BrainPOP
  • 3 months ago
Transcript
00:00Oh, just playing around with these old circuit boards.
00:11Yeah?
00:12Let me see.
00:15Dear Tim and Moby, could you please tell me about Lady Ada Lovelace?
00:22From Sean.
00:23Sure thing.
00:25Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is considered by many to have been the first
00:31computer programmer.
00:34She was born in London in 1815 to Anne Milbank and the poet George Gordon Byron, better known
00:40as Lord Byron.
00:42A month after her birth, though, Ada's parents separated.
00:47Ada stayed with her mother in London while her father left the country.
00:51Ada never saw him again.
00:53Yeah, it was kind of a rocky situation.
00:58Ada's mother wasted no time in taking charge of her daughter's education, though.
01:03She'd been interested in mathematics herself, so she strongly encouraged Ada to develop
01:07a mathematical mind.
01:10She hired private tutors to help teach young Ada, who grew to love working with numbers.
01:16Unfortunately, though, Ada was often ill.
01:20She suffered from severe headaches and became paralyzed at 14 after contracting the measles.
01:26It took almost a full year in bed for her to recover.
01:30Well, it helped that she could enjoy homeschool tutoring from some well-known scientists and
01:37mathematicians.
01:38One of these was Scottish researcher and writer Mary Somerville, who became both a mentor
01:43and friend to Lovelace.
01:46Somerville encouraged Ada to follow her mathematical and scientific studies and introduced her
01:50to various scholars of the day.
01:54One of Somerville's friends was mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.
02:00Lovelace became fascinated by Babbage's work, in particular, a machine he'd invented called
02:04the Difference Engine.
02:06She paid Babbage a visit in order to see the Difference Engine in person.
02:11It wasn't finished yet, but the machine could automatically calculate mathematical equations
02:16in a way that no device at that time could do.
02:19She was only a teenager, but Lovelace understood how the Difference Engine worked and knew
02:24it had the potential to be very important.
02:27Oh, actually, that was something else.
02:32Another of Babbage's ideas was for a device called the Analytical Engine.
02:36It was designed to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers, derive square roots, and
02:42make comparisons.
02:44The machine could do these things by reading instructions on punched cards.
02:51You're getting ahead of me, and please don't do that to my boards.
02:55Anyway, soon after Lovelace met with Babbage, she married a scientist named William King.
03:02King was a nobleman, so he went by a bunch of fancy titles, including Earl of Lovelace.
03:08That's how Ada became known as Ada King, the Right Honorable Countess of Lovelace.
03:14She had three children, and quickly went back to her mathematical work.
03:19Then, in 1842, another mathematician wrote a detailed description of Charles Babbage's
03:24Analytical Engine in French.
03:28By that time, Babbage had grown quite impressed by Lovelace's intellect.
03:32He'd even given her an endearing nickname, the Enchantress of Numbers.
03:38So he asked her to translate and take notes on the French description of the Analytical
03:42Engine for him.
03:44Lovelace worked on this for nine months, adding many of her own unique insights and calculations.
03:51Her notes included a plan for how the engine could calculate a sequence of numbers called
03:55the Bernoulli Numbers.
03:57Today, many historians consider this to have been the first computer program, and Lovelace
04:02the first programmer.
04:06Computer programs, by the way, are the all-important instructions that computers need to perform
04:10any function.
04:14Lovelace also predicted that computing machines might one day be used to do things like compose
04:19music and create graphics.
04:22Yeah, she sure was right about that, and we're living proof.
04:26Seriously, though, Lovelace was a visionary in many ways.
04:32She was only one of a few people in her day who got how these early computers worked,
04:37and she was possibly the only one who really appreciated how they might be used.
04:42It was pretty impressive, considering she lived at a time when women weren't accepted
04:46as scholars, much less mathematicians.
04:50In the end, Babbage was never able to fully build either of his early computers.
04:55And sadly, Ada's health went downhill not long after she published her work on the Analytical
04:59Engine.
05:01It's thought that she suffered from cancer for a number of years.
05:05Lovelace died in 1852, about two weeks before her thirty-seventh birthday.
05:10Hey, what did you do with my...
05:16...board?
05:17Well, good luck with that.