Ada Lovelace

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2008

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, but they are controlled by a programming language called Ada. It’s named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine called the Difference Engine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be. As such the Difference Engine is the spiritual ancestor of the modern computer. Ada Lovelace has been called many things - the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age – but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an ‘enchantress of numbers’. With Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon is a network of computers.
0:16.0	They control the US military, their most powerful army on the planet,
0:20.0	and they are in turn controlled by a programming language called
0:23.8	Aida. It's named after Aida Lovelace, the allegedly hard-drinking
0:28.4	19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron, she became the Countess of Lovelace.
0:33.7	In her work with Charles Babbage on steam-driven calculating machines,
0:37.4	Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be.
0:41.9	Aide of Lovelace, Eddie Lovelace has been called many things. a computer
0:45.0	and a computer programmer and a profit of the computer age
0:48.0	but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an enchantress of numbers.
0:52.0	With me to discuss Ada Lovelace and her work at
0:55.2	Doran Suede, visiting professor in the history of computing at Portsmouth University,
1:00.3	John Fuji visiting professor in biography at Kingston University
1:04.1	and Patricia Farra senior tutor at Claire Corridge, Cambridge.
1:08.0	Patricia Farra, Ada Laveless, he was born in 1815
1:11.9	to two exceptional parents, Lord Byron and the aristocrat and Isabel
1:17.9	Milbank. Can you explain the circumstances of her birth and a bit about her
1:22.4	early life?
1:23.0	Well, her parents were only married for a very brief time and only a couple of weeks after
1:29.8	Ada Lovelace was born, Baron disappeared and I think Annabelle Millbank
	...

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