Long before Wi-Fi passwords, cat videos, and doom-scrolling, there was Ada Lovelace—the woman who basically looked at a Victorian-age calculator and said, “But what if it could do more?” While most people were still trying to figure out indoor plumbing, Ada was busy dreaming up algorithms that would lay the foundation for modern computing.
Born in 1815, Augusta Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of the scandalous poet Lord Byron. He bailed when Ada was just a month old, leaving her mother, Lady Byron, to raise her alone. Lady Byron, who had a deep distrust of poetry (probably because of her ex), steered Ada toward mathematics, hoping numbers would keep her out of trouble. Plot twist: they didn’t. They just helped her become a different kind of rebel—the kind that invents computer programming a century before computers exist.
Ada’s passion for numbers led her to Charles Babbage, a mathematician working on a prototype of a mechanical computer called the Analytical Engine. Babbage was the ideas guy, but Ada? She was the visionary. She saw beyond the engine’s ability to crunch numbers, realizing it could process symbols and even create music if programmed correctly. In 1843, Ada translated an article on the Analytical Engine and added her own notes—tripling the original text’s length because Ada Lovelace did not do half-measures. These notes included the first published algorithm designed specifically for a machine, making her the world’s first computer programmer.
Her foresight was eerie. Ada speculated that a machine could one day compose complex music, create graphics, and be used for practical and scientific purposes. To put that into perspective, most people at the time still thought tomatoes were poisonous. Visionary doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Of course, the men in her era were a little slow to catch on—her contributions were mostly ignored until Alan Turing cited her work over a century later. But Ada wasn’t about to be silenced by a lack of recognition. Her work and legacy challenged the idea that women were biologically unsuited for mathematics and science. She wasn’t just a mathematician; she was a revolutionary, proving that the mind doesn’t care much about gender.
Ada also knew how to deliver a zinger. Her famous quote, “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show,” was less of a statement and more of a prophecy. Today, we live in the world she envisioned—one where algorithms run everything from social media feeds to space missions.
So the next time your laptop freezes mid-Zoom call, maybe give a little thanks to Ada Lovelace, who not only saw the future of technology but pretty much wrote the first chapter of it. She was a visionary, a mathematician, and the original programmer. Honestly, the fact that she did all this in a corset just makes it even more impressive.
