Charles Babbage first met Ada at a social gathering in London in 1833 when she was 17, during which time he was working on a calculating machine called the Difference Engine. Reared on a steady diet of mathematics by her domineering mother, Lady Byron, Ada quickly saw the usefulness of such a machine, and the two hit it off. However, they did not begin their famous collaboration until a decade later.
According to Holt, Ada spent that period suffering nervous breakdowns and pursuing interests in pseudosciences such as mesmerism and phrenology -- interests Toole insists belonged not to Ada but to her mother, Lady Byron. The breakdowns, Toole adds, were understandably triggered by the revelation that her cousin was in fact her half sister (Lord Byron had a well-earned reputation as a sexual libertine whose conquests included his half sister, Augusta Leigh.) As for the drug addiction, Toole notes that opium was the only real solace 19th-century doctors could offer Ada for a painful and then-incurable disease.
For his part, Babbage ditched his work on the Difference Engine, which was essentially a rapid adding machine, to devote himself to designing the Analytical Engine. Unlike its predecessor, the Analytical Engine could be programmed using punched cards to perform calculations of any kind, in much the same way that the earliest digital computers of the 1950s worked.
The Analytical Engine, says computer historian Tim Bergin, was "the first conceptual plan for a computer."
"It precedes by 100 years any real creation of a working digital computer," he told TechTV.
Bergin is a computer science professor at American University and the editor in chief of the "Annals of the History of Computing," a scholarly journal published quarterly by the Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society.
If it were built according to Babbage's blueprints today, the Analytical Engine would likely work, Bergin says. Indeed, Howard Aiken, who designed one of the earliest computers, the Harvard Mark I, in the early 1940s, openly credited Babbage's design as a source of inspiration, Bergin notes.
However, due to Babbage's squabbles with his own engineers and his failure to obtain funding, the Analytical Engine remained a blueprint a decade after it was conceived. When Babbage presented his plans at a conference in Turin, Italy, in 1842, his machine caught the eye of an Italian engineer named Luigi Menabrea, who published a description of it in French in a paper titled "Sketch of the Analytical Engine."
The Menabrea paper came to Ada's attention, and she decided, with Babbage's blessing, to translate it for publication in a British scientific journal. Babbage encouraged her to add notes of her own to the translation, and these "Notes," as they are known, form the basis of Ada's reputation as a programmer.
