The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick · 1 Mar 2011 · 855pp · 178,507 words
a scientific report, “Notions sur la machine analytique,”♦ to introduce Babbage’s plan to a broader community of European philosophers. As soon as this reached Ada Lovelace, she began translating it into English, correcting errors on the basis of her own knowledge. She did that on her own, without telling either Menabrea
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could verify a proof step by step, by following the rules, without understanding it. Calling this quality mechanical invoked the dreams of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, machines grinding through numbers, and numbers standing for anything at all. Amid the doomed culture of 1930 Vienna, listening to his new friends debate the
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machines think? was a question with a relatively brief and slightly odd tradition—odd because machines were so adamantly physical in themselves. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace lay near the beginning of this tradition, though they were all but forgotten, and now the trail led to Alan Turing, who did something really
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an industrious and diligent clerk, well supplied with scratch paper, tirelessly following his instructions,”♦ as the mathematician and logician Herbert Enderton remarked years later. Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental
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: William Morrow, 1994), 183. 4. TO THROW THE POWERS OF THOUGHT INTO WHEEL-WORK ♦ The original writings of Charles Babbage and, to a lesser extent, Ada Lovelace are increasingly accessible. The comprehensive, thousand-dollar, eleven-volume edition, The Works of Charles Babbage, edited by Martin Campbell-Kelly, was published in 1989. Online
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, 4 July 1843, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 145. ♦ “ANY PROCESS WHICH ALTERS THE MUTUAL RELATION”: Note A (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 247. ♦ “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE DOES
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Bath, 12 September 1888, in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 331. ♦ “WE EASILY PERCEIVE THAT SINCE EVERY SUCCESSIVE FUNCTION”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” ♦ “THAT BRAIN OF MINE”: Ada to Babbage, 5 July 1843, in Betty
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Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 147. ♦ “HOW MULTIFARIOUS AND HOW MUTUALLY COMPLICATED”: Note D (by the translator, Ada Lovelace) to L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” ♦ “I AM IN MUCH DISMAY”: Ada to Babbage, 13 July 1843, in
Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith · 26 Jun 2019 · 370pp · 107,983 words
who gave us the first probability distribution), which would have run correctly if the machine had ever been built. It is for this contribution that Ada Lovelace is often described as the world’s first computer programmer; however, that description fails to capture the real novelty and insight of her contribution. While
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the imaginings of her forebears and contemporaries, becoming the first person to really see where computing was headed. Unlike Mary Edwards, and even Mary Wollstonecraft, Ada Lovelace had every social advantage. She was a rich aristocrat by birth and marriage who had both fortune and fame. She was not denied an education
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spheres, even among contemporary scientists who were sure to have known her. One of those scientists was, of course, Charles Darwin who likely knew of Ada Lovelace’s abilities, perhaps even her formal contributions. It’s possible that they may have met as they both attended Babbage’s popular soirees, but it
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would have been while Ada was more famous than he as well as being significantly superior to him socially. Ada Lovelace died of uterine cancer on 27 November 1852. Almost exactly seven years later Darwin rose to become the most famous scientist in history with the
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any thinking ‘requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination’. These observations were made despite of the manifest evidence to the contrary of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Ada Lovelace and Caroline Kennard, along with other contemporary female scientists of note, who Darwin’s corresponded with, thanked for their contributions to his work and encouraged
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argue that the most important contribution of Babbage’s Engines was getting people to think seriously about the range of things that computing could do. Ada Lovelace was one of the first people to speculate about computers manipulating not just numbers, but symbols, and how similar such manipulations could be to human
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-fi tale Frankenstein could be described very precisely as a tragic version of the hero’s journey. And, in the same way, the story of Ada Lovelace would make a fine Hollywood hero’s journey with Ada as Luke Skywalker, Charles Babbage as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Byron’s Romantic image as
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to create the definitive map of the world: ‘wise men contemplate the world, knowing full well that they are contemplating themselves’. I believe that since Ada Lovelace, calling herself an ‘Analyst & Metaphysician’, first contemplated whether computers could do anything creative, AI has done more than any other field of study to explore
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Lake Geneva, with his personal physician, John Polidori. Byron was fleeing his abandoned wife, Annabella, and his new-born daughter, Ada (who would later become Ada Lovelace), and was just beginning his lifelong and self-inflicted exile from England. All four of them were true romantics, believers in free love and personal
In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis · 7 Mar 2016 · 405pp · 117,219 words
, would later influence two of the most important heroes in the history of Artificial Intelligence, the English mathematician Charles Babbage and Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace. These two would go on to invent the first general-purpose computer and write the first computer program respectively. But the achievements of Babbage and
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. However, in 1842 the Italian mathematician and military engineer Luigi Menabrea (1809–1896) wrote a description of the machine in French. One year later Countess Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, translated the description into English. Included in her translation was the first computer program ever written, which makes
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Ada Lovelace the inventor of software. Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron. A month after she was born, her father abandoned her and her mother, and
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her mathematical acumen and used to call her the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’. By annotating her translation of Menabrea’s description of the Analytical Engine,10 Ada Lovelace gave us one of the most significant documents in the history of computing. Impressed with the potential of her friend’s design, she wrote: ‘Mr
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could calculate the sequence of the Bernoulli numbers.11 This algorithm is considered to be the first software program ever written. The Analytical Engine and Ada Lovelace’s ‘first program’ have been subjects of fascination for historians and fiction writers alike. How would the world be today if the British Treasury had
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the electronic relay that allows electrical automation and switching. 1842: Charles Babbage lectures at the University of Turin, where he describes the Analytical Engine. 1843: Ada Lovelace writes the first computer program. 1847: George Boole invents symbolic and binary logic. 1876: Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. 1879: Thomas Edison invents the
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
wife thus became Ada, Countess of Lovelace. She is therefore properly referred to as Ada or Lady Lovelace, though she is now commonly known as Ada Lovelace. That Christmas of 1835, Ada received from her mother the family’s life-size portrait of her father. Painted by Thomas Phillips, it showed Lord
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. Babbage named this proposed machine the Analytical Engine. He was one hundred years ahead of his time. The Analytical Engine was the product of what Ada Lovelace, in her essay on imagination, had called “the Combining Faculty.” Babbage had combined innovations that had cropped up in other fields, a trick of many
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fund it. Try as he might, Babbage could generate little notice in either the popular press or scientific journals. But he did find one believer. Ada Lovelace fully appreciated the concept of a general-purpose machine. More important, she envisioned an attribute that might make it truly amazing: it could potentially process
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the Translator” that ended up totaling 19,136 words, more than twice the length of Menabrea’s original article. Signed “A.A.L.,” for Augusta Ada Lovelace, her “Notes” became more famous than the article and were destined to make her an iconic figure in the history of computing.35 As she
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description for the generation of Bernoulli numbers was the first computer program ever to be published. And the initials at the end were those of Ada Lovelace. There was one other significant concept that she introduced in her “Notes,” which harked back to the Frankenstein story produced by Mary Shelley after that
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more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols. Over the years, Ada Lovelace has been celebrated as a feminist icon and a computer pioneer. For example, the U.S. Defense Department named its high-level object-oriented programming
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using a finite table of instructions. So could the logarithm of 7, or the square root of 2, or the sequence of Bernoulli numbers that Ada Lovelace had helped produce an algorithm for, or any other number or series, no matter how challenging to compute, as long as its calculation was defined
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the instructions of any other machine and carry out whatever task that machine could do. In essence, it embodied the dream of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace for a completely general-purpose universal machine. A different and less beautiful solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, with the clunkier name “untyped lambda calculus,” had been
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that, it was more advanced than the machines built by Atanasoff, Zuse, Aiken, and Stibitz. Using what was called conditional branching (a capability described by Ada Lovelace a century earlier), it could hop around in a program based on its interim results, and it could repeat blocks of code, known as subroutines
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were conceived, at least initially, with a specific task in mind, such as solving equations or deciphering codes. A real computer, like that envisioned by Ada Lovelace and then Alan Turing, should be able to perform, seamlessly and quickly, any logical operation. This required machines whose operations were determined not just by
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computers focused primarily on the hardware. But the women who became involved during World War II saw early on the importance of programming, just as Ada Lovelace had. They developed ways to code the instructions that told the hardware what operations to perform. In this software lay the magic formulas that could
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portion of Babbage’s Difference Engine that Aiken had mounted in his office, and Hopper began with an epigraph from Babbage. She understood, as had Ada Lovelace, that Babbage’s Analytical Engine had a special quality, one that she and Aiken believed would distinguish the Harvard Mark I from other computers of
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, and clear. With their strong partnership, Hopper and Aiken became the modern counterparts, a century later, of Lovelace and Babbage. The more she learned about Ada Lovelace, the more Hopper identified with her. “She wrote the first loop,” Hopper said. “I will never forget. None of us ever will.”9 Hopper’s
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Mark I contained subroutines for sine x, log10 x, and 10x, each called for by a single operational code.”17 It was a concept that Ada Lovelace had originally described in her “Notes” on the Analytical Engine. Hopper collected a growing library of these subroutines. She also developed, while programming the Mark
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was especially good at devising the fundamentals of computer programming, which was still an ill-defined craft that had advanced little in the century since Ada Lovelace wrote down the steps for getting the Analytical Engine to generate Bernoulli numbers. Creating an elegant instruction set, he realized, involved both rigorous logic and
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happen he did not explain, but it and millions of other such ramifications did in fact eventually transpire. Later Jennings complained, in the tradition of Ada Lovelace, that many of the newspaper reports overstated what ENIAC could do by calling it a “giant brain” and implying that it could think. “The ENIAC
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the early 1970s. CAN MACHINES THINK? As he thought about the development of stored-program computers, Alan Turing turned his attention to the assertion that Ada Lovelace had made a century earlier, in her final “Note” on Babbage’s Analytical Engine: that machines could not really think. If a machine could modify
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new gambits and refine its strategy with every new win or loss. This approach, if successful, would represent a fundamental leap that would have dazzled Ada Lovelace: machines would be able to do more than merely follow the specific instructions given them by humans; they could learn from experience and refine their
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confer a soul upon a machine if He so desired. The most interesting objection, especially for our narrative, is the one that Turing attributed to Ada Lovelace. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in 1843. “It can do whatever we know how to order it to
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a real speaker of Chinese. Nevertheless, he would not have understood a single response that he made, nor would he have exhibited any intentionality. In Ada Lovelace’s words, he would have no pretensions whatever to originate anything but instead would merely do whatever actions he was ordered to perform. Similarly, the
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does his thinking with symbolized concepts (whether in the form of the English language, pictographs, formal logic, or mathematics) should be able to benefit significantly.” Ada Lovelace would have been thrilled. Engelbart’s treatise appeared the same month that Licklider, who had explored the same concepts two years earlier in his “Man
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the Dynabook, titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” that was partly a product proposal but mostly a manifesto. He began by quoting Ada Lovelace’s seminal insight about how computers could be used for creative tasks: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers
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song. The members of the Homebrew Club had found a computer they could take home and make do all sorts of beautiful things, including, as Ada Lovelace had predicted, rendering music. Dompier published his musical program in the next issue of the People’s Computer Company, which led to a historically noteworthy
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made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could
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. Anyone could share with people anywhere and, as the Victorian-era almanac promised, enquire within upon everything. CHAPTER TWELVE ADA FOREVER LADY LOVELACE’S OBJECTION Ada Lovelace would have been pleased. To the extent that we are permitted to surmise the thoughts of someone who’s been dead for more than 150
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never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.” There is, however, yet another possibility, one that Ada Lovelace would like, which is based on the half century of computer development in the tradition of Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, and Doug Engelbart
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. HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS: “WATSON, COME HERE” “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” Ada Lovelace declared. “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” In her mind, machines would not replace humans but instead become their
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the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no
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computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine that he found, and he made his crew members read Ada Lovelace’s “Notes.” The most productive teams were those that brought together people with a wide array of specialties. Bell Labs was a classic example. In
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. They are what we make of them. ADA’S LASTING LESSON: POETICAL SCIENCE That leads to a final lesson, one that takes us back to Ada Lovelace. As she pointed out, in our symbiosis with machines we humans have brought one crucial element to the partnership: creativity. The history of the digital
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are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty
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: my father, Irwin (an electrical engineer); my brother, Lee (a computer consultant); and my daughter, Betsy (a tech writer, who first turned me on to Ada Lovelace). Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Cathy, the wisest reader and most loving person I’ve ever known. NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Henry
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(Morrow, 1963); James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon, 2011), chapter 4. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Ada’s letters rely on the Toole transcriptions. Writers about Ada Lovelace range from canonizers to debunkers. The most sympathetic books are those by Toole, Woolley, and Baum; the most scholarly and balanced is Stein’s. For
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a debunking of Ada Lovelace, see Bruce Collier, “The Little Engines That Could’ve,” PhD dissertation, Harvard, 1970, http://robroy.dyndns.info/collier/. He writes, “She was a manic depressive
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cover for the first time, the MIT-trained do-it-yourself entrepreneur Limor Fried, whose moniker “ladyada” and company name Adafruit Industries were homages to Ada Lovelace. 31. To listen to Dompier’s Altair play “Fool on the Hill,” go to http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=46. 32. After
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold · 14 May 2000 · 352pp · 120,202 words
his life: 'He spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English Government and Organ Grinders most of all.'" While Ada Lovelace has been unofficially known to the inner circles of programmers since the 1950s, when card-punched batch-processing was not altogether different from Ada's
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of driving so recklessly that he demolished automobiles at regular intervals, always managing to emerge miraculously unscathed. Despite his apparently charmed existence, von Neumann, like Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing, died relatively young. Lovelace died of cancer at thirty-six, Turing of cyanide at forty-two, and von Neumann of cancer at
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less unusual than the software patriarchs who preceded them. Eccentrics and prodigies of both the blissful and agonized varieties dominated the early history of computation. Ada Lovelace, George Boole, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Presper Eckert were all in their early twenties or younger when they did their most important work
12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson · 15 Mar 2021 · 256pp · 73,068 words
WHERE WE MIGHT GO NEXT JEANETTE WINTERSON Grove Press New York Copyright © 2021 by Jeanette Winterson Jacket details: woman © Michael Nelson/Trevillion Images; portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Chalon © Science Museum/SSPL; frame © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
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, computers weren’t powerful enough to do what McCarthy, Minsky and Turing knew they would be able to do. And before those men, there was Ada Lovelace, the early-19th century genius who inspired Alan Turing to devise the Turing Test – when we can no longer tell the difference between AI and
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How We Got Here. A Few Lessons From History. Love(Lace) Actually At the beginning of the future were two young women: Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace. Mary was born in 1797. Ada was born in 1815. Each of these young women tore their way into history in the early years of
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Zone mansplaining is still alive and well on the web. More accurately, and more importantly, there is now Ada Lovelace Day, celebrated on the second Tuesday of October. In the UK we have the Ada Lovelace Institute (founded 2018), an independent body whose mission is to ensure that data use and AI technology work
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soul, but he was interested in whether or not a computer could originate (as well as learn) independently of human input. Turing took issue with Ada Lovelace on this matter – though again we have to remember that he took issue 110 years after her statement that a computer could not originate anything
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might decide, or AI might decide, that it doesn’t matter. * * * Mary Shelley may be closer to the world that is to come than either Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing. A new kind of life-form may not need to be like a human at all (the cute helper bot or the
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chess. Machines that could talk to you. Think with you. And one day, perhaps, think beyond you. Turing was ahead of his time, just as Ada Lovelace was ahead of hers. Arrested for gross indecency in 1952, Turing didn’t live to see, or to work on, the astonishing breakthroughs of the
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degrees. Between 1921 and 1948 the men awarding these semi-degrees called them BA tit. (Thanks, guys.) * * * Women like Philippa Fawcett were seen as flukes. Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, was seen as a fluke. Here’s Gustave Le Bon, medic and polymath, and author of the 1895 bestseller
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nominated by two existing fellows (who are probably men). It’s not hard to do the gender-maths here. We are only recently learning about Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Katherine Johnson, Margaret Hamilton, Stephanie Shirley, the women at Bletchley Park. Listening to the ahistorical, fact-free-free-speech ‘heroes’ telling us that
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, intelligent people who are not working in the field. What do you make of ‘disambiguation’? ‘Participatory mechanisms’? ‘Rapid online deliberation’? Now see below from the Ada Lovelace Institute: Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are increasingly being advocated as a means to help ensure regulatory compliance and the protection of commercially confidential information more
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mature market offerings and others still undergoing significant development. I am not being mean to Ada-wonks – and I am a flag-waver for the Ada Lovelace Institute – but their written content is torture. And they are far from being the only language-manglers. This is typical stuff. It really matters that
Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen · 6 Feb 2024 · 169pp · 41,887 words
inscription. History tells us that computers compute not only in the mathematical sense but universally. The number was incidental to the symbol. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and one of the first “programmers” in the modern sense, imagined an engine that could manipulate any symbolic information whatsoever (not
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problem. And was likely using the first computer ever to bet on horses. The conventional story has Charles Babbage, another Royal Society member, together with Ada Lovelace originating the concept of a digital programmable computer sometime in the 1820s. Things were a bit more complicated, however. The Analytical Engine, as Babbage called
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to high-minded topics like war and justice. Neither Aristotle nor Babbage tolerated an epistemic mess, obsessively compelled to make lists, even in passing. Young Ada Lovelace, a daughter of nobility, visited Babbage’s fashionable salons alongside other illustrious visitors like Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, and Charles Dickens. She was introduced for
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Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 1/3 (1826): 250–65. 57 Whatever the arrangement of objects in: L. F. Menabrea and Ada Lovelace (1842), “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage Esq.” in Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academics of Science and Learned
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words
field where things went backward, and women were actually chased away. Why? It’s often noted that the first computer programmer ever was a woman: Ada Lovelace. As a young mathematician in Victorian England, she met Charles Babbage, the inventor who was trying to create an Analytical Engine. The Engine was a
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: My description of Lovelace’s life and work draws from James Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm: How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age (New York: Melville House, 2014); Betsy Morais, “Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary,” New Yorker, October 15, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements
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/ada-lovelace-the-first-tech-visionary; Amy Jollymore, “Ada Lovelace, An Indirect and Reciprocal Influence,” Forbes, October 15, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www
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.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2013/10/15/ada-lovelace-an-indirect-and-reciprocal-influence; Valerie Aurora, “Deleting Ada Lovelace from the History of Computing,” Ada Initiative
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, August 24, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ada-lovelace-the-first-tech-visionary; Amy Jollymore, “Ada Lovelace, An Indirect and Reciprocal Influence,” Forbes, October 15
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, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2013/10/15/ada-lovelace-an-indirect-and-reciprocal-influence; Valerie Aurora, “Deleting Ada Lovelace from the History of Computing,” Ada Initiative, August 24, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://adainitiative.org/2013/08/24/deleting
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-ada-lovelace-from-the-history-of-computing. it contained a bug: Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole, “Ada and the First Computer,” Scientific American, May 1999,
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans · 6 Mar 2018 · 371pp · 93,570 words
, a hundred times, by teenage girls at their desks in the heart of their kingdoms, on machines beyond your wildest imagination. KILOGIRLS By her insistence, Ada Lovelace was buried next to her father in a small church near his ancestral estate of Newstead Abbey. Her coffin, finished in soft violet velvet, bore
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designed a general-purpose computer—think of the difference between Charles Babbage’s one-note Difference Engine and the speculative Analytical Engine, which so entranced Ada Lovelace. It could perform an essentially limitless number of computational functions, as long as new programs for it were written. In its time at the Moore
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or otherwise. Many of Grace’s female peers worked tirelessly to develop and standardize programming strategies that would transform the early computer industry, just as Ada Lovelace had made the mental leap from hardware to software a century before. But although the Difference Engine was never finished and the Analytical Engine was
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blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.” With our twenty-first-century brains, we all have a shot at being as clever as Ada Lovelace, the Harvard computers, or a wartime ballistics calculator at Penn. But there’s only so far we can reach before we hit the ultimate threshold
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and faxed it to tech magazines and feminist artists around the world, proclaiming the dawn of a new age: a century and a half after Ada Lovelace first scratched a computer program onto paper, it was time for women to become the virus, the signal, and the pulse of the network. When
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around them. It was an evocative vision of women’s bodily connection to networked computing, a connection that emerged before the technology itself, beginning with Ada Lovelace and the countless uncounted female computers—a lineage Plant traces in her book, much as I have in mine. Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix are
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step is to learn all the strategies of triumph and survival we can from our forebears, and I hope this book has unearthed a few: Ada Lovelace’s refusal of propriety, Grace Hopper’s forward-thinking tenacity, and the support the women of Resource One gave one another. Jake Feinler’s clarity
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 28 Sep 2014 · 243pp · 65,374 words
was a wretch, and that such a rebellious, unconventional lifestyle could only end in ruin. And so, at the still young age of twenty-five, Ada Lovelace found herself at a crossroads, confronting two very different ways of being an adult in the world. She could resign herself to the settled path
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of society propelled her toward it. And yet, like it or not, she was still Byron’s daughter. A conventional life seemed increasingly unthinkable. But Ada Lovelace found a way around the impasse she had confronted in her mid-twenties. In collaboration with another brilliant Victorian who was equally ahead of his
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able to imagine the idea of “writing” sound waves because he had borrowed metaphors from stenography and printing and anatomical studies of the human ear. Ada Lovelace could see the aesthetic possibilities of Babbage’s Analytical Engine because her life had been lived at a unique collision point between advanced math and
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