines to process numbers by steam power: his Analytical Engine, had i t been bui l t, would have had most of the features of a multi -purpose programmable computer. Lovelace, his friend and col laborator, trans lated a French-language description of the planned Engine and publ ished i t in 1842 with a contribution of her own: officia l ly just a set of ‘Notes’ to the trans lation, Lovelace’s piece added far more detai l , giving the reading publ ic a clear description of what we would now cal l programming, and an elegant account of the new fields of enquiry which the machine might open up. Yet the project, though never entirely forgotten, had l i ttle or no influence on the computers which achieved the same goals us ing high-speed electronics in the 1940s. Nonetheless , as smal ler, faster and cheaper machines reached into every area of twentieth-century l i fe, fi rst Babbage and then Lovelace gained a new prominence as early vis ionaries of the computer revolution.