In the autumn of 1843, Ada Lovelace sat at her writing desk in London. She was translating a French article about Charles Babbage's new machine, the Analytical Engine. But Ada did more than translate. She began writing her own notes, which grew longer than the article itself. In one note, she wrote a detailed sequence of steps—a set of instructions—for the machine to calculate a series of numbers. This list of steps is now known as the first computer programme ever created. She was just twenty-seven years old.
Ada was born in 1815, the only daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron. Her mother feared Ada would inherit her father's wild nature, so she made sure Ada studied mathematics and science. Ada loved these subjects. At seventeen, she met Charles Babbage at a party. He showed her his Difference Engine, a machine that did simple sums. Ada was hooked. She studied his bigger idea, the Analytical Engine, which could be programmed with cards. She saw that this machine could do much more than Babbage thought possible. Most people thought the Analytical Engine was just a fast calculator.
They could not imagine a machine doing anything but arithmetic. Babbage himself focused on building it, not on what it could do. Ada faced another problem: as a woman in the 1800s, her ideas were often ignored. She had to fight to be heard. Yet she kept thinking about the machine's true potential. She wrote letters to Babbage explaining her vision, but he sometimes doubted her. Still, she did not give up. Ada wrote the most detailed notes ever created for the Analytical Engine. She explained that the machine could handle not just numbers, but any symbols—like music notes or letters.
Her mother feared Ada would inherit her father's wild nature, so she made sure Ada studied mathematics and science.
She described how it could follow a set of instructions, make choices, and even repeat steps. Her Note G contained the steps for computing a set of numbers called Bernoulli numbers. It was the first programme written for a machine that hadn't been built yet. Ada had imagined the modern computer, a hundred years before it existed. After Ada died at thirty-six, her work was almost forgotten. In the 1950s, scientists rediscovered her notes and realised how brilliant she was. She had described programming concepts like loops and conditions long before computers were built. Today, she is known as the first computer programmer. A fun fact: the US Department of Defense named a programming language 'Ada' in her honour, and every year Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in technology.