The First Programmer
More than a hundred years before the first real computer ever hummed to life, a young woman filled page after page with careful instructions for a machine that had not even been built. Many people call what she wrote the world's first computer program. Her name was Ada Lovelace.
Ada was born in London in 1815. Her father was the famous poet Lord Byron, but he left when she was only a baby, and she never truly knew him. Her mother worried that Ada might grow up wild and dreamy like him, so she filled Ada's days with something she believed was safe and orderly: mathematics.
In Ada's time, girls were rarely taught difficult math. Some people even believed too much thinking could harm a woman's health. Ada studied anyway, and, better still, she fell in love with it. As a young girl she dreamed up a flying machine, sketching feathered wings.
When she was seventeen, Ada met an inventor named Charles Babbage. He was designing an enormous machine of brass gears and cranks called the Analytical Engine, a calculator so bold and complicated that it was never finished. Ada was spellbound. Babbage nicknamed her 'the Enchantress of Number.'
In 1843, Ada translated a French article about the engine, then added notes of her own that ran three times longer than the article itself. In the last note, called Note G, she laid out step-by-step directions the machine could follow to work out a tricky pattern of numbers. That is why she is remembered as the first programmer.
But Ada saw something almost no one else could. She realized a machine did not have to be trapped doing only sums. If music or letters could be turned into symbols, she wrote, a machine might someday compose songs or work with words. She was imagining computers a full century before they existed.
Ada died young, in 1852, at just 36 years old. The Analytical Engine was never built in her lifetime, and her brilliant notes were nearly forgotten. Today, though, her ideas shine brighter than ever, and a computer language is named Ada in her honor.
Check that you read it
- Ada's father was the famous poet Lord Byron.
- Ada's mother filled her days with mathematics, believing it was safe and orderly.
- The inventor Charles Babbage was designing the Analytical Engine.
- In her last note, called Note G, Ada laid out step-by-step directions for the machine.
- Ada realized that music and letters could be turned into symbols a machine could work with.
Choose the best answer
- Why is Ada Lovelace remembered as the first computer programmer?
- A. She built the very first computer by hand
- B. She wrote step-by-step instructions for a machine to follow
- C. She invented the poem her father was famous for
- D. She taught mathematics at a large university
- What big idea made Ada's thinking so far ahead of her time?
- A. That machines could only ever add and subtract
- B. That a machine could handle more than numbers, like music and words
- C. That computers should be made as small as possible
- D. That math was too difficult for anyone to master
- Which obstacle did Ada face while growing up?
- A. She was not allowed to read any books at all
- B. Girls in her time were rarely taught difficult math
- C. There were no tutors anywhere near her home
- D. Numbers had not been invented yet
Word cross
Across
- The famous poet who was Ada's father.
- What letters and musical notes could be turned into for a machine to handle.
- Her first name, now the name of a computer language in her honor.
- Babbage's giant calculating machine was called the Analytical ___.
Down
- The set of instructions Ada wrote is called the first computer ___.
- The tricky pattern of these that Note G taught the machine to work out.
- One surprising thing Ada imagined a machine might one day compose.
- The inventor who designed the machine Ada wrote instructions for.
- The city where Ada was born in 1815.