Meet Ada Lovelace: More Than a First
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photo: Antoine Claudet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Changemakers — More than a First
This week’s focus: Hidden History, a facts-based narrative to highlight someone who changed history
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,000 words, an estimated 3½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re exploring changemakers who were “the first” to break barriers — but were also more than a first.
Being first is often celebrated, yet these stories rarely begin — or end — with the milestone itself.
To better understand such changemakers, we can look at context, obstacles, persistence, and the ripple effect their actions create across generations.
In our first newsletter, we met Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal — whose life was much more than being a medalist.
In our second, we spent time with Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the first Indigenous person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — whose story, like all of ours, deserves to be told with nuance and care.
Today, we turn to Ada Lovelace.
Some may call her the world’s first computer programmer, but a more precise description may be “the first author of a computer program.”
Her story is remarkable not only because she was a woman working in science in the 1800s — rare for her time — but because she imagined the possibilities of computation more than a century before modern computers even existed.
In fact, the reason you can read this newsletter today is partially thanks to Ada Lovelace’s vision.
Early Life: A Childhood of Contrast
Ada Lovelace was born in 1815 to an aristocratic English family. Her father was a famous poet, Lord Byron, and her mother, Annabella Milbanke, was an abolitionist, philanthropist, and founder of England’s first industrial school.
Ada grew up as the Industrial Revolution reshaped England — steam engines powered trains and further mechanized textile production. Even though society was rapidly changing, the modern computer had yet to be imagined.
After Lovelace’s father left the family, Annabella curated Ada’s education to steer her away from poetry and toward mathematics and music — preparing her for intellectual pursuits rare for women of her time.
In some ways, Lovelace’s social position offered both doors and barriers. Wealth gave her access to select intellectual circles. Yet, as a woman, gender expectations imposed limits. Some contemporaries warned that Lovelace, because she was a woman, wasn’t "physically strong” enough to be an academic, and “shouldn't exert [herself] so heavily in the area of scholarship application.”
Despite these constraints, Lovelace persisted — eventually collaborating with a mathematician, and writing a single page of notes that arguably changed history.
More Than A Calculation
In the 1830s, Lovelace began working with mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.
Babbage had designed the Difference Engine, a complex machine that could “calculate a series of calculations on a number of variables to solve a complex problem.” He later designed the Analytical Engine, an even more ambitious machine capable of performing any calculation step by step — a precursor to the modern computer. However, because of costs and technical limitations, neither machine was completed in either of their lifetimes.
To gain a deeper understanding of these machines, Lovelace read research papers and immersed herself in mathematics.
She translated an Italian paper on the Analytical Engine and added extensive notes, including what is now called “Note G,” which outlined an “elemental sequence of instructions — an algorithm — for computing the series of Bernoulli numbers.”
This single page of notes is widely considered the first computer program.
Modern mathematician Anna Siffert explains: “[Lovelace’s] annotations… show that Ada recognizes the machine's potential beyond a device for numerical calculations… The Analytical Engine, Ada writes 'holds a position wholly its own.' Her vision of a machine that could also process musical notes, letters and images, anticipates modern computers by a hundred years. In her now famous note ‘G,’ Lovelace also adds a step-by-step description for computation of Bernoulli numbers with Babbage's machine — basically an algorithm — which, in effect, makes her the world's first computer programmer.”
And she did all of this — “anticipated modern methods of control flow and looping” — without ever seeing the machine built. And while raising three children.
“An Analyst and Metaphysician”
Lovelace’s vision went far beyond mathematics. She described herself as “an analyst and metaphysician,” while Babbage described her as “the enchantress of numbers.”
She wrote: “The [Analytical Engine] can do whatever we know to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”
Lovelace recognized that machines could go beyond arithmetic — one day, they could produce graphics, compose music, and perform other tasks guided by humans.
In this light, Lovelace envisioned the modern computer long before such technology existed, and she did so while navigating gender bias and also drawing support from key allies like Babbage.
Lovelace, More Than a First
While Lovelace is now widely remembered for writing the first computer program, her story was buried for decades.
Her work was initially published under her initials (likely to obscure her gender), it was presented as an appendix to an article, and it was a theoretical design for a machine that wasn’t constructed in her lifetime.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century that Ada Lovelace became recognized as a symbol of innovation, vision, and a woman who contributed to STEM.
Lovelace’s story demonstrates that changemaking can be intellectual, imaginative, and enduring — even if immediate recognition is limited.
What Comes Next?
Changemakers labeled “The First,” can be remembered for a single achievement — or for the broader story of context, obstacles, persistence, and community inspiration behind them.
Ada Lovelace was the first author of a computer program, yes — and she was also:
A visionary whose imagination stretched a century into the future
A highly skilled mathematician
A woman navigating societal limitations
An innovative thinker shaping the ideas behind modern computing
When unpacking her story, consider asking:
What conditions made being the “first” possible?
Who helped — or hindered — along the way?
What did it cost to be “the first”?
How does their story inspire change today?
Being first isn’t an ending. For Ada Lovelace, it was an opening — a doorway to the computational world we inhabit today and a reminder that imagination, persistence, and vision can shape the future.
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