The Analytical Engine was a general-purpose computing machine, a mechanical precursor to the modern computer, by which the Countess was enraptured. Successor of the Difference Engine of the same inventor, the Analytical Engine was incomplete creation of polymath (coined by Whalen) Charles Babbage.
Via the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. Machinations, or of Poetical Science Babbage’s notes on the Difference Engine, predecessor of the Analytical Engine. And, when it came in contact with a device the likes of the Analytical Engine, it cracked wide open. A repressed fantastic energy, a mind with a tendency to run wild, to seek acts of rebellion. In various accounts, there seems to have been a certain vibrancy in the young girl’s predisposition which some say scared Lady Byron, fearful the shadow of her late husband might follow. However, Ada’s mind was not made for scientific thought only. She loved machines, designed a flying one (that was going to be made of paper and silk) as a preteen, and seemed, in the eyes of her mother, to stay away from the father’s possible legacy of wildness through the discipline of her studies (as told by Charman-Anderson). Born during the brief marriage between Anne Isabella Milbanke, a solidly educated Baroness, and Lord Byron, poet and ‘19th century bad boy’, Ada was ultimately brought up by Lady Byron as a single mother and nourished with the knowledge instilled in her by her many tutors, with a focus on mathematics and science. It almost sounds like a fairy tale, but it is, to our knowledge, the picturesque background of the one who would become the first person to create an ancestor of the computer program: Augusta Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, known today as Ada Lovelace. Celebrating the woman who wrote the first computer algorithm and believed in the artistic vein within science AdaĪda was barely a month old when her mother fled from her marriage from Lord Byron (yes, that Byron) planning to take the baby into a life devoid of the father’s mad poetry and filled with discipline.
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