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Brief Lives

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

Alistair MacFarlane on how a poet’s daughter invented the concept of software.

In 1842, more than a century before the start of the information age, in a brilliant flash of penetrating insight, Ada Lovelace had a glimpse of the future. She saw that with suitable modifications, Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine would be capable of much more than its intended purpose of simple mathematical calculation. Lovelace realised that such a device could be set to execute any logically coherent sequence of instructions, and in this she became the world’s first computer programmer: together with Babbage, she invented what we now call software. When she had her marvellous insight she was in the twenty-seventh year of her short life, and had less than ten years left to live.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Chalon, 1838

Romance & Reality

Augusta Ada Byron, who became the first Countess of Lovelace and is usually known as Ada Lovelace, was born on 10 December 1815 in Piccadilly, London.

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