People to Know About: Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace

 Among the most remarkable prescient geniuses of history were the English mathematician, engineer, and inventor, Charles Babbage (1791 - 1871) and his friend, mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852).

Charles Babbage

In 1812, Charles Babbage was perusing a book of logarithmic tables, which he knew to contain errors, when he had the idea that the calculation of these numbers could be broken down into simple stages, and then processed by mechanical addition and subtraction. But in 1812, there was no such thing as electronics. Babbage conceived of a mechanically operated machine that would be able to compute by the working of complex and precisely manufactured machinery. (The word "computer" now means to process mathematical problems by electronic machines. But even into the 1950s, a computer was someone who added and subtracted columns of numbers. For example, people who worked in banks, insurance companies, or engineering firms needed to calculate sums and tables "by hand"; these processes were tedious, complex, and subject to human error. But those who did the "number crunching" were called "computers". What we now call "computers" were initially called "electronic computers".)

Charles Babbage is now known as the "father of the computer". Using mechanical machinery only, he designed two mathematical computers equipped with printers, called "Difference Engines", and an even more advanced contraption he called "the Analytical Engine" that would be capable of calculations not done until modern electronic computers after the Second World War. The Difference Engines were not constructed in his lifetime, and the Analytical Engine has never been built.

Please take a look at this site at the Computer History Museum providing fascinating details about Babbage's mechanical computer, the Difference Engine 2. I think you will be intrigued and amazed. Also, please watch the video on the first page of the site. It shows Difference Engine 2 in operation. It is shocking. Shocking and breathtakingly beautiful. And remember, as you watch the video, that it was designed by a single person in the 1840s. I am awed by Babbage's genius.

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the famous poet. She is generally referred to as Ada Lovelace. Her mother was preoccupied with mathematics, her father was a genius; Ada inherited both qualities. In 1842, Babbage asked Lovelace to translate an article in French on a lecture on the Analytical Engine that he had given. She did, and provided notes to the article that were longer than the article itself. Lovelace had looked farther into the possibilities of the Analytical machine than just crunching numbers, and in one of her notes, she presented an algorithm by which Bernoulli numbers could be calculated by use of the Analytical Engine. This algorithm is considered to be the first computer program ever written.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the inventor of computer programming, died of uterine cancer after being subjected to the stupid and barbaric practice of bloodletting. She was 36 years old.