The first computer programmer was an uneducated opiate addict
The early Victorian Era was hardly a time for women to be cocky about their brilliance. But Countess Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, didn’t care.
Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program a century before the advent of computers, was never shy about her genius.
“This brain of mine is something more than merely mortal,” she once told a colleague, according to the new book “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet” (Portfolio), by Claire L. Evans.
Born in 1815, Lovelace was the product of a passionate but short-lived marriage between Lord Byron and a “mathematically inclined aristocrat” named Anne Isabella Milbanke, whom Byron called “the Princess of Parallelograms.” The marriage ended after a year, and Byron never met his daughter.
Milbanke feared Lovelace would become a louche romantic like Byron and “began a rigorous course of mathematical instruction from the time she was 4 years old.”
“She didn’t want her daughter to adopt any of [Byron’s] poetical fancy or romantic temperament,” says Evans. “But to her mother’s horror, Ada shared his uncontrollable poetic spirit. She simply applied it to mathematics.”
As a girl, Lovelace was not allowed to pursue a formal university education. Instead, she hired private tutors and corresponded with many of England’s brightest minds.
When she was 17, she attended a salon hosted by British mathematician Charles Babbage, hoping to see his new invention, the Difference Engine. She was “immediately mesmerized by . . . the hulking block of interlinked brass gears and cogs” that used steam power to perform mathematical calculations.
Over the next few years, Lovelace would marry William King-Noel, 1st earl of Lovelace, eventually making her a countess. She had three children by 24 and led the busy life of a woman with high social standing.
But she never stopped studying math and remained in frequent touch with Babbage, begging to be involved in his work.
“I hope you are bearing me in mind,” she wrote to him in 1840. “I mean my mathematical interests. You know this is the greatest favor anyone can do me.”
Babbage was already formulating his next big idea — a machine that could calculate variables, making it “capable of solving every kind of problem.”
He called it the Analytical Engine, and while it was never built due to lack of funds, Babbage wrote 30 volumes of plans for it.
In 1840, Babbage was invited to present those plans to a group of scientists in Turin, Italy. A young engineer named L.F. Menabrea, Italy’s future prime minister, wrote a detailed paper about the Analytical Engine for a Swiss journal.
When Lovelace saw the paper, she translated it, correcting Menabrea’s mistakes as she went, and presented it to Babbage, who was so impressed he asked her to write her own paper.
After working feverishly for nine months between 1842-1843, she had gone far beyond a simple translation, “synthesiz[ing] the vast scope of Babbage’s vision” and explaining to the world why it would matter.
“What she did, essentially, was write the software for what this machine would do,” Evans said. “It’s the conceptual leap from hardware design to, OK, what are we going to use this machine for. She wrote what many people say was the first computer program, for this computer that was never even built.”
As if this wasn’t impressive enough, Lovelace, who had been dealing with various medical ailments, was prescribed laudanum most of her adult life and wrote her notes “through an opium haze, [laboring] in bursts of feverish energy.”
“She was addicted to opiates,” says Evans. “It helped her get through the day, but she also suffered from withdrawal when she wasn’t able to get her dosage. She would get really stressed out, she wouldn’t be able to sleep, her eyeballs would itch. It wasn’t until she was able to take her laudanum that she could relax and feel like herself.”
The Analytical Engine came to “represent the conceptual dawn of the computer age,” writes Evans. Lovelace’s notes were republished in 1953, cementing her place in computer-programming lore.
Lovelace died of uterine cancer in 1852 at age 36. Despite having three children, she considered her notes on Menabrea’s essay to be her “firstborn.”
“He is an uncommonly fine baby,” she wrote to Babbage, upon completing her draft, according to Evans’ book. “He will grow to be a man of the first magnitude and power.”